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Crispin Wright" interesting essay examines, and throws useful light on, fundamental issues concerning realism. What first interested me in this subject was a perception of strong analogies between a variety of metaphysical disputes, each of which could be regarded as a dispute over the correctness of a realist view of a certain subject-matter. Often one may say, "of certain things' (metal processes, material objects, mathematical entities); but disputes concerning the reality of the future or the past could harldly be so described, and it thus seemed better to say "of certain statements". I never supposed that a precise analogy obtained between any two of these disputes, only that there was a sufficient analogy to make a comparative study of them fruitful. One of the points of analogy was the salient role that the principle of bivalence frequently played. The colourless term "anti-realism" was deliberately chosen because, although there was a family resemblance between the arguments employed by the opponents of realism concerning different subject-matters - different classes of statments - the metaphysical character of their conclusions different markedly. The phenomenalist opponent of realism concerning the physical universe adopted a form of idealism; the behaviourist opponent of realism concerning mental states and processes gave comfort to materialism.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-009-3541-9_9

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