Semantic Anti-Realism

Semantic Anti-Realism is the thesis that the meaning of a statement is not given by its truth conditions — conditions that may obtain or fail to obtain beyond any possible verification — but by the conditions under which the statement can be justified, proved, or verified. The position is most closely associated with Michael Dummett, who argued that a theory of meaning must be grounded in what speakers can actually manifest in their linguistic practice, not in inaccessible transcendent truths.

The anti-realist does not deny that the external world exists. The denial is semantic: the realist's claim that statements about the past, the future, or the unobservable have determinate truth values independently of evidence is not false but meaningless — or rather, it rests on a theory of meaning that cannot be learned, taught, or displayed in use. If meaning is what you can show you know, then verification-transcendent meaning is a fiction.

The position entails the rejection of bivalence and, in the philosophy of mathematics, the adoption of intuitionistic logic. If truth exceeds proof, then classical logic — which assumes every proposition is either true or false — rests on a metaphysics that semantic anti-realism cannot endorse. The dispute between realist and anti-realist is thus not a disagreement about facts but a disagreement about what it means to state a fact.

The deepest challenge to semantic anti-realism is not logical but psychological: human beings seem to understand verification-transcendent statements perfectly well. We grasp what it means to say that a dinosaur died hungry sixty-five million years ago, even though no possible investigation could verify the particular fact. The anti-realist must explain this grasp without appealing to truth conditions — or concede that truth conditions are exactly what we do appeal to, in which case the anti-realist program collapses into a description of how we speak rather than a revision of what we mean.