Michael Dummett

Works

• 1959Truth

  The meaning of a statement cannot be given by truth conditions that might hold beyond any possible recognition – the starting point of anti-realism.

• 1973Frege: Philosophy of Language

  Frege read as the founder of analytic philosophy: the theory of meaning is the foundation of all philosophy.

Position

Dummett read Frege as the founder of analytic philosophy, whose central lesson is that the theory of meaning is the foundation of philosophy; his Frege: Philosophy of Language (1973) made this reading influential. In “Truth” (1959) and later papers he argued that many old metaphysical disputes – about the past, about other minds, about mathematical objects – are really disputes about meaning. The realist holds that every statement is determinately true or false, whether or not we could ever know which; the anti-realist ties meaning to the conditions under which we could recognise a statement as true. Following Wittgenstein’s idea that meaning is use, Dummett held that knowledge of meaning must be manifested in how speakers use sentences, and no one can manifest a grasp of truth conditions that transcend all possible recognition. If this is right, the law of excluded middle cannot be assumed everywhere, and intuitionistic logic, which he studied in Elements of Intuitionism (1977), becomes the logic of an anti-realist. He criticised Davidson’s truth-conditional theory of meaning on these grounds. His books on immigration and on voting theory applied the same insistence on clear argument to politics.

Life & context

Michael Dummett was born in London in 1925 and educated at Winchester College. He served in the army from 1943 to 1947, in the Royal Artillery and then in the Intelligence Corps in India and Malaya. In 1944 he became a Roman Catholic. He studied philosophy, politics and economics at Christ Church, Oxford, and in 1950 was elected a fellow of All Souls College. From the mid-1960s he and his wife Ann worked against racism and for the rights of immigrants in Britain, and he set his philosophy aside for some years for this work. From 1979 to 1992 he was Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford. He also wrote on voting systems and on the history of tarot cards. He was knighted in 1999 for his contributions to philosophy and to the cause of racial justice and died in Oxford in 2011.

Further main works

• Elements of Intuitionism (1977)
• The Logical Basis of Metaphysics (1991)
• Origins of Analytical Philosophy (1993)
• On Immigration and Refugees (2001)