Scott Shalkowski

MICHAEL DEVITT HAS ARGUED that Michael Dummett unsuccessfully attacks realism because Dummett does not address the traditional, and perhaps more interesting, doctrines that have been called by the name "realism." Dummett will balk at the charge that his writings on realism, truth, and the theory of meaning do not bear on the traditional metaphysical issues of realism. Indeed, he thinks that his most singular philosophical achievement has been showing that different realisms have a common characteristic: each involves the claim that the principle of bivalence holds for the relevant class of statements. Since he thinks that bivalence holds for a class of statements just in case those statements possess truth-conditions which transcend their conditions of verification, and since he thinks that the meanings of statements are either their truth-conditions or their conditions of verification, Dummett thinks he has succeeded in transforming persistently thorny questions of metaphysics into more tractable questions of meaning. His argument against realism, then, centers on his critique of truth-conditional semantics.

Wesley Salmon and Michael Martin argue that scientific considerations about the order in the universe justify atheism. After sketching Salmon’s argument, I examine the nature of begging the question and argue that Martin takes a sufficient condition of that fallacy to be a necessary condition. After a pragmatic account to the fallacy is recommended, I point out how Salmon’s and Martin’s beg the question against all save those who already adhere to atheism and that the crucial considerations that they take to be distinctly scientific are really extra-scientific considerations, giving a specious impression that they are uncontroversial to all who accept mainstream science.

David Lewis defends Genuine Modal Realism (GMR) by way of an inference to the best explanation (IBE); reasons of theoretical utility are taken as markers of truth. Warrant for thinking that IBE is reliable depends on the availability of access to the relevant matters that is independent of the various uses of IBE. Domains permitting no such independent access are domains over which we can have no confidence that instances of IBE are reliable. Genuine Modal Realism's plurality of worlds is one such domain. The wider implication is that IBE is not reliable for adjudicating metaphysical disputes.

In ‘Two Notions of Being: Entity and Essence’ E. J. Lowe defends “serious essentialism”. Serious essentialism is the position that (a) everything has an essence, (b) essences are not themselves things, and (c) essences are the ground for metaphysical necessity and possi- bility. Lowe’s defence of serious essentialism is both metaphysical and epistemological. In what follows I use Lowe’s discussion as a point of departure for, first, adding some considerations for the plausi- bility of essentialismand, second, somework onmodal epistemology

In this paper I present Simon Blackburn’s dilemma for truth conditional theories of modality and discuss its limitations. I discuss the nature of conceptual and argumentative circularity and argue that conceptual circularity does not apply to all of the main truth conditional theories of modality and that, likewise, argumentative circularity does not apply. There is nothing wrong, in principle, with theories of the modal in non-modal terms, but attending epistemological issues are significant and have been given too little attention. I conclude that Blackburn’s dilemma is insufficient for clearing the way for his own quasi-realist account of modality.