Abstract

McGinn's narrow aim in this essay is to complicate Dummett's simplistic, logico‐linguistic formulation of the debate between realism and anti‐realism, by undermining the presumption that the law of bivalence captures the intuitive notion of realism. Drawing on a wide variety of illustrations, McGinn counters that realism is better characterized as the claim of evidence independence, arguing that this claim is independent of the truth or falsity of bivalence. Thus, McGinn's wider aim is to formulate the dispute between realism and anti‐realism as a metaphysical, rather than logico‐linguistic, debate.