[citation needed] His higher education began at the University of Sydney in 1962, where he studied philosophy and psychology.

[citation needed] Following the completion of his coursework at Harvard, Michael Devitt returned to Sydney in 1971 and began his teaching career as a lecturer in the Philosophy department.

[1] He was made a senior lecturer in 1977 and associate professor in 1982, and by 1985 was named as Head of Department of Traditional and Modern Philosophy.

However, such a response leaves open the problem of cognitive significance that originally intrigued Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege.

Devitt, along with Georges Rey, is also a critic of the transcendental argument against eliminativism, and defends this position against claims that it is self-refuting by invoking deflationary semantic theories that avoid analysing predicates like "x is true" as expressing a real property.

This way, Rey and Devitt argue, in so far as dispositional replacements of "claims" and deflationary accounts of "true" are coherent, eliminativism is not self-refuting.