Abstract

This dissertation comprises four papers , each of which focuses on some aspect or application of the philosophical view known as semantic anti-realism, developed mainly by Michael Dummett. According to this view, reality is essentially knowable; as a corollary of this, the notion of truth is to be understood in terms of the availability of evidence. Chapter One considers a proposal for an anti-realist truth predicate advanced by Crispin Wright. I examine and reject various objections to Wright's proposal, before raising an objection of my own. Chapter Two reviews a potential objection to Dummett's philosophy of language, finding it not so much incorrect as harmless. Chapter Three sets the stage for a discussion of contemporary realism towards the states and properties of intentional psychology, by way of critically evaluating John Searle's claim to offer an alternative to contemporary theories of mind. And the final chapter synthesizes much of the preceding material, as I examine instrumentalism towards the mind: the thesis according to which mental states are merely what we propose in a rough-and-ready predictive heuristic, and are not actual states or objects. I reject this view, but not for the reasons often given. I then sketch the outlines of a realist theory of the mind that respects certain widespread intuitions about the normativity of mental state ascription: semantic anti-realism serves as a general theory against which this theory of mind may be developed