La teoria giustificazionalista del significato e l’antirealismo sul passato.

In my paper, I question Michael Dummett’s recent attempt to accommodate the general justificationist theory of meaning – according to which the meaning of a statement is constituted by what is needed to establish it as true – to a rejection of radical anti-realism about the past. To this effect, I will examine the three main reasons for adopting Dummett’s idea that justifications for statements concerning observable states of affairs consist of an actual or possible observation: i) the analogy between the process of coming to understand reference to places more o less distant from that we occupy and the process of coming to understand reference to different times; ii) the gap between what is needed to establish a statement as true and what the statement says; iii) the difference between a direct and an indirect way of establishing a statement as true. As a result, a conflict will emerge between the semantic of the past tense proposed by Dummett and his own account of the requirement of manifestability of meaning. This conflict, I argue, may be resolved by weakening Dummett’s manifestability constraint and by lessening the link between knowledge and truth which is implied by it.