Against Straightforward Anti-Realism

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to examine Michael Dummett’s arguments for anti-realism. I will focus mainly on Dummett’s reasoning that he claims leads to the abandonment of classical laws of logic in favor of intuitionistic ones. Mathematical intuitionism provides the paradigm for a considerably simple form of anti-realism and, according to Dummett’s characterization, rests on abandoning the notion of truth in the account of meaning of logical connectives and quantifiers. It is precisely this abandoning that differentiates the case of intuitionism from most other anti-realistic positions which are based on theses that explain how the meaning of expressions of the disputed language is related to expressions of some other language whose meaning is taken for granted.

I presented the first version of this paper at the Boston Colloquium in Philosophy of Science on January 28, 1992. I am indebted to the participants of the Colloquium for the discussions on this topic. I owe also my gratitude to my colleagues Paweł Turnau and Tom Tonon, who have read the paper and suggested a number of corrections