Realism and logic

Michael Dummet t may fairly be said to have given theory of meaning a new complexion by firmly identifying, as one of its foundational issues, the tension between what he labels realism and anti-realism. The former is the view that the meaning of a declarative sentence consists in its possibly unrecognisable or verification-transcendent truth condition; i.e., the view that a speaker 's multifarious semantic competences are all in the last analysis to be accounted for in terms of his implicitly associating, with each declarative sentence of his language, a state of affairs whose possibly unrecognisable obtaining is necessary and sufficient for its truth. The crux is the contention that the association is effected in the teeth of the fact that the question whether the state of affairs obtains or not is wholly independent of the speaker 's capacity, even in principle, to determine that it does. Anti-realists argue that we cannot be credited with a grasp of such t ranscendent truth conditions: they urge there is nothing in our verbal behaviour to warrant the attribution to us of an implicit association of sentences and t ranscendent states of affairs; nor is it possible to see how such an association could be taught and learned in the first place, l The thought is a natural one that this dispute must harbour metaphysical implications. In the case of nearly all kinds of sentence, most of us presumably feel a compulsive attraction towards the belief that those sentences deal with an objective or mind-independent reality, a reality, that is, that exists irrespective of any capacity on our part to attain knowledge about it. Surely, one wants to say, that intuitive b e l i e f call it ontological realism i s vindicated just in case a realist t reatment of those sentences can be sustained. Likewise, contraposing one half of that bi-implication, it seems evident that anti-realism or "verif icationism", in its insistence on an essential link between human intellectual capacity on the one hand and on the other the boundaries of what we can make intelligible to ourselves, i.e.,