Abstract

1. In his important article, “A Defense of McTaggart’s Proof of the Unreality of Time,” Michael Dummett identifies, as a central assumption in McTaggart’s refutation of the reality of time, a view of what it is to be real, namely that, “A description of what there really is, as it really is, must be independent of any particular point of view.” For ease of exposition, let us call this “the Realist Assumption.” Following Dummett’s lead, I have argued that such an assumption about the “nature” of reality must be given up quite generally if skepticism is to be avoided, urging that to give up the realist assumption is tantamount to rejecting a realist or truth-conditional conception of meaning and understanding. The arguments will not be rehearsed here. I further implied that to give up the realist assumption made one an idealist, in some unspecified way. In this paper I propose one feature of such idealism, although we shall see how the views thus generated do not fit exactly anyone uncontentiously an idealist.