Greg Detre
Sunday, 12 May, 2002
(see �Epistemology and Metaphysics Lecture 9Realism and Anti-Realism.htm�)
quite cursory, but reasonably useful
starts with some basic definitions of realism (mind-independent facts etc.)
brief discussion of Locke and naturalism, and Berkeley (attacks the lack of theory of error)
briefly discusses Blackburn's quasi-realism:
"The idea of quasi-realism is that it begins by asserting (a) that there are genuine facts of the relevant sort (about necessity or morality, to use Blackburn�s favourite examples), and then goes on to try to earn the right to assert (b) that everything the realist wants to say can legitimately be said. The obvious problem (raised by Wright) is that success in claiming (b) must undermine the assertion of (a).
fairly interesting discussion of Putnam, and correspondence realism, irrealism and correspondence idealism (a kind of scientism, that effectively denies that any genuinely functioning concept could fail to correspond to the way the world is � becomes strongly anti-realist if we�re allowed >1 conceptual scheme)
also discusses Dummett (semantic realism), and how Dummett takes acceptance/rejection of the principle of bivalence (that every meaningful sentence must be either true or false) as the test of realism - "an anti-realist will suppose that the principle of bivalence amounts to the claim that, for every meaningful sentence, there is either a proof of it or a disproof of it, which surely there won�t be"...
briefly considers why the burdern of proof should always seem to lie with the anti-realist � maybe in the end, it�s a moral matter