ABSTRACT
We turn now to the question of what a Buddhist antirealist might say about the property of truth. In Chapter 6 we characterized realism1 as the view that (i) there is one true description of the world; (ii) with truth understood as the property had by a statement when the state of affairs that it expresses obtains; and (iii) with the understanding as well that the states of affairs whose obtaining make up the world are independent of whatever relevant concepts we employ. A view will qualify as antirealist, then, if it rejects this picture. In Chapter 6 we also examined some of the arguments used by Buddhist antirealists to show that condition (ii) cannot be met. These were arguments directed against the Buddhist Reductionist claim that there are things with intrinsic natures. The antirealist strategy behind these arguments is that if it can be shown that there are no truthmakers of the requisite sort, then the realist understanding of truth captured in condition (ii), that truth is robust correspondence, is unsupportable. In Chapter 7, however, we turned to an argument that a Buddhist antirealist might use against the mind-independence constraint of condition (iii). The question we take up now is whether there is a strategy for refuting realism that depends less on epistemological considerations, and so is perhaps more in keeping with the deflationary or quietist (anti-metaphysical) side of Buddhist antirealism suggested by the arguments discussed in Chapter 6.
