Joanna also asked:

What is anti-realism?

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Sometimes, we ask questions when we are confident that we can find the answer. Sometimes, it's hit
or miss whether we will stumble across an answer or not. And sometimes — and not nearly as
infrequently as you might think — we have cast iron reasons for thinking that the answer to our
question will neverbe found.

If you want to construct a simple machine for generating questions that can never be answered,
simply put a coin in a sealed box, shake the box and wait for the coin to land, then shake it again.
'Was the result of the first shake heads or tails?' is just such a question.

An anti-realist response to this experiment would be to cast doubt on our confidence that we know
what it meansto say that the question, 'Was the result of the first shake heads or tails?' hasa
determinate answer.

Anti-realism is nothing like classical idealism. It is not the view that when we talk about 'material
things' we are really talking about ideas in some mind. Berkeley's idealism is thoroughly realist in its
assumption that every 'material object' in the universe, whether perceived by finite beings or not,
exists eternally in the mind of God.

As the experiment with the coin shows, it is statements about the past which most clearly illustrate the
challenge of anti-realist view, to explain, in the words of the metaphysical poet John Donne, 'Where
all past Yeares are.' The realization that memory gives only limited access to the past leads to the
metaphysical anxiety that maybe there is nothing really there, that what we term 'the past' only as a
concept, a name we give to statements based on memory or on inference from evidential traces that
past events leave behind. In the absence of a Recording Angel, there are no immutable past 'facts'.
When the answer to a question about the past cannot be found, there is no answer therein reality.

This kind of anti-realism is pretty hard to defeat. There is extensive material on this question in the
writings of Michael Dummett (see, for example 'The Reality of the Past' in his collection of papers
Truth and other EnigmasDuckworth 1978) and Crispin Wright (see, for example, his book Truth and
ObjectivityHarvard 1992).

In my view, these philosophers are barking up the wrong tree in trying to tie the dispute between
realism and anti-realism to the philosophy of language, and the question, 'What would be the correct
form of a theory of meaning?' Or at least so I argued in my doctoral thesis, and still believe. But that is
another story.

Geoffrey Klempner