The fact of the matter

Too much book quoting recently, but I'm short on time and this is one of the shorter things I've wanted to note down recently.

Here's Blackburn in Truth: A Guide for the Perplexed (so far, so good for those who might want to read it):

"An anti-realist about an area is likely to be met with sage rebuttals of the form 'Well, I happen to think that is is a fact that..' [...] as if this settled the matter against the expressivist [...] Whereas all it illustrates is commitment to the claims in question, which, of course, the anti-realist shares (he is not an eliminativist)" (p133)

This seems a little quick. Such statements are not the end of the matter, it's true. But they may be the beginning. For at first start exactly what the realist asserts and others deny is that there is a fact of the matter - something objective and independent about which people disagree, rather than merely a series of differing comittments which are no more or less priveleged than one another.

The use of the word "fact" in the italicised phrase does not seem to me to be an accident. When I say that something is a fact, I am not only comitting myself to it, but I'm also asserting some kind of realist picture of what my commitments in that area consist in. So it seems to me at any rate. If that's true, then it may be a relevant thing to point out to the anti-realist that we talk of facts in the relevant domain of discourse.