Realism and Anti-Realism in Davidson's Philosophy of Language, II

Realism and Anti-realism in the Philosophy of Psychiatry1

This paper invalidates the anti-realist point of view on the existence of mental illness by reviewing the anti-psychiatry challenge to official psychiatry. We present the anti-realist ideas of Thomas Szasz as the most radical anti-psychiatric author followed by the more moderate thoughts of Cooper and Laing. We then present the criticism of all these authors, most notably by the Canadian philos...

21 Realism / Anti - Realism

The main realism/anti-realism issue in the philosophy of science is the issue of scientific realism, concerned with the unobservable entities of science. However, there is also a more general issue, often known as “realism about the external world,” concerned primarily with the observable entities of common sense, but which spreads to scientific entities, both observable and unobservable. The i...

Ludics and Anti-Realism

In this chapter we try to give a flavour of Ludics, a frame developed by Jean-Yves Girard on the basis of Linear Logic (cf [8, 9, 10]). Ludics seems to be very on purpose in a book devoted to logics and anti-realism because it makes no assumptions on the existence of the external world, in the sense that it does not require any ”model-theoretic” assumption (like the evidence of a concept of ”Tr...

The Semantic Realism/Anti-Realism Dispute and Knowledge of Meanings

Here the relationship between understanding and knowledge of meaning is discussed from two different perspectives: that of Dummettian semantic anti-realism and that of the semantic externalism of Putnam and others. The question addressed is whether or not the truth of semantic externalism would undermine a central premise in one of Dummetts key arguments for anti-realism, insofar as Dummetts pr...

Projection and Realism in Hume's Philosophy (review)