Realism and Antirealism in the Philosophy of Science Today

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Apart from each particular point of issue, our study in these three years has enabled us to give a total outline of the effects of our project as follows.We can take as a starting point of the dispute between realism and antirealism in this century V. Lenin's Materialism and Empirico-Criticism which defended materialism against idealism. However, when it gave the linguistic turn under the influence of G. Frege's and L. Wittgenstein's philosophy of language, logical positivism reduced the framework of mind and matter to one of those problems which can simply be dealt with within the framework of language; it asserted the opposition between realism and idealism as nonsense because transcendental reality and transcendental ideas were both unattainable by our intelligible use of language. But logical positivism did not go so far as to break down the old framework itself. It was only when M. Dummett advanced a formulation of realism and antirealism as an affirmation and a denial of the principle of bivalence that it was broken down. And he further presented us with the opposition between classical logic and intuitionistic logic. Since then, he has raised doubts of whether classical logic grounded on the principle of bivalence should supply natural language with its basis, and has argued against realism that in so far as it demands the principle, it cannot escape illusion. This means that when the old framework has been replaced by the new one, realism has come to take the defensive. We can conclude that the fundamental problem concerning the opposition between realism and antirealism consists in the theory of reference and the theory of language understanding. There is no doubt that this will be a central theme of our next research project.