It is shown that: classicality is connected with various criteria some of which are fulfilled by TIL while some other are not; some more general characteristic of classicality connects it with philosophical realism whereas anti-realism is connected with non-classical logics; TIL is highly expressive due to its hyperintensionality, which makes it possible to handle procedures as objects sui generis. Thus TIL is classical in obeying principles of realism and non-classical in transcending some principles taught by textbooks (...) of classical logic. (shrink)

The most puzzling and intriguing aspect of intuitionism as a philosophy of mathematics is its claim that classical deductive reasoning in mathematics is illegitimate. The two most well-known proponents of this position are L. E. J. Brouwer and Michael Dummett. Both of their criticisms of the use of classical logic in mathematics have, by and large, been taken to depend on the thesis that the principle of bivalence does not apply to mathematical statements; and the difference between these criticisms is (...) taken to consist in their grounds for this thesis. Brouwer bases this thesis on an account of the nature of mathematics: it is an activity of mental construction essentially independent of language. Dummett, in contrast, bases the thesis on his anti-realist view of the nature of meaning. ;My first principal argument in this essay shows that the conception of anti-realism just outlined is problematic as a reading of Dummett. To begin with, Dummett explicitly rejects, not only the evidentiary restrictions of this conception, but also, more seriously, the use of specific epistemological theses in a philosophical account of meaning. Moreover, I give an alternative account of anti-realism, consisting of alternative interpretations of the manifestation requirement and of the rejection of realist truth conditions, that do not rely on an epistemology of meaning, and hence, a fortiori, not on evidential restrictions. ;My second principal argument in this essay consists of drawing a consequence of this conception of anti-realism, namely, that the failure of bivalence cannot, by itself, support a cogent criticism of classical logic. The basic reason is that, given my view of anti-realism, the claim that the legitimacy of applying classical reasoning to a class of statements depends on whether bivalence applies to that class already implies that the system of deductive reasoning applying to these statements is non-classical. Hence an argument against classical logic based on this claim is question-begging. ;Finally, I conclude by showing that Dummett's criticism of classical reasoning, as reconstructed by my third argument, fails. (shrink)

A hyperintensional semantics for natural language is proposed which is agnostic about the question of whether propositions are sets of worlds or worlds are sets of propositions. Montague’s theory of intensional senses is replaced by a weaker theory, written in standard classical higher-order logic, of fine-grained senses which are in a many-to-one correspondence with intensions; Montague’s theory can then be recovered from the proposed theory by identifying the type of propositions with the type of sets of worlds and adding an (...) axiom to the effect that each world is the set of propositions which are true there. Senses are compositionally assigned to linguistic expressions by a categorial grammar with only two rule schemas, based on the implicative fragment of intuitionistic linear propositional logic, and a fully explicit grammar fragment is provided that illustrates the compositional assignment of sense to a variety of constructions, including dummy-subject constructions, infinitive complements, predicative adjectives and nominals, raising to subject, ‘tough-movement’, and quantifier scope ambiguities. Notably, the grammar and the derivations that it licenses never make reference to either worlds or to the extensions of senses. (shrink)

In this interview, Christopher Norris discusses a wide range of issues having to do with postmodernism, deconstruction and other controversial topics of debate within present–day philosophy and critical theory. More specifically he challenges the view of deconstruction as just another offshoot of the broader postmodernist trend in cultural studies and the social sciences. Norris puts the case for deconstruction as continuing the ‘unfinished project of modernity’ and—in particular—for Derrida’s work as sustaining the values of enlightened critical reason in various spheres (...) of thought from epistemology to ethics, sociology and politics. Along the way he addresses a number of questions that have lately been raised with particular urgency for teachers and educationalists, among them the revival of creationist doctrine and the idea of scientific knowledge as a social, cultural, or discursive construct. In this context he addresses the ‘science wars’ or the debate between those who uphold the values of scientific reason, progress and truth, and those (like the ‘strong’ sociologists of knowledge) who would reject such values as merely the expression of a dominant ideological consensus. Norris also discusses the emergence of anti–realism as a strongly marked trend within recent analytic philosophy, one that denies the existence of objective (‘recognition–transcendent’) truths in mathematics, the physical sciences, history and other disciplines. Thus statements are thought of as possessing a truth–value just insofar as we possess some adequate proof–procedure or some means of finding them out through empirical or other methods of enquiry. Norris offers a range of arguments against this anti–realist position and brings out its convergence with various postmodernist lines of thought. Through a running commentary on Derrida’s work in relation to these developments he shows how deconstruction has been misconstrued by sociologists, cultural critics and educational theorists whose understanding has often been based on a limited acquaintance with the primary texts. Above all Norris calls for a renewed engagement with the philosophic discourse of modernity and a willingness to challenge postmodern scepticism and value–relativism in a spirit of open–minded critical debate. (shrink)

SummaryThe platonist, in affirming the principle of bivalence for sentences for which there is no decision procedure, disconnects their truth‐conditions from conditions that would enable us to prove them ‐ as if Goldbach's conjecture, say, might just happen to be true. According to Dummett, what has gone wrong here is that the meaning of the relevant sentences has been conceived so as to go beyond what could be learned in learning to use them, or displayed in using them competently. Dummett (...) draws the general conclusion that accounts of meaning must traffic only in decidable circumstances. I suggest that Dummett can be right about platonism but wrong in this general conclusion: the centrality of decidable circumstances in competent use of language is a special feature of mathematical language. This means that someone who recoils from the anti‐realism constituted by Dummett's generalized anti‐platonism, in the case of, say, statements about other minds, need not be recoiling into a close analogue of platonism, as Dummett suggests. We can reinstate the intuitive idea that platonism goes wrong by inappropriately modelling the epistemology and metaphysics of mathematics on the epistemology and metaphysics of the natural world. And we make room for the suggestion that anti‐realism makes a converse mistake; in this vein, I propose a picture of Dummettian anti‐realism as a novel expression of familiar and suspect epistemological and metaphysical thoughts. (shrink)

The article shows that three antirealistic theories of classical analysis and synthesis are logically possible: presentationistic, solipsistic and Kantian, but only the latter is actually being developed. Revealed its specific features and features shared with other, logically possible antirealistic theories. The correlation of the Kantian theory of analysis and synthesis of knowledge with his theory of analysis and synthesis of subjects of knowledge is analyzed. Gnoseological problems that forced Kant to assert that new knowledge is provided only by the synthesis (...) of knowledge, and analysis only clarifies the results of synthesis, are characterized. The Kantian solution to these problems is correlated with their realistic solution. The role that the Kantian "Copernican revolution in philosophy" plays in his interpretation of the analysis and synthesis of subjects of knowledge is investigated. The Kantian theory of analytical and synthetic judgments is considered. It is shown that the Kantian question "how are synthetic judgments a priori possible?" is essentially a question about the nature of theoretical knowledge, which was historically formed in ancient geometry precisely as the unity of analysis and synthesis. A qualitative difference is shown between classical and geometric (by origin) analysis and synthesis. Three historical stages of their formation are described. The assertion of I. Newton that the natural science experiment arose as a result of the extension of the method of geometric analysis and synthesis to the natural sciences is investigated. (shrink)

Crispin Wright offers superassertibility as an anti-realist explication of truth. A statement is superassertible, roughly, if there is a state of information available which warrants it and it is warranted by all achievable enlargements of that state of information. However, it is argued, Wright fails to take account of the fact that many of our test procedures are not sure fire, even when applied under ideal conditions. An alternative conception of superassertibility is constructed to take this feature into account. (...) However, it is then argued that when this revised concept of superassertibility is taken as the truth predicate of probability statements, statements whose test procedures are paradigmatically not sure fire, then any anti-realist theory of the sense of such probability statements cannot be compositional, in Dummett's sense of compositional. (shrink)

Using a quantified propositional logic involving the operators it is known that and it is possible to know that, we formalize various interesting philosophical claims involved in the realism debate. We set out inferential rules for the epistemic modalities, ranging from ones that are obviously analytic, to ones that are epistemologically more substantive or even controversial. Then we investigate various aporias for the realism debate. These are constructively inconsistent triads of claims from our list: a claim expressing some (...) sort of common ground in the debate; a characteristically anti-realist thesis about truth and knowability; and a characteristically realist thesis about determinacy of truth value. Various patterns of reductio proof for these inconsistent triads are generated, so as to display their variety. The reductio proofs use only the inferential rules set out earlier. The philosophical utility of each aporia for the anti-realist is then assessed. This involves consideration of the acceptability of the premiss expressing common ground; the strength and plausibility of the anti-realist premiss; the strength of the realist premiss that is the ultimate target of the reductio; and the analytic status of the inferential rules applied within the proof. (shrink)

When information on a coma patient’s expected outcome is uncertain, a moral dilemma arises in clinical practice: if life-sustaining treatment is continued, the patient may survive with unacceptably poor neurological prospects, but if withdrawn a patient who could have recovered may die. Continuous electroencephalogram-monitoring is expected to substantially improve neuroprognostication for patients in coma after cardiac arrest. This raises expectations that decisions whether or not to withdraw will become easier. This paper investigates that expectation, exploring cEEG’s impacts when it becomes (...) part of a socio-technical network in an Intensive Care Unit. Based on observations in two ICUs in the Netherlands and one in the USA that had cEEG implemented for research, we interviewed 25 family members, healthcare professionals, and surviving patients. The analysis focuses on the way patient outcomes are constructed, the kind of decision support these outcomes provide, and how cEEG affects communication between professionals and relatives. We argue that cEEG can take away or decrease the intensity of the dilemma in some cases, while increasing uncertainty for others. It also raises new concerns. Since its actual impacts furthermore hinge on how cEEG is designed and implemented, we end with recommendations for ensuring responsible development and implementation. (shrink)

Dummettian anti-realism–the refusal to endorse bivalence–is generally thought to be associated with idealism This paper argues that this is only true of the position developed by early Dummett. In a later manifestation Dummettian anti-realism is better thought of as providing the logic for anti-realisms of an error theoretic kind. Early on Dummett distinguished deep from shallow arguments for giving up bivalence: deep arguments followed a strong ‘sufficiency’ reading of Frege’s context principle, and made the sentence (...) the primary vehicle of meaning. Enriched by an account of truth in terms of verifiability, deep arguments implied a form of linguistic idealism. From within a perspective that had already made ontology relative to theory, it was natural for the difference between realism and idealism to hinge on the notion of truth for sentences. Having given up the distinction between deep and shallow arguments against bivalence, Dummett, post 1990, asserts that every rejection of bivalence leads to a form of anti-realism. In the intervening years, he has also come to cast doubt on the sufficiency reading of the context principle, particularly as developed by Crispin Wright. These doubts open the space for some more simple-minded criticisms of this strong version of the context principle, developed in the paper. Once the sufficiency reading of the context principle is given up, arguments for failing to assert bivalence come to hinge on beliefs about ‘genuine’ existence. These forms of anti-realism cannot be taken to imply idealism. Rather, in many cases they will be the expression of views of an error-theoretic kind, that are quite compatible with a thorough-going rejection of idealism. (shrink)

The Transparent Intensional Logic explicates the meaning of a linguistic expression as a construction. The construction is a hyperintensional entity. It is characterised as instructions for a „calculation“ of a concrete value. In the terminology of Pavel Tichy a linguistic expression denotes its meaning , which construes the signification of the expression. If the signification is an intension, we can call it a reference of the expression. In several semantic conceptions the question of the denotation and of the reference are (...) not treated equally. The terminological chaos can be resolved in a specific way thanks to „fine-grained“ character of the logical analysis offered by TIL. (shrink)

This paper compares Kant's transcendental idealism with three main groups of contemporary anti-realism, associated with Wittgenstein, Putnam, and Dummett, respectively. The kind of anti-realism associated with Wittgenstein has it that there is no deep sense in which our concepts are answerable to reality. Associated with Putnam is the rejection of four main ideas: theory-independent reality, the idea of a uniquely true theory, a correspondence theory of truth, and bivalence. While there are superficial similarities between both views (...) and Kant's, I find more significant differences. Dummettian anti-realism, too, clearly differs from Kant's position: Kant believes in verification-transcendent reality, and transcendental idealism is not a theory of meaning or truth. However, I argue that part of the Dummettian position is extremely useful for understanding part of Kant's position - his idealism about the appearances of things. I argue that Kant's idealism about appearances can be expressed as the rejection of experience-transcendent reality with respect to appearances. (shrink)

This study is in two parts. In the first part, various important principles of classical extensional mereology are derived on the basis of a nice axiomatization involving ‘part of’ and fusion. All results are proved here with full Fregean rigor. They are chosen because they are needed for the second part. In the second part, this natural-deduction framework is used in order to regiment David Lewis’s justification of his Division Thesis, which features prominently in his combination of mereology with class (...) theory. The Division Thesis plays a crucial role in Lewis’s informal argument for his Second Thesis in his book Parts of Classes. In order to present Lewis’s argument in rigorous detail, an elegant new principle is offered for the theory that combines class theory and mereology. The new principle is called the Canonical Decomposition Thesis. It secures Lewis’s Division Thesis on the strong construal required in order for his argument to go through. The exercise illustrates how careful one has to be when setting up the details of an adequate foundational theory of parts and classes. The main aim behind this investigation is to determine whether an anti-realist, inferentialist theorist of meaning has the resources to exhibit Lewis’s argument for his Second Thesis—which is central to his marriage of class theory with mereology—as a purely conceptual one. The formal analysis shows that Lewis’s argument, despite its striking appearance to the contrary, can be given in the constructive, relevant logic IR. This is the logic that the author has argued, elsewhere, to be the correct logic from an anti-realist point of view. The anti-realist is therefore in a position to regard Lewis’s argument as purely conceptual. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BELSEY ON LANGUAGE AND REALISM by Noel Carroll Like much contemporary literary theory, Catherine Belsey's influential Critical Practice1 is antirealist, where "antirealism" refers both to the rejection of a putative literary style and to the espousal of an epistemological stance, the latter ostensibly grounded in a theory of language, adapted from Ferdinand Saussure. Moreover, these two antirealisms are connected in that stylistic antirealism is, in part, advanced as (...) a consequence of epistemological —or perhaps more aptly "linguistic"— antirealism. Belsey's theory is avowedly political, designed to challenge the operation of ideology in literature, particularly realist literature. That is, though Belsey discusses literature of several different periods and of different genres, her primary preoccupation is with something she calls expressive realism, a tendency perhaps best exemplified by the nineteenth-century novel and still pursued by our less experimental writers. Purportedly, expressive realism is underwritten by at least two tenets: (1) realism insofar as it presumes that literature can accurately represent reality, and (2) a variant of expressionism insofar as it presumes we have access to the thoughts and intentions of authors {CP, p. 7). In this note, I shall concentrate exclusively on the linguistic arguments— which Belsey calls "Post Saussurean" — that are mobilized to discredit the first presumption of literary realism, its claim to represent reality. For Belsey, a major problem with expressive realism is that this sort of literature presents itself or is taken as an accurate reflection of reality. Belsey sometimes makes this point by saying that such literature purports to be an accurate representation of reality. At other moments, that which such literature claims to reflect accurately is said to be experiences of reality. But these alternative claims are also segued by 124 Noel Carroll125 saying that what is reflected are experiences of reality which are recognized to be true. Given the text, the variant of the reflection theory that appears to occupy Belsey most is the notion that literature reflects reality — that is, holds a mirror up to nature, as Hamlet might have it. This raises Belsey's political hackles because she believes that a commitment to the plausibility of the goal of reflecting life accurately invests realist literature with the aura of a socially unmediated, transhistorical, "natural" account of human life rather than an ideologically constructed one. In order to forestall this supposedly political repercussion, Belsey, taking advantage of her expanded version of Saussurean linguistics, charges that realism misconstrues the relationship between literature and the world. Indeed, ana this is the crux of her postSaussurean argument, the error here can be traced to something deeper, viz., a misconstrual of the relation between language and the world, of which the pretensions of literary realism are merely but an instance. Stated baldly, Belsey aspires to debunk literature's claims to realism by denying language's claims to realism. This may seem rather like killing a fly by using a cannon. And, in any case, one would have thought that questions about the representational efficacy of language were logically independent of the issue of the ideological operation of literary realism. However, Belsey, like many contemporary literary theorists, mistakenly believes that one contests literary realism by propounding epistemological reservations about language. Belsey claims that her linguistic antirealism derives from Saussure's putative discovery that "far from providing a set of labels for entities which exist independently in the world, language precedes the existence of independent entities, making the world intelligible by differentiating between concepts" {CP, p. 38). That language always precedes the existence of that to which it refers is a truly astounding discovery. And we should wish to know how Saussure, according to Belsey's interpretation, came upon it. For Saussure, language is a system of signs. Signs are composed of two elements: a material element— a sound-image or graphic image— called a signifier, and a conceptual element, what in different jargons is referred to as a meaning, an intension, or a connotation, and which in Saussure's terminology is called a signified. At this point it pays to notice what is missing in this account, viz., what other theorists sometimes call the reference, extension, or denotation of a term, that is, the set of 126Philosophy and... (shrink)

Starmaking brings together a cluster of work published over the past 35 years by Nelson Goodman and two Harvard colleagues, Hilary Putnam and Israel Scheffler, on the conceptual connections between monism and pluralism, absolutism and relativism, and idealism and different notions of realism -- issues that are central to metaphysics and epistemology. The title alludes to Goodman's famous defense of the claim that because all true representations of stars and other objects are human creations, it follows that in an (...) important sense the stars themselves are made by us. More generally, the argument moves from the fact that our right representations are constructed by us to the claim that the world itself is similarly constructed. Starmaking addresses the question of whether this seeming paradox can be turned into a serious philosophical view. Goodman and Putnam are sympathetic; Scheffler is the critic. Although many others continue to write about pluralism, relativism, and constructionalism, Starmaking brings together the protagonists in the debate since its beginnings and follows closely its still developing form and substance, focusing sharply on Goodman's claim that "we make versions, and right versions make worlds.". (shrink)

Van Fraassen's constructive empiricism is presently the most influential and well-developed alternative to scientific realism. In this paper I argue that a reasonable condition on the distinction between belief and agnosticism prevents van Fraassen from claiming that we can be agnostic about what a theory says about unobservable entities while simultaneously accepting that theory. The upshot is that we must find some other way to do justice both to the argument for constructive empiricism and to van Fraassen's cogent criticisms (...) of scientific realism. I suggest that a highly attractive alternative is founded upon semantic anti-realism, and that empiricists should develop this alternative. (shrink)

I sketch an application of a semantically anti-realist understanding of the classical sequent calculus to the topic of mathematics. The result is a semantically anti-realist defence of a kind of mathematical realism. In the paper, I begin the development of the view and compare it to orthodox positions in the philosophy of mathematics.

I present a case for a rapprochement between aspects of rationalism and scientific realism, by way of a general framework employing modal epistemology and elements of 2-dimensional semantics (2DS). My overall argument strategy is meta-inductive: The bulk of this paper establishes a “base case,” i.e., a concretely constructive example by which I demonstrate this linkage. The base case or constructive example acts as the exemplar for generating, in a constructively ‘bottom-up’ fashion, a more generally rigorous case for rationalism-realism (...) qua modal epistemology. The exemple I choose in D. Chalmers’ (2002) modal rationalism and R. Giere’s (1985, 1988) constructive realism. I show by way of a thorough analysis how Giere’s claims concerning modal scope are characterized as instances of Chalmers’ modal rationalism, both weak and strong. In essence, as I demonstrate via Chalmers’ notions, ceteris paribus the constructive realist ultimately opts for a comparatively wider gate, characterized by modal reasoning, to lead from the rooms of conceivability qua thought experiments and models, to the pastures of metaphysical possibility. Chalmers likewise tries to erect such a wider gate, in his general conceivability-possibility theses. Anti-realists, on the other hand, see a narrower passage and my contention herein is that they suffer from modal myopia, which hopefully the ‘corrective vision’ of Chalmers’ modal rationalism can restore. In the introduction and concluding sections I sketch out suggestions of constructing ‘inductive steps’ from my base case, to generate more extensively general claims regarding realism qua rationalism. -/- . (shrink)

This paper exploits the language of structuralism, as it has recently been developed with stunning effectiveness in defining the relations between confirmation, empirical progress and truth approximation, to concisely clarify the fundamental problem of the classical Lakatos concept of scientific progress, and to compare its way of evaluation to the real problems of scientists facing the far from perfect theories they wish to improve and defend against competitors.I opt basically for the structuralist terminology adopted in Kuipers (2000), because that is (...) balanced with care to deal with a range of issues far wider than the one dealt with in this contribution. It should be added that this does not commit me to any position on any subject, because structuralism is not a (meta-) theory, it is a language, able to express anything that can be said in other concept systems created to describe knowledge and its dynamics. (shrink)

The dissertation falls into two sections. Part I deals with classical pragmatist arguments against the correspondence theory of truth; Part II , with neo-pragmatist arguments against the possibility of a substantive theory of knowledge. The goal of Part I is to reconstruct and evaluate the main anti-correspondence arguments employed by the classical pragmatists and contemporary neo-pragmatists . Here we offer detailed critical and historical discussions of two arguments in particular: the comparison objection, which claims that the idea that truth (...) is a matter of correspondence with the facts leads directly to skepticism; and the constructivist or anti-realist objection, according to which the correspondence theory is tenable only if realism is defensible, and thus cannot survive the latter position's fall from grace. After considering these objections, we address what James and Dewey had to say about the nature of the correspondence relation itself, and urge that their position has been badly misunderstood by foes and friends alike. Part II deals with the misgivings neo-pragmatists have about the very idea of a philosophical "theory of knowledge." Within analytic philosophy, the most familiar and aggressive expression of this anti-epistemology attitude is Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. However, Rorty is far from alone in declaring epistemology moribund: philosophers in both the Anglo-American and Continental traditions have been busy composing obituaries for some time now. Our primary aim in Part II is to refute two main arguments central to the neo-pragmatist anti-epistemology case: the arguments against "foundations", a heterogeneous family of four objections to the idea of epistemology as 'foundational'; and the anti-representationalist argument, according to which skepticism and epistemology itself are said to rest on an untenable representationalist conception of thought or language. (shrink)

Realism is the claim that truth may transcend all possible verification. The familiar Dummettian argument against that modal claim is that there is no way to manifest an understanding of it in actual linguistic practice. The Dummettian anti-realist's provisional conclusion is that the modal claim must be false. ;The attack on truth-conditional semantics and on the principle of bivalence are familiar ingredients of the anti-realist negative programme. I agree that, whether mathematical formulae or ordinary sentences in the (...) past tense are concerned, we cannot manifest a knowledge of the truth-conditions of particular instances of 'It is possible that ' by deciding their truth. There is nevertheless a way to argue in favour of specific instances of the modal claim when s is a sentence in the past tense. The proposed argument does not appeal to the recognitional abilities which, in the standard anti-realist perspective, constitute grasp of meaning. It does not commit one to the endorsement of the principle of bivalence, although the principle implies the modal claim. ;Our understanding of the workings of nature, whether grounded on scientific theories or on common sense, implies the modal claim. Since we are only contingently connected to the evidence pro or con past events and since the existence of evidence is itself a contingent matter, sentences which say that those events occurred could be true whether or not we can, at any point in time, detect that they are true. The possibility that truths about past facts transcend all possible verification is a purely natural possibility, grounded on what we know of the workings of nature. ;This implies that decidable statements in the past tense are not immune to the realism vs. anti-realism debate. Although they do not transcend verifiability, they could transcend whatever our recognitional abilities, no matter how extended, would allow us to establish at any point in time, either in the past, right now, or in an indefinitely extensible future. (shrink)

Through their transcript products genes regulate the rates at which an immense variety of transcripts and subsequent proteins occur. Understanding the mechanisms that determine which genes are expressed, and when they are expressed, is one of the keys to genetic manipulation for many purposes, including the development of new treatments for disease. Viewing each gene in a genome as a distinct variable that is either on or off, or more realistically as a continuous variable, the values of some of these (...) variables influence the values of others through the regulatory proteins they express, including, of course, the possibility that the rate of expression of a gene at one time may, in various circumstances, influence the rate of expression of that same gene at a later time. If we imagine an arrow drawn from each gene expression variable at a given time to a gene variable whose expression it influences a short while after, the result is a network, technically a directed acyclic graph. For example, the DAG in Figure 1 is a representation of a system in which the expression level of gene G1 at time 1 ) causes the expression level of G2, which in turn causes the expression level of G3. The arrows in Figure 1 which do not have a variable at their tails are “error terms” which represent all of the causes of a variable other than the ones explicitly represented in the DAG. The DAG describes more than associations—it describes causal connections among gene expression rates. A shock to a cell—by mutation, heating, chemical treatment, etc. may alter the DAG describing the relations among gene expressions, for example by activating a gene that was otherwise not expressed, producing a cascade of new expression effects. Although “knockout” experiments can reveal some of the underlying causal network of gene expression levels, unless guided by information from other sources, such experiments are limited in how much of the network structure they can reveal, due to the sheer number of possible combinations of experimental manipulations of genes necessary to reveal the complete causal network. Recent developments have made it possible to compare quantitatively the expression of tens of thousands of genes in cells from different sources in a single experiment, and to trace gene expression over time in thousands of genes simultaneously. cDNA microarrays are already producing extensive data, much of it available on the web. Thus there are calls for analytic software that can be applied to microarray and other data to help infer regulatory networks. In this paper we will review current techniques that are available for searching for the causal relations between variables, describe algorithmic and data gathering obstacles to applying these techniques to gene expression levels, and describe the prospects for overcoming these obstacles. (shrink)

One of the most interesting forms of antirealism developed in recent years is the irrealism of Nelson Goodman. According to that position, the widely held belief that there is one real world and one way the world is, and that the aim of our inquiry is to provide a true description of that world, is mistaken. We should not envisage our cognitive activity as involving recognition and description of the unique structure of the world, but rather as engaged in construction (...) of various world versions. It should also be admitted that in this process we, in some important and nontrivial sense, make worlds corresponding to those versions. That is to say, this version of irrealism combines a constructionalist account of our knowledge with radical ontological pluralism. Such a view certainly leads to a relativism of some sort, but Goodman thinks that this is not the relativism of “anything goes” type, since construction and acceptance of world versions is constrained by some standards of rightness. (shrink)

I intend to: a) clarify the origins and de facto meanings of the term relativism; b) reconstruct the reasons for the birth of the thesis named “cultural relativism”; d) reconstruct ethical implications of the above thesis; c) revisit the recent discussion between universalists and particularists in the light of the idea of cultural relativism.. -/- 1.Prescriptive Moral Relativism: “everybody is justified in acting in the way imposed by criteria accepted by the group he belongs to”. Universalism: there are at least (...) some judgments which are valid inter-culturally Absolutism: there are at least some particular prescriptions which are valid without exception everywhere and always -/- 2. The traditional proof of prescriptive moral relativism: the argument from variability: Judgments, rules, and shared values are de facto variable in time and space. The traditional counter-proof: examples of variability do not prove what skeptics contend. -/- 3. Pre-history of the doctrine -Ancient sophists: either immoralist or contractualist -Modern moral scepticism (xvii c.): variability as an historical and ethnographic fact supports a sceptical conclusion more moderate than sheer immoralism. - Voltaire, Kant, Reid counter-attack pointing at a universally shared moral sense - Romantics and idealists stage an even more moderate reformulation: instead of universally shared moral sense they point at the Spirit of a People which is: a)alternative to abstract and universal philosophical systems as far as it is lived ‘culture’; b) indivisible unity with an inner harmony and a source of normative standards; c) dynamic, in so far as it is a manifestation of the Spirit through the becoming of National cultures. -/- 4. The birth of Cultural Relativism and its ethical implications 4.1. The 18th c. doctrine was the noble savage (a non-historical doctrine: state of nature vs. social state) 4.2 Edward Tylor (1832-1817) and ethnocentric historicism Savage moral standards are real enough, but they are far and weaker than ours. 4.3 Boas and Malinowski and an holistic reaction to ethnocentric historicism -/- Franz Boas (1858-1942): a) Development of civilizations is not ruled by technical progress nor does it follow a one-way path; instead there are parallel developments (for ex. Agriculture does not follow stock-raising); b) racial characters have no relevance in development of civilization; c) we are not yet in a position to compare externally identical kinds of behaviour till we have not yet understood beliefs and intentions laying at their roots (for ex.: “From an ethnological point of view murder cannot be considered as a single phenomenon”; d) we should distinguish among different practices which are only superficially similar (fro ex. practices traditionally classified under the label “tabù”); e) there is as a fact just one normative ethic, constant in its contents but varying in its extension; f) the implication is not that we cannot judge behavior by members of other groups; it is only a recommendation of caution. -/- Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942): a) against Tylor’s and Frazer’s “magpie” methodology, field-work is required, a culture as a whole should be observed from inside; individual elements are incomprehensible; b) a culture is an organic whole; c) its elements are accounted for by their function (economy), avoiding non-observables (empio-criticism). -/- Ruth Benedict and Melville Herskovitz identify Boas’s approach with “cultural relativism”. Benedict: what is normal and abnormal is to be judged on a culture’s own standards, not on our own (“Anthropology and the Abnormal”). Herskovits: “Boas adumbrates what we have come to call cultural relativism” (The Mind, p. 10); “Judgements are based on experience, and experience is interpreted by each individual in terms of his own enculturation” (Man and his Works). -/- 4. How analytic philosophy understood and misunderstood the discussion 4.1. At the beginning of the 20th c., the new view in ethics was non-cognitivism (emotivist and subjectivist). Eric Westermark combines this view with an old-style ethnographic approach in support of relativity of moralities. Moralities are codes, or systems of emotive ‘disinterested’ reactions selected by evolution on their usefulness in terms of survival value for the society that is the carrier of such systems or codes. The moral relativity thesis: there are cases of disagreement that cannot be settled even after agreement about facts. 4.2 Anti-realists Brandt, Mackie, Gilbert, Harman adopt Westermark’s approach in a more sophisticated version: a) moralities are codes with an overall function and may be appraised only as wholes; b) variability is an argument for moral subjectivism; c) apparent legitimacy of deriving shift from ought is legitimized only within one institution d) morality should not be described but instead made, and existing moralities may be improved. Is it ‘real’ relativism? It is clearly subjectivism (a metaethical thesis). The normative thesis is that there better and worse codes, and survival values is the normative standard. -/- 4.3 Particularists MacIntyre, Sandel, Taylor, Wiggins, McDowell ‘Wittgensteinian’ prospectivist arguments bent to support weak-relativist claims MacIntyre: there is ‘incommensurability’ between different theoretical systems in both science and ethics. No argument is possible through different systems Different traditions may coexist for a long time without being able to bring their conflicts to a rational solution. -/- 4.4 Kantian universalists Baier, Gewirth, Rawls, Apel, Habermas Shared claim: justice concerns the right and is universal in so far as it may be based on minimal assumptions Other virtues are relative to context in so far as they are related to comprehensive views of the good - O’Neill criticism: a) it is an assumption shared by both alignments; b) after an alleged crisis brought about by alleged loss of metaphysical certainties, theories of justice have dropped demanding assumptions and kept universalism, virtue theories have kept demanding assumptions and dropped universalism; c) the opposition of virtue and justice has arisen in an unjustified way. O’Neill’s positive proposal: ‘constructive’ procedures may be adopted both (i) concerning all the range of virtues and (ii) across cultures once we abandon idealization and confine ourselves to abstraction from real-world cases. -/- 4.5 A metaethical relativist and anti-relativist normative ethicists: Bernard Williams Williams: vulgar relativism may be assumed to claim that: a) 'just' means 'just in a given society'; b) 'just in a given society' is to be understood in functionalist sense; c) it is wrong for one society’s members to condemn another society’s values. It is inconsistent since in (c) uses ‘just’ in a non-relative way that has been excluded in (a). William’s positive proposal: i) keep a number of substantive or thick ethical concepts that will be different in space and time; ii) admit that public choices are to be legitimized through recourse to more abstract procedures and relying on more thin ethical concepts. -/- 5. Critical remarks 5.1 The only real relativism available is ‘vulgar’ relativism (Westermark?) 5.2. Descriptive universalism (or absolutism) has a long pedigree, from Cicero on, reaching Boas himself but it is useless as an answer to normative questions 5.3. Twentieth-century philosophical discussion seems to discuss an ad hoc doctrine reconstructed by assembling obsolete philosophical ideas but ignoring the real theory of cultural relativism as formulated by anthropologists. -/- 6. A distinction between ethoi and ethical theories as a way out of confusions a)There are systems of conventions de facto existing. These may be studies from outside as phenomena or facts. b)There is moral argument and this, when studies from outside, is a fact, but this does not influence in any degree the possible validity of claims advanced. c) the difference between the above claims and Mackie’s criticism to Searle’s argument of the promising game is that promises, arguments etc. are also phenomena, but they are also communicative phenomena with a logical and pragmatic structure. -/- 7.Conclusions: a) cultural relativism, as a name for Boas’s methodology is a valuable discovery, and in this sense we are all relativists; b) ethical relativism, as an alleged implication of cultural relativism, has been argued in a philosophically quite unsophisticated way by Benedict and Herskovits; philosophers apparently discussed ethical relativism in the basis of a rather faint impression of what cultural relativism had been. c) a full-fledged ethical relativism has hardly been defended by anybody among philosophers; virtually no modern philosopher really argued a prescriptive version of the thesis; d) we may accept the grain of truth in ethical relativism by including relativist critique to ethical absolutism into a universalist normative doctrine that be careful in separating open-textured formulations of universal claims from culturally conditioned particular prescriptions. -/- . 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Not only does a shared expertise in classical philosophy and literature inform the works of Martha Nussbaum and Bernard Williams, each has also written and spoken on contemporary social and political issues. Given such ranges of reference, it is not surprising that their two recent books, Frontiers of Justice, a treatise, and In the Beginning Was the Deed, selected essays, confidently take up fundamental political questions. Yet these books differ in their intentions, organising structures, and discursive strategies, and they have (...) little overlap in topics. What then may be hoped from their juxtaposition? That their moral-political perspectives are strongly anti-utilitarian, somewhat anti-Kantian, and self-professedly liberal are unpromising commonplaces. Their juxtaposition can point, I think, toward an alternative to liberalism that is not anti-liberal. Williams considered himself a ‘critical liberal’. But among his contributions to ‘processes of extension’ of liberalism is enlargement of the category of moral agency to some groups in political contexts. And Nussbaum wants to ‘extend the Rawlsian approach’ to liberalism so as to remain a ‘type of political liberal’. But one of her most important conclusions is that it is ‘easy to extend’ justice as political entitlements to nonhumans. Williams 's move toward nonperson moral agents and Nussbaum's toward nonhuman moral patients do not merely ‘extend’ liberalism but, if taken together, leverage a departure beyond it into postliberalism. (shrink)

Famously, Michael Dummett argues that considerations concerning the role of language in communication lead to the rejection of classical logic in favor of intuitionistic logic. Potentially, this results in massive revisions of established mathematics. Recently, Neil Tennant (“The law of excluded middle is synthetic a priori, if valid”, Philosophical Topics 24 (1996), 205-229) suggested that a Dummettian anti-realist can accept the law of excluded middle as a synthetic, a priori principle grounded on a metaphysical principle of determinacy. This article (...) shows that the for the anti-realist, the law of excluded middle entails that humans have wildly implausible abilities. The proposed synthesis between anti-realism and classical mathematics thus fails. (shrink)

One of the most common criticisms one hears of the idea of granting a legitimate role for social values in theory choice in science is that it just doesn’t make sense to regard social preferences as relevant to the truth or to the way things are. “What is at issue,” wrote Susan Haack, is “whether it is possible to derive an ‘is’ from an ‘ought.’ ” One can see that this is not possible, she concludes, “as soon as one expresses (...) it plainly: that propositions about what states of affairs are desirable or deplorable could be evidence that things are, or are not, so” (Haack 1993a, 35, emphasis in original). The purpose of this chapter is not to determine whether this widespread view is correct, but rather to show that even if we grant it (which I do), we may still consistently believe that social values have a legitimate role in theory choice in science. I will defend this conclusion by outlining a view about social values and theory choice that is available to a Constructive Empiricist anti-realist, but not to a realist. (shrink)

Arguments pro and contra convergent realism – underdetermination of theory by observational evidence and pessimistic meta-induction from past falsity – are considered. It is argued that, to meet the counter-arguments challenge, convergent realism should be considerably changed with a help of modification of the propositions from this meta-programme “hard core” or “protecting belt”. Two well-known convergent realism rivals – “entity realism” of Nancy Cartwright and Ian Hacking and John Worrall’s “structural realism” – are considered. Entity (...) realism’s main drawback is fundamental laws underestimation. As for structural realism, its limitation of theoretical propositions by pure structural ones is ineffective. One always can transform propositions about objects into propositions about structures and vice versa. Both conceptions are kinds of “metaphysical revisionism” that tries to reformulate the good old convergent realism propositions using more decent language and applying ad hoc modifications of the solutions first obtained within the anti-realist epistemological meta-programmes. It is stated that to overcome the troubles of convergent realism one has to turn from classical or “metaphysical” realism to nonclassical or “internal” one and to coherent theory of truth. Internal realism has no troubles in solving the problem of empirically-equivalent theoretical descriptions and historical meta-induction problem, but gets the problem of scientific knowledge objectivity instead. Where does this objectivity come from? One of the answers is proposed by the scientific knowledge growth model elaborated by Rinat Nugayev and by Peter Galison. Each paradigm is a local viewpoint determined by the peculiarities of a culture into which its creator . was submerged. However, the meeting of the different paradigms leads to their interaction; as a result, the crossbred theoretical objects are constructed. Through these systems the infiltration of one paradigm on the other’s domain takes place. After the old paradigms’ grinding the new ones emerge that reconcile to each other much better than the old ones. Scientific theories reconcile results in elimination of many contingent details. In the process of competition more universal components survive. It is demonstrated that the process of objective knowledge genesis takes place in modern superstring theory too. The list of its drawbacks is rather long; it is clear that the theory cannot pretend on the role of the Theory of Everything. Nevertheless the process of argumentation pro and contra convergent realism – underdetermination of theory by observational evidence and pessimistic meta-induction from past falsity – are considered. It is argued that, to meet the counter-arguments challenge, convergent realism should be considerably changed with a help of modification of the propositions from this meta-programme “hard core” or “protecting belt”. It is stated that to overcome the troubles of convergent realism one has to turn from classical or “metaphysic” of quantum field theory and general relativity interpenetration have already begun. (shrink)

Van Fraassen stresses two distinct but interrelated themes in The Scientific Image: the semantic view of theories and the epistemic status of unobservables. The first of these could easily be accepted by a scientific realist, and indeed realists like Giere have already adapted it to their purposes. So the specifically empiricist thread in van Fraassen’s philosophy stems from the second.Van Fraassen breaks from tradition in founding his empiricism not on the ontological status of unobservable entities but on the epistemic attitude (...) we take to them. The main points of his position are these:1)The claims of scientific theories, including claims about unobservable entities, are to be taken literally. Theories are not reconstructed so as to remove claims of the existence of unobservable objects.2)Observation is a matter of direct observation by accepted participants in the human scientific community. (shrink)

In this essay I set out to place Derrida's work – especially his earlier books and essays – in the context of related or contrasting developments in analytic philosophy of science over the past half-century. Along the way I challenge the various misconceptions that have grown up around that work, not only amongst its routine detractors in the analytic camp but also amongst some of its less philosophically informed disciples. In particular I focus on the interlinked issues of realism (...) versus anti-realism and the scope and limits of classical logic, both of which receive a detailed, rigorous and sustained treatment in his deconstructive readings of Husserl, Austin and others. Contrary to Derrida's reputation as a exponent of anti-realism in its far-gone ‘textualist’ form and as one who merely plays perverse though ingenious games with logic I show that those readings presuppose both a basically realist conception of their subject-matter and a strong commitment to the protocols of bivalent logic. These he applies with the utmost care and precision right up to the point – unreachable except by way of that procedure – where they encounter certain problems or anomalies that cannot be resolved except by switching to a different logic. Philosophy of science in the analytic mainstream might benefit greatly from a closer acquaintance with Derrida's thinking on these topics, as it might from a knowledge of his likewise rigorous thinking-through of the antinomy between structure and genesis as it bears upon issues in the history of scientific thought. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 6–21. The French philosopher and novelist Tristan Garcia was born in Toulouse in 1981. This makes him rather young to have written such an imaginative work of systematic philosophy as Forme et objet , 1 the latest entry in the MétaphysiqueS series at Presses universitaires de France. But this reference to Garcia’s youthfulness is not a form of condescension: by publishing a complete system of philosophy in the grand style, he has already done what none of us (...) in the older generation of speculative realists has done so far. His book is sophisticated, erudite, rigorous, imaginatively rich, and abundant in worldly wisdom– despite the author’s conclusion that wisdom does not exist. The quality and scope of Forme et objet took few observers by surprise, since Garcia has been treated as an emerging philosopher to watch across half a decade of Parisian oral tradition. But Garcia was not just the subject of rumor, being already well known to the French public as a writer of fiction. His debut novel, La meilleure part des hommes , 2 was awarded the 2008 Prix de Flore 3 and has already appeared in English as Hate: A Romance . 4 His follow-up novel, Mémoires de la jungle , 5 made clever use of a chimpanzee narrator. Nor was Garcia only published as a novelist before last November: his philosophical study L’Image 6 had already appeared when the author was just twenty-six, a year before he was crowned by the muses at the historic Café de Flore. And then in 2011, just months before the appearance of Forme et objet , Garcia published a widely distributed work entitled Nous, animaux et humains , 7 with its focus on Jeremy Bentham’s ideas about animals. Given this prolific and versatile track record, an optimistic scenario might envisage the young Garcia as one of those combined literary/philosophical talents who appear intermittently in France across the centuries: Jean-Paul Sartre is merely the most famous recent case. While more time is needed to see how Garcia will channel his impressive mental energies, Forme et objet displays such breadth of insight that its author has a good chance to emerge as one of the leading philosophers of his generation. If we accept Aristotle’s dictum that the peak mental age is fifty-one, then to read Garcia’s massive book is to gain some idea of what European philosophy might look like in the futuristic-sounding 2030’s. The present article is confined to Forme et objet . At 486 pages, the work is obviously daunting in size. Indeed, it is even longer than it sounds, given that many of its early sections are printed in a smaller typeface to designate them as supplemental commentary to the main flow of the argument. But while the length of the book reportedly led to delays in French publication, and will probably slow the inevitable appearance of an English translation, the length of the book should not deter interested readers– much of it results from Garcia’s teacherly writing style. Whereas Quentin Meillassoux’s prose displays an arctic economy of means, Garcia’s style is reminiscent of the repeated lessons of oral classroom proceedings. Rarely is the reader given fewer than three or four chances to master an idea before the author moves on to the next. In practice, the style feels welcoming rather than long-winded. Otherwise, the structure of Forme et objet is surprisingly simple. There is a useful Introduction of less than twenty pages. Then comes Book I: Formally , running to approximately 135 pages. Here Garcia outlines the most basic features of a thing “no matter what it is,” or n’importe quoi , an everyday phrase that Garcia shapes into a technical term. This part of the book feels at times like a more amiable version of Hegel’s Science of Logic , a parallel emphasized further by the threefold articulation of its theme: 1. Thing; 2. Thing and World; 3. Being and Understanding. This is followed by the much longer Book II: Objectively , totaling more than 300 pages. It contains sixteen essay-like meditations on specific kinds of objects—including time, animals, humans, history, gender, and death. Here each chapter rolls smoothly into the next, making this second part of the book feel more like a different work of Hegel: The Phenomenology of Spirit . But these are merely analogies. Garcia is no Hegelian, even if the book contains a few dialectical flourishes that seem to reflect his early enthusiasm for the Frankfurt School. Forme et objet ends with a six-page Coda, followed by the usual page of acknowledgments. In what follows, I will briefly summarize each of these four parts of the book before ending with some more general remarks. Before doing so, it will be useful to situate Garcia biographically (as much as I am able) and philosophically. Though Toulouse is his native city, his formative years were spent largely in Algeria, where his family has deep roots. During our sole private conversation, Garcia mentioned that his parents are professors of literature. 8 As a student of philosopher Garcia flourished so early that many of his current ideas date to his teenaged years: “There are sentences in Forme et objet that I wrote when I was seventeen,” he said in response to a question on that cold night on the Canal St.-Martin. I recalled that remark when reading his brilliant account, late in the book, of the central role of adolescence in contemporary culture. While many prodigies blow through their formal academic training without serious obstruction, Garcia’s student memories are rich in tales of isolation and struggle, though equally rich in gratitude for a half-dozen or so exceptional teachers who provided the intellectual space he needed: Meillassoux and Alain Badiou are simply two of the most prominent figures on that list. Though there are many points of agreement between Garcia’s philosophical position and my own, he not only reached his position years before reading my work, 9 he arrived along a rather different path: not through phenomenology, but via the Frankfurt School, which may be one of the reasons for his profound fascination with aesthetics. Garcia’s cultural background is as broad as one could wish: he is no less informed about punk rock and European football leagues than about the spiritualist roots of Bergson’s philosophy. Curious about everything and contemptuous towards nothing, Garcia can be expected to write insightfully on dozens of topics in the years to come. Given that his philosophy is so personally tantalizing in its agreements and disagreements with my own, and given the great internal richness of Forme et objet itself, the present review is no better than a first effort at coming to terms with the challenges posed by this minstrel from the rising generation. This is especially intriguing for older Generation X’ers like me, since confrontation with the younger generation is one of the many themes treated insightfully in Garcia’s book. 1. Introduction Garcia begins in defense of a so-called “flat ontology,” in which all things are equally things. While Roy Bhaskar 10 used this term pejoratively to refer to anti-realist philosophies that flatten everything onto an epistemic plane of human access, Manuel DeLanda 11 (an admirer of Bhaskar) reversed it into the positive principle that all realities are equally realities. Similar notions can be found in the “absistence” of Alexius Meinong, 12 the “irreduction” of Bruno Latour, 13 and my own critique 14 of the undermining/overmining pair. Also noteworthy is Levi Bryant’s use of the term “flat ontology” throughout The Democracy of Objects 15 and his earlier essay “The Ontic Principle.” 16 But for Garcia, flatness is only one face of the cosmos, and one that he ultimately declares to be rather impoverished. Even so, he always remains an advocate of a flat ontology. Insofar as everything is equally something, no matter what it is ( n’importe qui ), everything is equally a thing, equally solitary in its relation with world. This is why his book abounds in those long lists of random, ontologically equivalent entities that Ian Bogost has playfully termed “Latour Litanies.” 17 The first litany in Garcia’s book runs as follows: “We live in this world of things, where a cutting of acacia, a gene, a computer-generated image, a transplantable hand, a musical sample, a trademarked name, or a sexual service are comparable things.” (7) Yet Garcia is frankly dualistic; his flat ontology only lasts until page 159 and the end of Book I (entitled “Formally”), which deals entirely with things that are equally things. Thereafter Garcia turns his attention from things to objects, which are not flat in the least, but engage in hierarchical relations with one another. In agreement with both DeLanda and the speculative realists, Garcia proclaims that his book “proposes to put to the test a thought about things rather than a thought about our thought about things .” (8) Just as ducklings are “imprinted” (9) after hatching and treat the first creature they see as their mother, philosophers are imprinted by the idea with which they begin. Hence, philosophies that begin with human access will never truly find their way back to things. This makes Garcia rather suspicious of twentieth century philosophy, since “the twentieth century—to which in some way this work proposes to bid adieu—has been a period of theorizing modes of access to things rather than things...” (9) Among other possible benefits of the philosophy of things that Garcia proposes, it is fully able to account for thought as a special variant of things, while the reverse is not possible.(10) In Book I of Forme et objet , Garcia’s “things” are so flat, so de-determined, that he is forced to renounce some of the most basic features ascribed to things by most realists. As he tells us in his foreboding third footnote: “We will maintain that the solitude [of things] is less than unity, less than identity, and that it does not imply acceptance (any more than refusal) of the principle of non-contradiction.” (11) In a contemporary world cluttered with too many things, Garcia’s flat and formal plane provides us with some breathing room: “The formal plan of thought enables or re-enables us to cut short all accumulation—whether of knowing, experience, or action—by a simplicity, an impoverished surface...” (13) As Garcia says elsewhere in responding to a Deleuzian critic of the book, his starting point in flat ontology is designed to obstruct the claims of both analytic philosophy and Hegelianism: “Hence, this work seeks to protect each thing—real, imaginary, inconsistent, contradictory—both against Ockham’s Razor and against the Aufhebung or dialectical process.” 18 Yet contrary to the equalizing spirit of many flat ontologies, “we will add to our formal ontology of the equal, an objective ontology of the unequal.” (13) But initially, Garcia joins all flat ontologists in holding that everything is irreducible: “this irreducibility, which we will term the ‘chance’ of each thing... also marks the refusal of a positive thought that reduces things exclusively to natural things, or social things, or historical things, etc.” (15) This irreducible “chance” of a thing emerges as an important technical term in the book, always paired with its inverted brother, the “price to pay” ( prix à payer ). On pages 17-19, we find the only diagrams in the book. What they illustrate is that Garcia wishes to avoid two equally dangerous extremes. The first is the philosophy of substance, featuring the thing-in-itself as a mighty river fed by attributes as if by subordinate tributary streams. This model can be found in many of the classic thinkers of West and East alike. In it, “there is obviously a hierarchization between that which is dragged towards something other than itself, and this other which serves it as an ontological support while supporting its proper being.” (16) For Garcia, the second extreme worth avoiding is the philosophy of events: “One thus conceives trajectories of being, identified as events, facts, powers, intensities, or intentionality. These vectors of being come first, bearing and supporting being, displacing it, but without ever finding a stopping point, a buffer, an objective consistency.” (17) The first model gives us a thing too wrapped up in itself, too compact . This word “compact” (the French and the English are the same) is another technical term for Garcia. But if the “compact” model of things leads us to something more than things, the philosophy of events gives us less than things, by dissolving them into a play of vectors. Garcia’s alternative lies midway between these two extremes: Being enters the thing, being comes out of it. And a thing is nothing other than the difference between the enters and the being that comes out. Thus, the circuit of being is never halted. In the thing, there is never the thing-in-itself. And the thing is never in-itself, but outside of itself. Nonetheless, being is not eventally “pollinated” by vectors: it possesses an objecting halting-point... (19) This single idea is the key to Garcia’s book: the thing is neither a self-contained durable lump nor some sort of evental flux. Instead, the thing is the difference between its various components and its relations with its environment. Or stated differently: “the price to pay for this disposition is a circulation of being that systematically distinguishes two senses of things: that which is in the thing , and that in which the thing is , or that which encompasses it and that which it encompasses,” (19) translating comprendre here as “encompass.” 19 In a beautiful description of a piece of black slate, Garcia sums up the various minerals, qualities, and shapes that compose [ comprend ] it, and calls them “that which is in the thing,” (20) noting that this tells us nothing about “that in which [the slate] is”—namely, all the various situations in which the black slate can be found. Instead, the slate is the difference between these two: the most characteristic principle of Garcia’s philosophy. 2. Formally Book One of Forme et objet , “Formally,” is concerned with the formal equality of all things in a flat world. “Two questions mark the boundaries of reflection: of what is everything composed [ composé ], and: what do all things compose?” (27) Looking downward, we wish to know what everything is made of; looking upward, we want to know the ultimate result of the combination of all things. Here we must turn our attention to the thing n’importe quoi— no matter what it is. (30) Anything with finite qualities is obviously too specific to be relevant to global ontological questions. To an equal degree, something possessing all qualities (think of Whitehead’s God) 20 would not be n’importe quoi either, since it would still be too definite, even if incredibly vast. The same holds for contradictions, since these all differ from each other. The square circle, the non-white black white, and the non-city city are all too distinct to count as the thing no matter what it is. The n’importe quoi must be devoid of all specific qualities, including contradictory ones. In one of the more intriguing points in his book, so reminiscent of Meinong, Garcia proclaims that “the ‘no matter what it is’ is neither a reality nor an abstract construction, nor both of these at once; the ‘no matter what it is’ is simply the plane of equality of that which is real, that which is possible, that which is inexistent, that which is past, that which is impossible, that which is true, that which is false, that which is bad.”(39-40) Since everything has two faces, it would be a grievous mistake to focus on just one of them at the expense of the other, as physicalism or materialism do when reducing the world to minuscule physical underpinnings. For scientistic materialism, “it is either atoms, particles, or fields of force... which are the things.” (47-48) Moreover, “these more-than-things are accompanied by less-than-things: for example, ideas or facts of consciousness are determined by the state of matter and are not autonomous things, but manifestations reduced to secondary effects of material processes...” (48) On this point, Garcia’s position is in complete accord with my own critique of undermining and overmining. 21 Where we disagree is that Garcia is more deeply suspicious of the notion of substance, which I view as salvageable with a few needed changes, while Garcia sees this operation as hopeless: “A substance, in the history of philosophy, is the more-than-thing par excellence.” (51) Another agreement between our positions is visible when Garcia claims (correctly, in my opinion) “that it is vain to distinguish between things which are material and those which are not.” (52) Yet we also find an even more important disagreement, since for Garcia withdrawal cannot be the quality of a thing. Instead, the absence of a thing is simultaneous with it, embodied in all that is not it– the absence of the sculpture of a woman is to be found in the mold that appears at the same time as it, and thus withdrawal must be viewed as an “event” rather than as something pertaining to an object. For Garcia, nothing withdraws beyond access. Since we must distinguish between “that which is something” and “that which something is,” and since the former is identified with “no matter what it is is” and the latter with “ not no matter what it is,” we can say that “everything is thus a milieu, a fragile link between ‘no matter what it is’ and ‘ not no matter what it is.’” (62) And here we find Garcia’s critique of the thing-in-itself: “A thing is never defined en bloc . We can affirm that a thing is this or that, but that does not suffice. It is still necessary to state precisely that which is this thing .” (62) Stated differently, “something is not in itself : for that which is in the thing is not the thing, and that in which the thing is is not the thing.” (62) And here Garcia and I, facing the same evidence, draw opposite conclusions. For me, the fact that nothing can be identified with either its components or its concrete location means that the thing must be something in-itself distinct from both of these. Yet for Garcia, to be in-itself would mean to be identified with just one of these two extreme terms, and hence the thing can only be the difference between them. Garcia is equally suspicious of the classical tendency to view “unity” as a property of the thing, since in his eyes unity is too relational a property to belong to things. (65) While specific things are situated determinately with respect to other things, we are still speaking here about the thing no matter what it is, and this can be viewed only in terms of solitude, which all things share: a human being, a hand, or a chair or all equally things insofar as they are on their own , not insofar as they are one . (64) A thing is alone, and relates only to the one thing that is not another thing: world. In a striking parallel to my own argument for a partial revival of occasionalism, Garcia tells us that “the things communicate only by their solitude: it is because everything is equally on its own in the world that things can be together, enmeshed in one another.” (67) Alone in their solitude, things all relate to world, which serves as a mediator allowing them to become mixed up in one another. As we have seen, one reason that nothing can be in itself is because everything is in something else. For Garcia, “to be in something and to be something are equivalent.” (69) Stated more broadly, “being is thus the difference between the two aspects of each thing: that which is it, and that which it is.” (70) And even more vividly: “a thing is almost like a sack: there is that which one puts in the sack and that which remains outside the sack.” (70) But not quite like a sack, “since a thing is not a thin skin or film. Instead, a thing is comparable to a sack that is immaterial and without thickness: it is nothing other than the difference between that which is this thing and that which thing is, between content and container.” (71) Nothing can be in-itself because everything is two selves at once. For example, we cannot say that our self is defined by our consciousness: “Everything has a self because nothing is in itself. The self is not the quality of that which is related to itself (which is conscious, for example) or which thinks itself related to itself. Nonetheless, for an entity called ‘conscious’ to be related to itself, it is necessary that this very relation should be another thing than the self to which it is related.” (71) Consciousness cannot be the self, precisely because it is other than that of which it is conscious. Nothing is able to grasp itself. The self is “the function by which being and composition [ compréhension ] are mutually excluded...” (72) The self is “the point of shadow of everything that projects some light...” (72) The in-itself faces two opposite dangers: “For something to be in-itself is to be a self. Something which is a self flies out through one of its two sides... Stated differently, being in-itself is simply the possibility of a double failure.” (73) The in-itself can be termed compact : “There remains to us a means of thinking that which does not fully enter into the world, though without exiting from it. This means is what we call the compact.” (76) In a sense, the compact is the opposite of the world. For in the case of the world, everything enters it and it enters nothing; as for the compact, it enters the world (since it is something, after all) while nothing enters it. (77) The compact marks the presence of the impossible in the world. (78) It is not impossible, but possible only on the condition that it fails. (78) The time has come to speak of where a thing is located. “The sole condition of a thing is that of being in another thing than itself, and thus in another thing than something.” (78) A condition is “that which determines something, that which forms something, that in which something is.” (78) As for humans, “the condition of someone is his situation; my social condition is that which socially determines me, my place and my function...” (79) More generally, “to be conditioned is to find oneself reduced to that in which one is.” (79) Everything is conditioned, but nothing is reducible to this condition. To determine the condition of something is to determine in what it is. A thing is located in that which contradicts it, just as a statue exists in its mold, which is precisely that which it is not. Since the thing is finite and definite, its condition or form must be infinite and indefinite. That in which all things are is the world, which Garcia also terms “the whole.” (81) “To try to be in-itself is to attempt to remain outside the world. And indeed, to try to be in-itself is only a path of entry into the world.” (83) For Garcia, “the world is not the pre-existent container of the things it contains, a priori , nor the construction by the mind of a fictional ensemble of all things, a posteriori .” (85) Instead, the world is simultaneous with all things; the two always go together. The world cannot be a determinate world, such as the physical universe or mathematical space, since these are already too specific and limited. “Every determinate world, which is in fact a universe , is a ‘big thing’ [ grosse chose ]: it is a set, however vast, of composite things which itself embodies a thing.” (85) Every determinate world is really just a “big thing.” Stated differently, “it is nothing other than a balanced milieu between the things that compose it and the thing that it composes.” (85) We generally picture the world as a physical univer. (shrink)

This article offers a critical perspective on two lines of thought in recent epistemology and philosophy of science, namely Michael Dummett?s anti-realist approach to issues of truth, meaning, and knowledge and Bas van Fraassen?s influential programme of?constructive empiricism?. While not denying the salient differences between them it shows how they converge on a sceptical outlook concerning the realist claim that truth might always transcend the restrictions of some given state of knowledge. The author puts the case that such sceptical (...) arguments, if followed through consistently, must involve giving up all claim to account for our knowledge of the growth of scientific knowledge. He also takes issue with Dummett?s idea of truth as nothing more than a matter of?warranted assertibility? and with van Fraassen?s likewise verificationist conception of empirical warrant as the most we can have by way of epistemic justification. Thus it is wrong to suppose that the realist is merely indulging in a display of? courage not under fire? when she assumes ontological commitments in excess of the observational data. This disavowal of realism in favour of a theory which?saves the appearances? has a less-than-distinguished prehistory in the range of compromise strategies adopted by upholders of a dominant metaphysics or world-view, starting out with the orthodox Catholic attempt to defuse the implications of the heliocentric hypothesis advanced by Copernicus and Galileo. Such theological motives are nowadays not so prominent although? it is suggested fithey do emerge at certain points in Dummett?s writing. More constructively, this article presents a case for objectivism with regard to scientific truth and also for inference to the best causal explanation on both the micro- and the macrophysical scale as the only approach with an adequate claim to make sense of the history of advancements in scientific knowledge to date. (shrink)

My dissertation is concerned with the misconceptions many postmodernist theorists and critics harbor about the history of western philosophy and about various branches of it, misconceptions that I contend are the source of the simplistic account of both postwar culture and literature, and eighteenth-and nineteenth-century realist fiction, that they provide. ;In the first chapter, I consider the campaign that a host of postmodernists have mounted against something they typically refer to as the "logic of either/or," alleged to structure western thought. (...) This logic they claim they try to "subvert" by recourse to something else called the "logic of both/and," which, they assert, violates the law of noncontradiction. Instantiations of the "logic of both/and" that postmodernists cite as evidence of the "contradictory," subversive nature of postmodernism include, for example, that postmodernism is both a break from and a continuation of modernism, that postmodernist fiction is both about reality and about the processes of artistic creation, and that postmodern humor is both destructive and constructive. None of these states of affairs, however, is a contradiction, much less a violation of the law of noncontradiction. What postmodernists assume is that by the terms of classical logic, postmodernism, for example, must be either a break from or a continuation of modernism--that is, they attribute to classical logicians what is considered by them to be one of the most common fallacies of presumption: the either/or fallacy, or black-and-white thinking. It is the trivial notion that A and B can both be predicated of x that underwrites, in effect, the "radical" claims made by postmodernists on behalf of the "logic of both/and." ;In the second chapter, I address the reductive accounts of both realist and postmodernist fiction that postmodernists characteristically offer. Many assume, for example, that a realist metaphysics is implicit in realist fiction, and argue that, for this reason, realist fiction is outmoded. The ground of this assumption is, among other things, a misconception about what metaphysical realism is. A belief in a "world out there" is not, as a number of postmodernists seem to think, tantamount to a belief in the truth of metaphysical realism-- the thesis, simply put, that reality is mind-independent. There is no pat, one-to-one correspondence between literary realism and metaphysical realism , and no reason--stylistic or otherwise--why a realist novel cannot express an anti-realist metaphysics--not even any reason why an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century realist novel couldn't, since metaphysical anti-realism was as alive and well then as metaphysical realism is today. The latter point is important, for postmodernists often base their assertions about the metaphysical assumptions that inform eighteenth- and nineteenth-century realist fiction not on any textual evidence, but on a priori assumptions about the metaphysical beliefs it was possible for realist fiction to reflect. This "ideas-of-the-time" approach to literary history is problematic in its own right, but it becomes even more so if one's assumptions about what were or were not the ideas of the time, are, as in this case, false. (shrink)

THE CONVICTION that nature as ordinarily experienced is the manifestation of a deeper, more extensive physical reality is now commonplace. While Aristotle could believe that the visible qualities and substantial forms of the perceptual world correspond to the real natures of things, the advent of modern classical mechanics, incorporating the atomic theory, dispelled this notion. As in the ancient atomic theories of Leucippus and Democritus, the composition, motion, and qualitative changes of phenomena were attributed to the interaction of "insensible particles," (...) atoms or corpuscles, due to the influence of forces such as gravity, impact, and acceleration. Yet even in the Hellenistic world the search for "hidden causes" to explain observable phenomena was an established tradition, as indicated in this passage from the first century A.D. (shrink)

This article introduces, studies, and applies a new system of logic which is called ‘HYPE’. In HYPE, formulas are evaluated at states that may exhibit truth value gaps and truth value gluts. Simple and natural semantic rules for negation and the conditional operator are formulated based on an incompatibility relation and a partial fusion operation on states. The semantics is worked out in formal and philosophical detail, and a sound and complete axiomatization is provided both for the propositional and the (...) predicate logic of the system. The propositional logic of HYPE is shown to contain first-degree entailment, to have the Finite Model Property, to be decidable, to have the Disjunction Property, and to extend intuitionistic propositional logic conservatively when intuitionistic negation is defined appropriately by HYPE’s logical connectives. Furthermore, HYPE’s first-order logic is a conservative extension of intuitionistic logic with the Constant Domain Axiom, when intuitionistic negation is again defined appropriately. The system allows for simple model constructions and intuitive Euler-Venn-like diagrams, and its logical structure matches structures well-known from ordinary mathematics, such as from optimization theory, combinatorics, and graph theory. HYPE may also be used as a general logical framework in which different systems of logic can be studied, compared, and combined. In particular, HYPE is found to relate in interesting ways to classical logic and various systems of relevance and paraconsistent logic, many-valued logic, and truthmaker semantics. On the philosophical side, if used as a logic for theories of type-free truth, HYPE is shown to address semantic paradoxes such as the Liar Paradox by extending non-classical fixed-point interpretations of truth by a conditional as well-behaved as that of intuitionistic logic. Finally, HYPE may be used as a background system for modal operators that create hyperintensional contexts, though the details of this application need to be left to follow-up work. (shrink)

It might be expected that it would suffice for the entry for “moral anti-realism” to contain only some links to other entries in this encyclopedia. It could contain a link to “moral realism” and stipulate the negation of the view there described. Alternatively, it could have links to the entries “anti-realism” and “morality” and could stipulate the conjunction of the materials contained therein. The fact that neither of these approaches would be adequate—and, more strikingly, that (...) following the two procedures would yield substantively non-equivalent results—reveals the contentious and unsettled nature of the topic. -/- “Anti-realism,” “non-realism,” and “irrealism” may for most purposes be treated as synonymous. Occasionally, distinctions have been suggested for local pedagogic reasons (see, e.g., Wright 1988a; Dreier 2004), but no such distinction has generally taken hold. (“Quasi-realism” denotes something very different, to be discussed in the supplement Projectivism and quasi-realism below.) All three terms are to be defined in opposition to realism, but since there is no consensus on how “realism” is to be understood, “anti-realism” fares no better. Crispin Wright (1992: 1) comments that “if there ever was a consensus of understanding about ‘realism’, as a philosophical term of art, it has undoubtedly been fragmented by the pressures exerted by the various debates—so much so that a philosopher who asserts that she is a realist about theoretical science, for example, or ethics, has probably, for most philosophical audiences, accomplished little more than to clear her throat.” This entry doesn't purport to do justice to the intricacy and subtlety of the topic of realism; it should be acknowledged at the outset that the fragmentation of which Wright speaks renders it unlikely that the label “moral anti-realism” even succeeds in picking out a definite position. Yet perhaps we can at least make an advance on clearing our throats. (shrink)

Dummett's account of the semantic paradoxes in terms of his theory of indefinitely extensible concepts is compared with Bürge's account in terms of indexicality. Dummett's appeal to intuitionistic logic does not block the paradoxes but Bürge's attempt to avoid the Strengthened Liar is unconvincing. It is argued that in order to avoid the Strengthened Liar and other semantic paradoxes involving nonindexical expressions (constants), one must postulate that when we reflect on the paradoxes there are slight shifts in the meaning (not (...) just reference) we ascribe to metalinguistic expressions (in particular 'say', and derivatively 'true' and 'false'). Consideration of metaphor and gradual linguistic change suggests that such semantic shifts are consistent with language-learning and communication. On this account there is no threat to classical logic, bivalence or the fundamental principles governing 'true' and 'false'. (shrink)

Here is one argument against realism. (1) Realists are committed to the classical rules for negation. But (2) legitimate rules of inference must conserve evidence. And (3) the classical rules for negation do not conserve evidence. So (4) realism is wrong. Most realists reject 2. But it has recently been argued that if we allow denied sentences as premisses and conclusions in inferences we will be able to reject 3. And this new argument against 3 generates a new (...) response to the antirealist argument: keep 1 and 2, avoiding 4 by rejecting 3. My aim in this paper is to see how much work in the fight against anti-realism this new response can really do. I argue that there is a powerful objection to the response: 2 is in tension with the claim that denied sentences can be premisses and conclusions in inferences. But I show that, even given this objection, the new response has an important role to play. (shrink)

Lee McIntyre’s Respecting Truth chronicles the contemporary challenges regarding the relationship amongst evidence, belief formation and ideology. The discussion in his book focusses on the ‘politicisation of knowledge’ and the purportedly growing public (and sometimes academic) tendency to choose to believe what is determined by prior ideological commitments rather than what is determined by evidence-based reasoning. In considering these issues, McIntyre posits that the claim “race is a myth” is founded on a political ideology rather than on support from scientific (...) evidence. He contrasts this view with the argument that racially correlated biomedical outcomes for self-identified racial groups suggest that biological races are real. I explore how McIntyre’s framing of the claim “race is a myth” as fundamentally ideological results in him failing to engage with the arguments and evidence many constructionists and biological anti-realists put forward in support of their views. I also show how the biomedical evidence he thinks supports biological realism is unconvincing. (shrink)

Mathematical concepts play at least three roles in the application of mathematics: an inferential role, a representational role, and an expressive role. In this paper, I argue that, despite what has often been alleged, platonists do not fully accommodate these features of the application of mathematics. At best, platonism provides partial ways of handling the issues. I then sketch an alternative, anti-realist account of the application of mathematics, and argue that this account manages to accommodate these features of the (...) application process. In this way, a better account of mathematical applications is, in principle, available. (shrink)

This is a new major and systematic monograph on the realism debate, written by a very skillful and sophisticated defender of anti-realism. The realism debate is conceived here as a primarily semantic controversy concerning the possibility of forming propositions or sentences about the world whose truth or falsity might be unknowable to us. Realists of various persuasions take it to be perfectly possible, while nonrealists of all sorts deny this. Tennant distinguishes two basic forms of nonrealism (...) in his book: irrealism and antirealism. According to semantic irrealism, there are no such entities as propositions, or objective and determinate meanings for sentences to possess. Semantic antirealists generally do not agree with such a radical conclusion. They argue for the objectivity and determinacy of meaning, although at the same time they insist that both meaning and truth attributable to propositions or sentences has to be epistemically constrained, that is, grasping a meaning has to be manifestable and truth has to be in principle knowable. While developing in greater detail his own version of antirealism that respects those two constraints, Tennant combines the knowability requirement with the claim that truth need not be bivalent, which in turn leads him to replace classical logic based on bivalence by a nonclassical constructive logic, namely, intuitionistic relevant logic. Tennant attempts to show that this logic has much wider application than one might suppose. It suffices not only for mathematics but also adequately captures the basic inferential practices of empirical sciences. It would be hard to overestimate the significance of that attempt, since if successful it undermines the charge that anti-realism is a doctrine that cannot really be extended beyond the domain of mathematical discourse. The general strategy taken in this respect by Tennant is not, as has been common so far, to strengthen the notion of empirical verification or confirmation of a sentence in such a way as to make it a close analogue of the notion of mathematical proof. “Rather, one should attend to the main feature of natural scientific theorizing to which Popper drew our attention: our scientific theories can at best be falsified, not verified”. In other words, in the case of empirical discourse the perfect analogue of the antirealist notion of constructive provability is the notion of constructive falsifiability. (shrink)

Though my title speaks of Kant’s mathematical realism, I want in this essay to explore Kant’s relation to a famous mathematical anti-realist. Specifically, I want to discuss Kant’s influence on L. E. J. Brouwer, the 20th-century Dutch mathematician who built a contemporary philosophy of mathematics on constructivist themes which were quite explicitly Kantian. Brouwer’s theory is perhaps most notable for its belief that constructivism requires us to abandon the traditional logic of mathematical reasoning in favor of different canon (...) of reasoning, called intuitionistic logic. Brouwer thought that classical logic is intrinsically bound up with a nonconstructive view of mathematics. This means that, according to Brouwer, when we do mathematics we must give up bivalence, we must no longer use such familiar logical laws as excluded middle, and we must sometimes forebear from the classic method of reductio ad absurdum. All of these are intuitionistically invalid classical principles. (shrink)

On the Dummettian understanding, anti-realism regarding a particular discourse amounts to (or at the very least, involves) a refusal to accept the determinacy of the subject matter of that discourse and a corresponding refusal to assert at least some instances of excluded middle (which can be understood as expressing this determinacy of subject matter). In short: one is an anti-realist about a discourse if and only if one accepts intuitionistic logic as correct for that discourse. On careful (...) examination, the strongest Dummettian arguments for anti-realism of this sort fail to secure intuitionistic logic as the single, correct logic for anti-realist discourses. Instead, antirealists are placed in a situation where they fail to be justified in asserting monism (that intuitionistic logic is the unique correct logic). Thus, antirealists seem forced either to accept pluralism (i.e. one or more intermediate logic is at least as `correct’ as intuitionistic logic–an option I take to be unattractive from the anti-realist perspective), or they must be anti-realists about the realism/anti-realism debate (and, in particular, must refuse to assert the instance of excluded middle equivalent to logical monism or logical pluralism). (shrink)

Wittgenstein attached overarching personal importance to questions of moral value. Yet his written treatments of ethics are brief and obscure, while his views on language have had a strong, albeit intermittent and diffuse, influence on analytic moral philosophy. His remarks on ethics seem to be totally at odds with realist and cognitivist accounts. Both the Tractatus and 'A Lecture on Ethics' maintain that ethics transcends linguistic expression, and later remarks seem to point in the direction of a communal variant of (...) expressivism and relativism. Nevertheless, Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language was invoked in the 1980s by Oxford philosophers like John McDowell and Sabina Lovibond against the still prevailing non-cognitivist mainstream. These ‘anti-anti-realists’ maintained that, from a Wittgensteinian perspective, all indicative sentences, including moral ones, make claims to truth. My article discusses this proposal, historically, exegetically, and substantively. Anti-anti-realism (AAR) chimes with Wittgenstein’s deflationary account of truth. But that account is not committed to the conclusion that all propositions that can be called ‘true’ or ‘false’ have the same semantic status. Indeed, anti-anti-realism is at odds with Wittgenstein’s view that the similarity in linguistic form disguises logical differences between moral and descriptive propositions. (shrink)

Open future is incompatible with realism about possible worlds. Since realistically conceived (concrete or abstract) possible worlds are maximal in the sense that they contain/represent the full history of a possible spacetime, past and future included, if such a world is actual now, the future is fully settled now, which rules out openness. The kind of metaphysical indeterminacy required for open future is incompatible with the kind of maximality which is built into the concept of possible worlds. The paper (...) discusses various modal realist responses and argues that they provide ersatz openness only, or they lead to incoherence, or they render the resulting theory inadequate as a theory of modality. The paper also considers various accounts of the open future, including rejection of bivalence, supervaluationism, and the ‘thin red line’ view (TRL), and claims that a version of (TRL) can avoid the incompatibility problem, but only at the cost of deflating the notion of openness. (shrink)

According to the realist, the meaning of a declarative, non-indexical sentence is the condition under which it is true and the truth-condition of an undecidable sentence can obtain or fail to obtain independently of our capacity, even in principle, to recognize that it obtains or that fails to do so.1 In a series of papers, beginning with “Truth” in 1959, Michael Dummett challenged the position that the classical notion of truth-condition occupied as the central notion of a theory of meaning, (...) and proposed that it should be replaced by the anti-realist (and intuitionistic) notion of assertability-condition. Taken together with normalization results obtained by Dag Prawitz, Dummett’s work truly opened up the anti-realist challenge at the level of proof-theoretical semantics.2 There has been since numerous rejoinders from partisans of classical logic, which were at times met with by attempts at watering down the anti-realist challenge, e.g., by arguing that anti-realism does not necessarily entail the adoption of intuitionistic logic. Only a few anti-realists, such as Crispin Wright and Neil Tennant, tried to look instead in the other direction, towards a more radical version of anti-realism which would entail deeper revisions of classical logic than those recommended by intuitionists.3 In this paper, which is largely programmatic, we shall also argue in favour of a radical anti-realism which would be a genuine alternative to the traditional anti-realism of Dummett and Prawitz. The debate about anti-realism has by now more or less run out of breath and we wish to provide it with a new lease on life, by taking into account the profound changes that took place in proof theory during the intervening years. We have in mind in particular the considerable development within Gentzen-style proof theory of non-classical, substructural logics other than intuitionistic logic, which seriously opens up the possibility that anti-realism, when properly understood, might end up justifying another logic, and the development of closer links between proof theory and computational complexity theory that has renewed interest in a radical form of anti-realism, namely strict finitism. (shrink)

A number of authors have noted that the key steps in Fitch’s argument are not intuitionistically valid, and some have proposed this as a reason for an anti-realist to accept intuitionistic logic (e.g. Williamson 1982, 1988). This line of reasoning rests upon two assumptions. The first is that the premises of Fitch’s argument make sense from an anti-realist point of view – and in particular, that an anti-realist can and should maintain the principle that all truths are (...) knowable. The second is that we have some independent reason for thinking that classical logic is not appropriate in this area. This paper explores these two assumptions in the context of Michael Dummett’s version of anti-realism, with particular reference to the argument from indefinite extensibility developed at various points in Dummett’s writings (e.g. Dummett 1991 Ch. 24). -/- Dummett argues that certain concepts, the indefinitely extensible concepts, are such that we cannot form a clear and determinate conception of all the objects that fall under them. The most familiar examples of indefinitely extensible concepts are mathematical. Dummett discusses the concepts ordinal number, real number, and natural number, which are indefinitely extensible because any conception that one might form of their complete extension can be extended to a more inclusive conception (as, for example, in Cantor’s proof of the non-denumerability of the set of real numbers). This paper argues that the concept of a truth is indefinitely extensible. This gives a Dummettian anti-realist an independent motivation for rejecting the classical understanding of the quantifiers in this area. At the same time, however, it places in doubt the admissibility of the knowability principle, which seems to involve quantification over the “totality” of truths. As Dummett is at pains to point out (1991: 316), some sentences that purport to quantify over the extension of an indefinitely extensible concept plainly have a truth-value (we can truly say, for example, that every ordinal number has a successor, even though when we say that we are not quantifying over the set of all ordinals). But is the knowability principle one of these sentences? (shrink)

claims that constructive mathematics is inadequate for spacetime physics and hence that constructive mathematics cannot be considered as an alternative to classical mathematics. He also argues that the contructivist must be guilty of a form of a priorism unless she adopts a strong form of anti-realism for science. Here I want to dispute both claims. First, even if there are non-constructive results in physics this does not show that adequate constructive alternatives could not be formulated. Secondly, the constructivist (...) adopts a 'philosophy first' approach that Hellman rejects. This deep difference means that the viability of constructive mathematics cannot yet be decided by determining whether current scientific theories require classical mathematics. We need to decide which approach is most appropriate before we can even determine how we should go about deciding whether we should be constructive or classical mathematicians. (shrink)

After introducing semantic anti-realism and the paradox of knowability, the paper offers a reconstruction of the anti-realist argument from the theory of understanding. The proposed reconstruction validates an unrestricted principle to the effect that truth requires the existence of a certain kind of “demonstration”. The paper shows that the principle fails to imply the problematic instances of the original unrestricted knowability principle but that the overall view still has unrestricted epistemic consequences. Appealing precisely to the paradox of (...) knowability, the paper also argues, against BHK semantics, for the non-constructive character of the demonstrations envisaged by anti-realists, and contends that, in such a setting, one of the most natural arguments in favour of a revision of classical logic loses all its force. (shrink)