Realism Without Representation: A Response to Appiah

Abstract

Appiah agrees that the traditional argument about realism has been over a metaphysical thesis. Nevertheless, he claims that this thesis is implicitly semantic because the entities the thesis commits us to must be identified as the referents of our representations. This claim is false. We can identify the entities directly. And even if we do use reference to identify them, the notion in question need only be deflationary and hence not, in any interesting sense, semantic.