Wright Says Dummett Is Wrong

According to Dummett's attempt to characterize realism, a mind-brain identity theorist is a realist about mental states, but, says Wright, intuitively a mind-brain identity theorist is not a realist about mental states. In addition, according to Wright, Dummett says that to be a realist about something you must believe that it is possible for it to be true independently of anyone's ability to know it. Wright says that can't be right for cases in which truth and knowledge are intimately connected. For example, (mine, not Wright's or Dummett's), if that were correct then it would be impossible to be a realist about sense data. Wright is surely correct that realism doesn't require that it be possible for something to be true but unknown. I'm much less sure he has Dummett right about that.

Wright thinks bivalence is associated with realism, but that it is not the defining characteristic of realism. He proposes an alternate characterization. He proposes that the central characteristic of realist views is that they "take a mechanical view of" "the Platitude" and endorse the Platitude.

The Platitude

Whether or not a statement, envisaged as uttered on a particular occasion, would express a truth is a function only of the content it would have on that occasion and the state of the world in relevant respects. 651

A Mechanical View

What thought a particular sentence would express in a particular context depends only on the semantics of the language and germane features of the context. Whether that thought is true depends only on which thought it is and germane features of the context. At neither point does human judgment or response come into the picture.

Does it follow from Wright's realism that every statement, envisaged as uttered on a particular occasion, is either true or false? That is, does it entail bivalence? (Remember, we are putting vagueness aside.)

To make the rest of what Wright says clearer, I need to say something about expressivism. Expressivism about X is a form of antirealism about X that takes certain sentences about X to be, neither true nor false, but expressive of feelings about X. Blackburn's "Morals and modals" is a classic statement of an expressivist view. So, for example, "Murder is wrong" is not a true statement that expresses a fact about what is wrong, but the expression of a sentiment. Roughly, it means "Boo murder."

Expressivists have a related cluster of problems raised by the fact that such statements go into complex statements in ways that sentences that are true or false do. For example,

Expressivist spend unholy amounts of time trying to make such things work. Wright argues that that is clearly a waste of time and a mistake: If you succeed in showing that your "expressivist" "statements" function just like statements that are true or false, then you have defeated your own expressivism by removing any barrier to taking the statements to be true or false. Wright takes expressivism to be self-defeating. He thinks an expressivist should, instead, take the statements to be true or false, but to still not be realist about them.

-- ShaughanLavine - 24 Mar 2008