Log24

From a review of Truth and Other Enigmas , a book by the late Michael Dummett—

"… two issues stand out as central, recurring as they do in many of the
essays. One issue is the set of debates about realism, that is, those debates that ask
whether or not one or another aspect of the world is independent of the way we
represent that aspect to ourselves. For example, is there a realm of mathematical
entities that exists fully formed independently of our mathematical activity? Are
there facts about the past that our use of the past tense aims to capture? The other
issue is the view— which Dummett learns primarily from the later Wittgenstein—
that the meaning of an expression is fully determined by its use, by the way it
is employed by speakers. Much of his work consists in attempts to argue for this
thesis, to clarify its content and to work out its consequences. For Dummett one
of the most important consequences of the thesis concerns the realism debate and
for many other philosophers the prime importance of his work precisely consists
in this perception of a link between these two issues."

— Bernhard Weiss, pp. 104-125 in Central Works of Philosophy , Vol. 5,
ed. by John Shand, McGill-Queen's University Press, June 12, 2006

The above publication date (June 12, 2006) suggests a review of other
philosophical remarks related to that date. See …

• a June 12, 2006 link (in a 2007 post) to Geometry of the 4×4 Square,
• some related remarks on Dummett and Universals in this journal, and
• the following excerpt from Spekkens's toy model—

  "Every partitioning of the set of sixteen ontic states
  into four disjoint pure epistemic states
  yields a maximally informative measurement."—

For some more-personal remarks on Dummett, see yesterday afternoon's
"The Stone" weblog in The New York Times.

I caught the sudden look of some dead master….

— Four Quartets