Michael Dummett Quotes on Knowledge
Michael Dummett (1925–2011), whose Frege: Philosophy of Language (1973), The Logical Basis of Metaphysics (1991), and the long series of essays on realism and anti-realism shaped late-twentieth-century analytic philosophy, defended the case that the dispute between realism and anti-realism in any given subject-matter is at bottom a dispute about the meaning of the statements of that subject-matter — and specifically about whether their meaning is given by their truth-conditions (potentially recognition-transcendent) or by their assertibility-conditions (necessarily recognizable). The framework grounds Dummett's verificationist anti-realism and his sustained engagement with intuitionist mathematics as the most fully developed anti-realist programme in any discipline.
Quotes
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Attributed to Michael Dummett:
“The theory of meaning is the foundation of metaphysics.”
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Attributed to Michael Dummett:
“Truth is a matter of justified assertibility, not of bare correspondence.”
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Attributed to Michael Dummett:
“Realism is the thesis that statements are determinately true or false independently of our means of knowing.”
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Attributed to Michael Dummett:
“Meaning is what we know when we understand a sentence.”
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Attributed to Michael Dummett:
“Logic without philosophy of language is empty; philosophy of language without logic is blind.”
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“Dummett, M. A. E. The Logical Basis of Metaphysics . Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1991.”
Philosophy can take us no further than enabling us to command a clear view of the concepts by means of which we think about the world, and, by so doing, to attain a firmer grasp of the way we represent the world in our thought. It is for this reason and in this sense that philosophy is about the world. -
“On Lewis Carroll 's work on election theory; quoted in Robin Wilson, Lewis Carroll in Numberland (2008), p. vii”
Such were the lucidity of exposition and his mastery of the topic that it seems possible that, had he ever published it, the political theory of Britain would have been significantly different.