ABSTRACT
Philosophical errors can be surprisingly hard to kill, though, and today’s journals are filled with what is called ‘anti-realism.’ Anti-realists oppose any ‘view from nowhere’ which reveals things as they really are, as distinct from how they would seem after suitably prolonged investigation. They claim that ‘how things really are’ must mean nothing other than how matters would seem, were collection of evidence to be adequately persistent. In “Demons, Vats and the Cosmos,” the author argued that anti-realism must deny meaning to many fairly evidently meaningful speculations in the field of physical cosmology. For all practical purposes, the case is exactly as if the anti-realists were logical positivists of the old school. The most that an anti-realist could hope to get away with would be a flat denial that it was meaningful—more than pure verbiage—to talk of infinitely detailed structure.
