Reddit reviews Thought and Reality (Lines of Thought)

Awesome, thanks! And yeah, the joke is fine, given you know something about the discipline and its history, but I just dunno if it's the kind of thing I can take a chance on.

If you do end up reading some Dummett, there's a couple options. He has a collection of intro essays called The Nature and Future of Philosophy. His essay on realism in there is pretty clear on what he believes and who his opponents are.

The downside of reading Dummett is although he's brilliant, he's often seen as a really difficult writer. The majority of his important work is contained within an anthology of his papers called Truth and Other Enigmas. A more readable introduction to his main research programme, the semantic anti-realism / constructivism, is Thought and Reality. OUP has a useful summary:

> In this short, lucid, rich book Michael Dummett sets out his views about some of the deepest questions in philosophy. The fundamental question of metaphysics is: what does reality consist of? To answer this, Dummett holds, it is necessary to say what kinds of fact obtain, and what constitutes their holding good. Facts correspond with true propositions, or true thoughts: when we know which propositions, or thoughts, in general, are true, we shall know what facts there are in general. Dummett considers the relation between metaphysics, our conception of the constitution of reality, and semantics, the theory that explains how statements are determined as true or as false in terms of their composition out of their constituent expressions. He investigates the two concepts on which the bridge that connects semantics to metaphysics rests, meaning and truth, and the role of justification in a theory of meaning. He then examines the special semantic and metaphysical issues that arise with relation to time and tense.

> On this basis Dummett puts forward his controversial view of reality as indeterminate: there may be no fact of the matter about whether an object does or does not have a given property. We have to relinquish our deep-held realist understanding of language, the illusion that we know what it is for any proposition that we can frame to be true independently of our having any means of recognizing its truth, and accept that truth depends on our capacity to apprehend it. Dummett concludes with a chapter about God.