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Pragmatic antirealism: a new antirealist strategy

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Abstract

In everyday speech we seem to refer to such things as abstract objects, moral properties, or propositional attitudes that have been the target of metaphysical and/or epistemological objections. Many philosophers, while endorsing scepticism about some of these entities, have not wished to charge ordinary speakers with fundamental error, or recommend that the discourse be revised or eliminated. To this end a number of non-revisionary antirealist strategies have been employed, including expressivism, reductionism and hermeneutic fictionalism. But each of these theories faces forceful objections. In particular, we argue, proponents of these strategies face a dilemma: either concedes that their theory is revisionary, or adopt an implausible account of speaker-meaning whereby the content of certain types of utterance is opaque to their speakers. In this paper we introduce a new type of antirealist strategy, which is thoroughly non-revisionary, and leaves speaker-meaning transparent to speakers. We draw on work on pragmatics in the philosophy of language to develop a theory we call ‘pragmatic antirealism’. The pragmatic antirealist holds that while the sentences of the discourses in question have metaphysically contentious truth conditions, ordinary utterances of them are pragmatically modified in context in such a way that speakers do not incur commitment to those truth conditions. After setting out the theory, we show how it might be developed for both mathematical and ethical discourse, before responding to some likely objections.

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Notes

  1. Scepticism concerning these discourses has been advanced on various grounds, of which the following is merely a sampling. Mathematical entities are thought to be problematic because, if they are abstract objects then it is hard to account for the accuracy of beliefs about them: what effect can non-spatial, acausal entities have on the mental states of mathematicians? (Field 1989). Moral properties have been thought to combine objectivity and prescriptivity in a metaphysically dubious way (Mackie 1977); or to be superfluous to explaining moral thought, given debunking evolutionary explanations (Joyce 2006). Propositional attitudes have been argued to be posits in a radically defective folk-theory of the mind, which will have no place in completed neuroscience (Churchland 1981).

  2. See e.g., Fodor (1975) on propositional attitudes; Brink (1989) on ethics.

  3. What counts as ‘realism’ in these debates is to some extent a matter of stipulation by individual authors. Note that on our use of the expression, theories that respond to the sceptical problems by denying that the allegedly dubious entities are mind-independent will count as realist. Response-dependence theories may fit this bill (for an example of these theories in ethics see Wiggins (2002)).

  4. See e.g., Churchland (1981) on propositional attitudes; Garner (2010) on ethics.

  5. See e.g., Dennett (1987) on propositional attitudes; Joyce (2001) on ethical discourse.

  6. It should be noted that not all the theories we sketch below have been applied to the D-discourses. For instance, subjectivism has not been applied to mathematical discourse.

  7. Some expressivists allow for truth-apt content that does not represent the distinctive subject matter of the target discourse. See, for example, Ridge (2006).

  8. Some ethical constructivists construe moral truth as the satisfaction of certain procedures of moral scrutiny (Korsgaard 1996; Street 2008), albeit ones that are requisite for practical decision making. This can be understood as a form of minimalism.

  9. See Schroeder (2008) for a useful roundup of the various problems facing expressivist semantics and attempts to resolve them.

  10. These and other problems with reductionism are discussed in Blackburn (1984, pp. 151–166).

  11. See Schroeder (2008, pp. 16–17).

  12. See Tappolet (2000).

  13. As with semantics, there are different ways of developing the pragmatic position (see Huang 2007 for an overview). The view we present here is most closely aligned with Recanati (2004), Carston (2002) and Sperber and Wilson (1995) but could, with minor modifications, be brought in line with any of the leading forms of pragmatics.

  14. Carston usefully distinguishes (a) logical information: the inference rules and analytical implications of the concept; (b) encyclopaedic information, which involves commonplace beliefs about the object of the expression; (c) lexical information about the phonetic and syntactic characteristics of the expression that encodes the concept. In the examples we are considering here, it is logical information that is being modified.

  15. We will leave aside the question of whether the truth-conditions of sentences can be specified by semantic interpretation (as Sperber and Wilson allow), or whether additional pragmatic information is required to give a propositionally complete content (Bach 1994).

  16. Note that a further subdivision is required here to accommodate two other positions that adopt a pragmatic framework. First, a pragmatic realist might accept that D-utterances are pragmatically modified but also maintain that D-sentences are true (even if they are rarely asserted with their semantic content intact). Second, a different kind of pragmatic antirealist could maintain that (some) D-sentences are true, but that pragmatic modification renders them false.

  17. This is often known as the ‘Quine-Putnam indispensability argument’. The locus classicus is perhaps Putnam (1979).

  18. While realism can be construed as a purely metaphysical thesis (Miller, 2009), it is difficult to see how (M) could be defended without (S). If ethical judgements do not represent ethical facts, then no argument in favour of believing the truth of an ethical claim would lend support to the existence of ethical facts. (See FitzPatrick 2009, p. 747).

  19. See Dreier (2004) for a review.

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to David Liggins and Michael Ridge for comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

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Correspondence to Michael Scott.

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Scott, M., Brown, P. Pragmatic antirealism: a new antirealist strategy. Philos Stud 161, 349–366 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9742-1

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