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...

Although different strands of “post-approaches” and “post-theories”, for example, grounded theory and structuration theory, have gained popularity in Information Systems (IS) research they are not without problems. We present critical realism as an alternative philosophical underpinning for IS research. Critical realism starts from an ontology that identifies structures and mechanisms through w...

We review recent progress in designing an empirical test of (temporal) realism in cognition. Realism in this context is the property that cognitive variables always have well defined (if possibly unknown) values at all times. We focus most of our attention in this contribution on discussing the exact notion of realism that is to be tested, as we feel this issue has not received enough attention...

Michael Esfeld & Vincent Lam University of Lausanne, Department of Philosophy & Centre romand for logic, history and philosophy of science CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland [email protected], [email protected] (Draft, 8 June 2006, forthcoming in Synthese) Abstract This paper sets out a moderate version of metaphysical structural realism that stands in contrast to both the epistemic s...