ABSTRACT
The first task, of course, is to clarify what Dummett means by the terms ‘realist’ and ‘anti-realist’. Dummett says that realism about Fs, in his sense, is not the doctrine that there are Fs (where Fs are entities of some disputed sort), nor anti-realism its denial. Thus the realist/nominalist dispute over the existence of universals is not an example of a realist/anti-realist dispute in Dummett’s sense (see Chapter 3). Dummett’s realist/anti-realist dispute is not concerned with the existence of some purported class of entities, but with features of certain classes of statements (statements about other minds, mathematics, the physical world, the past and future, etc.) Dummett is fond of quoting Kreisel’s dictum that Platonism in mathematics is best understood, not as a doctrine about the existence of mathematical objects, but a thesis about the objectivity of mathematical statements. Realism, in Dummett’s sense, is one expression of such objectivity.
