Blackwell Reference Online

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Michael Dummett (Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford 1979–92) is one of the most important and influential British philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century. In addition to making seminal contributions to the exposition and study of the philosophy of Frege, Dummett started a debate – concerning how issues in metaphysics might best be prosecuted via arguments in the philosophy of language and theory of meaning – which continues to be one of the central issues in contemporary analytic philosophy. The two are intimately related. We are given a large-scale exposition and partial defense of a broadly Fregean theory of meaning. It is then argued that the realist position in metaphysical debates about a disputed subject matter is best cast as a semantical thesis about the meaning of sentences concerning that subject matter. Once Wittgensteinian insights about linguistic understanding and language mastery are incorporated into the Fregean theory of meaning, it emerges that the semantical thesis in which the realist view is best cast turns out to face very serious challenges. An anti-realist alternative is explored, drawing on the theory of meaning proposed by intuitionism for mathematical statements, and it is argued that one consequence of this is the rejection of certain theorems of classical logic, such as the law of excluded middle. Dummett's exposition and partial defence ... log in or subscribe to read full text