چکیده:
In this paper, we will discuss what is called “Manifestation Challenge” to semantic realism, which was originally developed by Michael Dummett and has been further refined by Crispin Wright. According to this challenge, semantic realism has to meet the requirement that knowledge of meaning must be publically manifested in linguistic behaviour. In this regard, we will introduce and evaluate John McDowell’s response to this anti-realistic challenge, which was put forward to show that the challenge cannot undermine realism. According to McDowell, knowledge of undecidable sentences’ truth-conditions can be properly manifested in our ordinary practice of asserting such sentences under certain circumstances, and any further requirement will be redundant. Wright’s further objection to McDowell’s response will be also discussed and it will be argued that this objection fails to raise any serious problem for McDowell’s response and that it is an implausible objection in general.
خلاصه ماشینی:
Therefore, Dummett’s manifestation argument against semantic realism aims to show that our sentential understanding does not consist in a grasp of potentially evidence-transcendent truth-conditions.
According to Wright’s reading, Dummett’s manifestation argument can be regarded as a “challenge” for semantic realists, a challenge concerning whether a coherent and consistent realistic view can be extracted from a combination of the following beliefs: The Truth-Conditional Conception of Understanding: “the thesis that what constitutes an understanding of any declarative sentence is a knowledge of its truth-conditions” (Wright, 1993: 247-248).
(1981: 322) What McDowell, by appealing to the assertion-truth platitude, seeks to show here is that competent speakers are able to use undecidable sentences to make assertions and they thereby manifest their knowledge of the conditions under which those sentences would be true, although for these conditions we have no evidence or finite procedure which can help verify or falsify them.
It is not something that we expect from a normal, competent member of our speech community to know and, hence, it is not plausible to seek an ability to manifest such sort of knowledge, that is, it is not plausible to claim that “knowing the [potentially evidence-transcendent] truth-conditions of a sentence may require an understanding of how it could be undetectably true”, as Wright is claiming (Ibid, 248).
Therefore, he prefers to discuss realism as a doctrine about our linguistic understanding of the sentences which, for semantic realists, have potentially evidence-transcendent truth-conditions.
According to the acquisition argument, (1) semantic realism implies the claim that our understanding of (undecidable) sentences is constituted by our knowledge of their potentially evidence-transcendent truth-conditions.