ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces some issues about the relationship between language, mind, and world: in particular, about the relationship between a speaker's grasp of sense and facts about the nature of his worldly environment. One way of opposing realism about morals, therefore, would be to deny that moral sentences are truth-apt: they do not express beliefs, which can be true or false, but rather non-cognitive sentiments which can neither be true nor false. Realism in Michael Dummett's sense is thus one way of laying the essential semantic groundwork for the idea that our thought aspires to reflect a reality whose character is entirely independent of us and our cognitive operations. The debate between realism and anti-realism about a region of discourse is a debate about the nature of the truth-conditions possessed by the sentences of that discourse. The metaphysical debate concerning the plausibility of realism thus boils down to a debate within the philosophy of language.
