Michael Dummett Quotes on Truth
Michael Dummett’s Truth and Other Enigmas (1978), Frege: Philosophy of Language (1973), and the long sequence of papers on intuitionism and the theory of meaning gave late twentieth-century analytic philosophy its most influential anti-realist program. The central thesis is that the standard realist conception of truth as a property that may obtain or fail to obtain independently of any possible recognition of it cannot supply the meaning-theoretic role truth is required to play — the proper alternative is a verificationist or assertibility-conditional theory of meaning on the model of the intuitionistic mathematical tradition, with the corresponding philosophical reconstruction of metaphysics, the philosophy of mathematics, and the philosophy of time. The framework, drawing on Frege, the late Wittgenstein, and the intuitionistic mathematical tradition through Brouwer and Heyting, shaped the contemporary analytic engagement with realism, anti-realism, and the theory of meaning.
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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“...the most interesting fact about the Tarot pack [is] that it is the subject of the most successful propaganda campaign ever launched: not by a very long way the most important, but the most completely successful. An entire false history, and false interpretations, of the Tarot pack was concocted by the occultists; and it is all but universally believed.”
Decker, Ronald; Depaulis, Thierry; Dummett, Michael. A Wicked Pack of Cards: The Origins of the Occult Tarot (1996), p. 27