Realist critiques of Dummett's 'On the Reality of the Past': A realist approach to time and truth.

摘要

This research attempts to utilize diverse contemporary realist criticism in which to demonstrate the implausibility of Michael Dummett's semantic anti-realism, verificationism, and skepticism in general, and more specifically, with regards to the past. I argue both on Dummett's preferred turf, i.e., form the perspective of the philosophy of language which entails a debate about the class of statements pertaining to the past, as do I include naturalistic, logical, ontological, and common-sense approaches. This work commits, to the scientific entity space-time and endorses a realist conception of truth that includes evidence-transcendent truth conditions, bivalence and the Correspondence Theory of Truth. I attempt to show that the way in which we understand the truth-value of statements pertaining to the past is determined by whether or not our statements accurately match up with actual past states of affairs in the world independently of confirming or refuting evidence. Micheal Dummett claims that the realist/anti-realist dispute ends in a stalemate because each side remains faithful to their respective position regarding the conditions that determine truth-value. I agree that each side is clinging to dissimilar definitions of truth though I assert that the realist definition has a logical place for the anti-realist definition while the converse is not the case. My conclusion is that in light of the numerous and effective avenues open to the realist coupled with the profound weaknesses in Dummett's program, the semantic anti-realist's position on the truth-value of statements pertaining to the past is implausible.