ABSTRACT
In this chapter I want to look concisely at typical objections to depressive realism before going on to examine in a little more depth the arguments put forward by some positive psychologists and rational optimists. We might say it is in the nature of universal assumptions that anyone could potentially be wholly or partly right or wrong. Let me follow the terms suggested by Burton (2014) when he speaks of dogmatic and undogmatic global scepticism. In the first case, one is certain in DR terms that everything is painfully meaningless, or empty; in the second case, one does not know whether everything is meaningless or empty and does not know if one can ever really know. In my own experience, an affective swing is in operation between dogmatic and undogmatic DR. Sometimes I seem able to be certain about (or unable to doubt) my own knowledge that all reality is quite depressing. But at other times I am uncertain, even to the point of suspecting I may be wholly incorrect. I would not, however, call this global agnosticism but rather a bipolar dogmatism-nondogmatism.
