Realism and Paradox

Putnam's Paradox: Metaphysical Realism Revamped and Evaded*

Hilary Putnam's argument against metaphysical realism (commonly referred to as the "model theoretic argument") has now enjoyed two decades of discussion. 1 The text is rich and contains variously construable arguments against variously construed philosophical positions. David Lewis isolated one argument and called it "Putnam's Paradox".2 That argument is clear and concise; so is the paradoxical...

Hume, the Bad Paradox and Value Realism

One plausible interpretation of Hume’s famous claim that “reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions” holds that desires are necessary to motivation, that beliefs alone cannot motivate. Now some have held, against Hume, that there are in fact beliefs which could motivate all by themselves—namely, beliefs about what is good. For there to be such beliefs then cognitivism about value—th...

The Paradox of Knowability and Semantic Anti-Realism

ing away from its implications for knowledge and knowability, at least to begin with. He thinks that once this is done, Fitch’s result is only initially surprising; for it is clear that the result is derived simply because truth-entailing operators can be used to construct self-refuting expressions. Mackie gives the following example to illustrate this: Let J be an operator variable that has an...

On the Apparent Paradox of Learning and Realism

Paradox and Relativism

Since the time of Plato, relativism has been attacked as a self-refuting theory. Today, there are two basic kinds of argument that are used to show that global relativism is logically incoherent: first, a direct descendent of the argument Plato uses against Protagoras, called the peritrope; and, second, a more recent argument that relativism leads to an infinite regress. Although some relativis...