Reply to Sundholm

Abstract

I should be surprised if there were not many vestiges of realism in my writings. A hedgehog, who knows one big thing and sticks to it, can keep himself uncontaminated by alien thoughts; but a fox, who goes snuffling around among the many things about each of which he knows a little, is bound to pick up variegated ideas not consistent with one another. We are all of us brought up to view the world in a realist manner, and it is difficult for us foxes to shake off all the effects of that upbringing. More exactly, I believe that there are several features of our language, and therefore of the way we learn to think, that push us to take the first steps towards realism, and was attempting to explore one of these in one of the papers Sundholm quotes (The Source of the Concept of Truth). These features are, in my view, to be respected, not eliminated as defects; it is a test of any version of anti-realism that it can accommodate them without degenerating into full-blown realism. I therefore view it as misleading that Sundholm should remark (footnote 57) that the notion of truth employed in that paper is a realist one. It was not intended to be a specific or full-grown notion at all: only a newborn infant in which we can discern the future lineaments of a realist conception, but which, given a proper upbringing, still might develop into a viable constructivist one.