Salerno and Brogaard's Critique of the Argument from Anti-Realism to Theism

In his 1982 APA presidential address, "How to be an Anti-Realist", Alvin Plantinga (Notre Dame) argued that anti-realism is true, and that the best account of anti-realism entails the truth of theism. Plantinga summarizes his argument at the end of his address as follows:

"By way of conclusion then: the fundamental anti-realist intuition-
that truth is not independent of mind--is indeed correct. This intuition
is best accommodated by the theistic claim that necessarily, proposi-
tions have two properties essentially: being conceived by God and being
true if and only if believed by God. So how can we sensibly be anti-
realists? Easily enough: by being theists."

Recently, Michael Rea (Notre Dame) has offered a similar version of Plantinga's argument (‘‘Theism and Epistemic Truth-Equivalences’’, Nous 34:2 (2000), pp. 291–301).

Joe Salerno (Saint Louis University) and Berit Brogaard (U of MIssouri, St. Louis) published a paper ("Anti-realism, Theism and the Conditional Fallacy", Nous 39:1 (2005), pp. 123-139) that critiques Plantinga's and Rea's versions of the argument. The paper can be found here.

4 comments:

Chad said...

Similar to Plantinga and Rea's argument is Josh Peterson's, “Conceptualism and Truth” Ratio 13:3 (2000), pp. 234-238.

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/119037837/PDFSTART

Thanks for the reference to this critique.

exapologist said...

Hi Chad,

Thanks for the reference to Peterson's paper!

-EA

Luke said...

This blog is a goldmine.

exapologist said...

Thanks for the kind words, Luke!

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