| 7953 | Reasoning needs to cut nature accurately at the joints [Plato] |
| Full Idea: In our reasoning we need a clear view of the ability to divide a genus into species, observing the natural joints, not mangling any of the parts, like an unskilful butcher. | |
| From: Plato (Phaedrus [c.366 BCE], 265d) | |
| A reaction: In modern times this Platonic idea has become the standard metaphor for realism. I endorse it. I think nature has joints, and we should hunt for them. There are natural sets. The joints may exist in abstract concepts, as well as in objects. |
| 12568 | God assures me of the existence of external things [Locke] |
| Full Idea: God has given me assurance enough of the existence of things without me. | |
| From: John Locke (Essay Conc Human Understanding (2nd Ed) [1694], 4.11.03) | |
| A reaction: Is Locke committing a similar crime to Descartes? Descartes was circular about what is 'clear and distinct'. Locke uses inner existence to prove God, who is then rich enough at act as guarantor for what is external. Not circular. Over-reaching. |
| 12741 | If experience is just a dream, it is still real enough if critical reason is never deceived [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Even if this whole life were said to be only a dream, and the visible world only a phantasm, I should call this dream or phantasm real enough if we were never deceived by it when we make good use of reason. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (De modo distinguendi phaenomena [1685], A6.4.1502), quoted by Daniel Garber - Leibniz:Body,Substance,Monad 7 | |
| A reaction: I find this response more satisfactory than his response in Idea 12740. As a supporter of the coherence account of justification, I take the closest we get to knowledge to be when our full critical faculties and experience are brought to bear, and shared. |
| 12740 | The strongest criterion that phenomena show reality is success in prediction [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The most powerful criterion of the reality of phenomena, sufficient even by itself, is success in predicting future phenomena from past and present ones. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (De modo distinguendi phaenomena [1685], A6.4.1502), quoted by Daniel Garber - Leibniz:Body,Substance,Monad 7 | |
| A reaction: I would say that this is clutching at straws, as there is no reason at all to deny that dreams could be thoroughly coherent and predictable in their events. We must just live with these doubts, not try to defeat them. |
| 13184 | The division of nature into matter makes distinct appearances, and that presupposes substances [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: If there were no divisions of matter in nature, there would be no things that are different; just the mere possibility of things. It is the actual division into masses that really produces things that appear distinct, which presupposes simple substances. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (Letters to Burcher De Volder [1706], 1704 or 1705) | |
| A reaction: This shows Leibniz to be a straightforward realist about the physical world, and certainly not an 'idealist', despite the mind-like character of monads. I take this to be an argument for reality from best explanation, which is all that's available. |
| 13188 | The only indications of reality are agreement among phenomena, and their agreement with necessities [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: We don't have, nor should we hope for, any mark of reality in phenomena, but the fact that they agree with one another and with eternal truths. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (Letters to Burcher De Volder [1706], 1706.01.19) | |
| A reaction: Elsewhere he says that divisions in appearance imply divisions in matter. Now he adds two further arguments in favour of realism, but admits that nothing conclusive is available. Quite right. |
| 7416 | Kant is read as the phenomena being 'contrained' by the noumenon, or 'free-floating' [Talbot on Kant] |
| Full Idea: The two readings of Kant depend on whether the world of phenomena is 'constrained' by the noumenon, or whether it is 'free-floating'. | |
| From: comment on Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781]) by Marianne Talbot - talk | |
| A reaction: The free-floating reading leads to idealism, since the noumenon then becomes a quite irrelevant part of Kant's theory, and can be dropped (since its existence means nothing if it has no causal role). On the first reading, constraint becomes interesting. |
| 22014 | Consciousness is not entirely representational, because there are pains, and the self [Schulze, by Pinkard] |
| Full Idea: Schulze said Reinhold and Kant violated their own theory with the thing-in-itself, and that Reinhold was wrong that all consciousnes is representational (since pain isn't), and the self can't represent itself without a regress. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Schulze (Aenesidemus [1792]) by Terry Pinkard - German Philosophy 1760-1860 05 | |
| A reaction: [my compressed version] This article demolished Reinhold, which is a shame, because if he had responded constructively to these criticisms he might have reached be best theory of his age. These are analytic style objections, by counterexample. |
| 22059 | Kant's thing-in-itself is just an abstraction from our knowledge; things only exist for us [Hegel, by Bowie] |
| Full Idea: For Hegel there is no thing-in-itself, because the thing only becomes a something by being for us. Kant's thing-in-itself is the result of abstracting from the thing everything we know about it. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (Science of Logic [1816]) by Andrew Bowie - German Philosophy: a very short introduction 3 | |
| A reaction: This seems to pinpoint why Hegel is an idealist philosopher. Frege objected to abstraction for similar reasons. I don't understand how the tree outside my window can only exist 'for me'. I have a much better theory about the tree. |
| 22083 | Hegel believe that the genuine categories reveal things in themselves [Hegel, by Houlgate] |
| Full Idea: Hegel believed, unlike Kant, that the categories of the understanding, when properly understood, disclose the nature of things in themselves and not just the character of things as they appear to us. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (Science of Logic [1816]) by Stephen Houlgate - Hegel p.101 | |
| A reaction: 'Properly understood' sounds like 'no true Scotsman'. This is thoroughgoing idealism, because reality is determined by the activity of the mind, and not from outside. The Hegel story makes more sense if you see the categories as evolutionary. |
| 21470 | For me the objective thing-in-itself is the will [Schopenhauer] |
| Full Idea: Thing in itself signifies that which exists independently of our perception, that which actually is; …to Kant it was '= x'; to me it is will. | |
| From: Arthur Schopenhauer (Parerga and Paralipomena [1851], IV:61) | |
| A reaction: Does he mean his own will, which is plausible since he has direct experience of it, or is he referring will in general - whatever that is? |
| 21492 | Realism is basic to the scientific method [Peirce] |
| Full Idea: The fundamental hypothesis of the method of science is this: There are real things, whose characters are entirely independent of our opinion of them. | |
| From: Charles Sanders Peirce (The Fixation of Belief [1877]), quoted by Albert Atkin - Peirce 3 'method' | |
| A reaction: He admits later that this is only a commitment and not a fact. It seems to me that when you combine this idea with the huge success of science, the denial of realism is crazy. Philosophy has a lot to answer for. |
| 19240 | Realism is the belief that there is something in the being of things corresponding to our reasoning [Peirce] |
| Full Idea: If there is any reality, then it consists of this: that there is in the being of things something which corresponds to the process of reasoning. | |
| From: Charles Sanders Peirce (Reasoning and the Logic of Things [1898], III) | |
| A reaction: A nice definition of realism, a little different from usual. I belief that the normal logic of daily thought corresponds (in its rules and connectives) to the way the world is. We evaluate success in logic by truth-preservation. |
| 19239 | There may be no reality; it's just our one desperate hope of knowing anything [Peirce] |
| Full Idea: What is reality? Perhaps there isn't any such thing at all. It is but a working hypothesis which we try, our one desperate forlorn hope of knowing anything. | |
| From: Charles Sanders Peirce (Reasoning and the Logic of Things [1898], III) | |
| A reaction: I'm not quite sure why the hope is 'forlorn'. We have no current reason to doubt that the hypothesis is working out extremely well. Lovely idea, though. |
| 7153 | We can't be realists, because we don't know what being is [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: One would have to know what being is in order to decide whether this or that is real - but we don't know that. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 02[87]) | |
| A reaction: Nietzsche is a genius - he puts his finger on something which has always bothered me about realism, even though I call myself a 'realist'. Being and existence are utterly indefinable, and even incomprehensible, so what do we realists believe in? |
| 20726 | We can only distinguish self from non-self if there is an inflexible external reality [Colvin] |
| Full Idea: Were there no inflexible reality outside of the individual, opposing and limiting it, knowledge of the self and the non-self would never develop. | |
| From: Stephen S. Colvin (The Common-Sense View of Reality [1902], p.140) | |
| A reaction: Presumably opponents would have to say that such 'knowledge' is an illusion. This is in no way a conclusive argument, but I approach the problem of realism in quest of the best explanation, and this idea is important evidence. |
| 20727 | Common-sense realism rests on our interests and practical life [Colvin] |
| Full Idea: It is the determination of the external world from the practical standpoint, from the standpoint of interest, that may be defined as the common-sense view of reality. | |
| From: Stephen S. Colvin (The Common-Sense View of Reality [1902], p.141) | |
| A reaction: Probably more appropriately named the 'pragmatic' view of reality. Relying on what is 'practical' seems to offer some objectivity, but relying on 'interest' rather less so. Can I be an anti-realist when life goes badly, and a realist when it goes well? |
| 21538 | If two people perceive the same object, the object of perception can't be in the mind [Russell] |
| Full Idea: If two people can perceive the same object, as the possibility of any common world requires, then the object of an external perception is not in the mind of the percipient. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Meinong on Complexes and Assumptions [1904], p.33) | |
| A reaction: This is merely an assertion of the realist view, rather than an argument. I take representative realism to tell a perfectly good story that permits two subjective representations of the same object. |
| 17545 | Quantum theory shows that exact science does not need dogmatic realism [Heisenberg] |
| Full Idea: It is only through quantum theory that we have learned that exact science is possible without the basis of dogmatic realism. | |
| From: Werner Heisenberg (Physics and Philosophy [1958], 05) |
| 18900 | Unfortunately for realists, modern logic cannot say that some fact exists [Sommers] |
| Full Idea: Unfortunately for the fate of realist philosophy, modern logic's treatment of 'exists' is resolutely inhospitable to facts as referents of phrases of the form 'the existence or non-existence of φ'. | |
| From: Fred Sommers (Intellectual Autobiography [2005], 'Realism') | |
| A reaction: Predicate logic has to talk about objects, and then attribute predicates to them. It tends to treat a fact as 'Fa' - this object has this predicate, but that's not really how we understand facts. |
| 6280 | Realism is a theory, which explains the convergence of science and the success of language [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: Realism is an empirical theory; it explains the convergence of scientific theories, where earlier theories are often limiting cases of later theories (which is why theoretical terms preserve their reference); and it explains the success of language. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Pt Four) | |
| A reaction: I agree. Personally, I think of Plato's Theory of Forms and all religions as empirical theories. The response from anti-realists is generally to undermine confidence in the evidence which these 'empirical theories' are said to explain. |
| 17644 | Metaphysical realism is committed to there being one ultimate true theory [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: What makes the metaphysical realist a 'metaphysical' realist is his belief that there is somewhere 'one true theory' (two theories which are true and complete descriptions of the world would be mere notational variants of each other). | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Why there isn't a ready-made world [1981], 'Causation') | |
| A reaction: This is wrong!!!!! Commitment to one reality doesn't imply that only one comprehensive theory is possible. Theory-making (at least in any human language, or in mathematics) is an inherently limited activity. |
| 2349 | Realists believe truth is correspondence, independent of humans, is bivalent, and is unique [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: Metaphysical realism about truth is a bundle of ideas: that it is a matter of Correspondence, that it exhibits Independence (of humans), Bivalence, and Uniqueness (there is only one ultimate truth). | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Representation and Reality [1988], §7 p.107) |
| 9869 | Realism is just the application of two-valued semantics to sentences [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: Fully fledged realism depends on - indeed, may be identified with - an undiluted application to sentences of the relevant kind of straightforwards two-valued semantics. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Frege philosophy of mathematics [1991], Ch.15) | |
| A reaction: This is the sort of account you get from a whole-heartedly linguistic philosopher. Personally I would say that Dummett has got it precisely the wrong way round: I adopt a two-valued semantics because my metaphysics is realist. |
| 22297 | Dummett saw realism as acceptance of bivalence, rather than of mind-independent entities [Dummett, by Potter] |
| Full Idea: Dummett aimed to characterise realism in terms not of the mind-independence of the entities but of the validity of bivalence for sentences referring to them. | |
| From: report of Michael Dummett (Realism [1982]) by Michael Potter - The Rise of Analytic Philosophy 1879-1930 21 'Lang' | |
| A reaction: Hence he called himself a 'philosopher of language', rather than a 'philosopher of thought'. Philosophers of language are more likely to end up as anti-realists, I suspect. |
| 15049 | Metaphysical realists are committed to all unambiguous statements being true or not true [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: The anti-realist view undercuts the ground for accepting bivalence. ...Acceptance of bivalence should not be taken as a sufficient condition for realism. ..They accept the weaker principle that unambiguous statements are determinately true or not true. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Realism and Anti-Realism [1992], p.467) | |
| A reaction: [cited by Kit Fine, when discussing anti-realism] I take it be quite an important component of realism that there might be facts which will never be expressed, or are even beyond our capacity to grasp or express them |
| 8184 | Philosophers should not presume reality, but only invoke it when language requires it [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: The philosopher's task is not to make a prior commitment for or against realism, but to discover how far realist considerations must be invoked in order to describe our understanding of our language: they may be invoked only if they must be invoked. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Thought and Reality [1997], 6) | |
| A reaction: I don't see why the default position should be solipsism, or a commitment to Ockham's Razor. This is the Cartesian 'Enlightenment Project' approach to philosophy - that everything has to be proved. There is more to ontology than language. |
| 22355 | In the realist view, the real external world explains how it (and perceptions of it) are possible [Williams,B] |
| Full Idea: The substance of the absolute conception [of external reality] lies in the idea that it could nonvacuously explain how it itself, and the various perspectival views of the world, are possible. | |
| From: Bernard Williams (Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy [1985], p.139), quoted by Reiss,J/Spreger,J - Scientific Objectivity 2.1 | |
| A reaction: I like this. Explanation and understanding strike me as more important than justified truths, and I am struck by the complete inability of subjectivists, relativists and anti-realists to give any kinds of good explanation. |
| 14896 | Kripke's metaphysics (essences, kinds, rigidity) blocks the slide into sociology [Kripke, by Ladyman/Ross] |
| Full Idea: Kripke's metaphysics of essences, natural kinds, and rigid designation gave philosophers a means of avoiding the relativist path that was bound to end in the tears of sociology. | |
| From: report of Saul A. Kripke (Naming and Necessity lectures [1970]) by J Ladyman / D Ross - Every Thing Must Go 1.2 | |
| A reaction: They are contemptuous of Kripke's project, but this is the core of it. He was making a stand against Kuhn, and trying to build a metaphysics for realism. Good for Kripke. |
| 16523 | Realist Conceptualists accept that our interests affect our concepts [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: The realist conceptualist may cheerfully admit that the sortal concepts of which we are possessed are the creatures of our interests; …and also that there need be no one way in which we must articulate reality. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Sameness and Substance [1980], 5.2) | |
| A reaction: Wiggins calls himself a 'realist conceptualist'. In his terminology, I seem to be an 'anti-conceptualist realist'. The issue concerns aspects of reality that extend beyond our concepts. The 99th d.p. of the mass of the electron. |
| 16524 | Conceptualism says we must use our individuating concepts to grasp reality [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: What Conceptualism entails is that, although horses and stars are not inventions or artefacts, in order to single out these things we must deploy a conceptual scheme which has been formed in such a way as to make singling them out possible. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Sameness and Substance [1980], 5.5) | |
| A reaction: I don't quite see why the 'singling out' role of the concepts is the only one that generates them, or makes them fit for purpose. In general, of course, our conceptual scheme is necessarily a response to our experience of the world. |
| 2781 | Realism says that most perceived objects exist, and have some of their perceived properties [Dancy,J] |
| Full Idea: Realism in the theory of perception is that objects we perceive usually do exist, and retain some at least of the properties we perceive them as having. | |
| From: Jonathan Dancy (Intro to Contemporary Epistemology [1985], 10.2) |
| 2969 | How does a direct realist distinguish a building from Buckingham Palace? [Lockwood] |
| Full Idea: It is one thing to see a building, and another to see it as a building, and yet another to see it as Buckingham Palace. How does the commonsense realist think that this is accomplished? | |
| From: Michael Lockwood (Mind, Brain and the Quantum [1989], p.302) |
| 22427 | To explain object qualities, primary qualities must be more than mere sources of experience [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: In order that we have available an explanation of the qualities of objects we need to be able to conceive primary qualities as consisting in something other than powers to produce experiences. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 6 n 52) | |
| A reaction: I suppose if the qualities are nothing more than the source of the experiences, that is Kant's noumenon. Nothing more could be said. The seems to be a requirement for tacit inference here. We infer the interior of the tomato. |
| 7045 | Realism says some of our concepts 'cut nature at the joints' [Heil] |
| Full Idea: Realism is sometimes said to involve a commitment to the idea that certain of our concepts, those with respect to which we are realists, 'carve reality at the joints'. | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], 14.11) | |
| A reaction: Clearly not all concepts cut nature at the joints (e.g. we have concepts of things we know to be imaginary). Personally I am committed to this view of realism. I try very hard to use concepts that cut accurately; why shouldn't I sometimes succeed? |
| 14334 | Modest realism says there is a reality; the presumptuous view says we can accurately describe it [Mumford] |
| Full Idea: The claim of modest realism is that there is a subject-independent reality; the presumptuous claim is that we are capable of describing that reality accurately. | |
| From: Stephen Mumford (Dispositions [1998], 09.1) | |
| A reaction: And the super-presumptuous claim is that there only exists one ultimate accurate description of reality. I am happy to call myself a Modest Realist on this one. |
| 18692 | Realists believe in independent objects, correspondence, and fallibility of all theories [Button] |
| Full Idea: External realists have three principles: Independence - the world is objects that are independent of mind, language and theory; Correspondence - truth involves some correspondence of thoughts and things; Cartesian - an ideal theory might be false. | |
| From: Tim Button (The Limits of Reason [2013], 01.1-3) | |
| A reaction: [compressed; he cites Descartes's Demon for the third] Button is setting these up as targets. I subscribe to all three, in some form or other. Of course, as a theory approaches the success implying it is 'ideal', it becomes highly likely to be accurate. |
| 18881 | For realists it is analytic that truths are grounded in the world [Cameron] |
| Full Idea: The analytic commitment of realism is that truths are grounded in the world. | |
| From: Ross P. Cameron (Truthmakers, Realism and Ontology [2008], 'Grounding') | |
| A reaction: Certain fifth-level truths might be a long way from the actual world, and deeply interfused with human concepts and theories. Negative truths must be fitted into this picture. |
| 18875 | Realism says a discourse is true or false, and some of it is true [Cameron] |
| Full Idea: Realism about a discourse is 1) to think that the sentences are, when construed literally, literally true or false, and 2) to think that some of the sentences of the discourse are non-vacuously true. | |
| From: Ross P. Cameron (Truthmakers, Realism and Ontology [2008], 'Realism') | |
| A reaction: [Cameron adds 'non-vacuously' to an idea of Sayre-McCord 199 p.5] This is realism based on what is 'true', without specifying 'commitments', so I like it. Cameron says it makes mathematical postulationists into realists. He likes 'mind-independent'. |
| 18878 | Realism says truths rest on mind-independent reality; truthmaking theories are about which features [Cameron] |
| Full Idea: All that is necessary for realism, I claim, is that truth is grounded in mind-independent features of fundamental reality. Truthmaker theory comes into play because it is a theory about what those features are (…so it isn't a commitment to realism). | |
| From: Ross P. Cameron (Truthmakers, Realism and Ontology [2008], 'Realism') | |
| A reaction: [He cites Michael Devitt for this approach] What is the word 'fundamental' doing here? Because the mind-dependent parts of reality are considered non-fundamental? The no-true-Scotsman-hates-whisky move? His truthmaking is committed to 'things'. |
| 22633 | Indirect realists are cautious about the manifest image, and prefer the scientific image [Ingthorsson] |
| Full Idea: The indirect realist regards the manifest image with scepticism and contrasts it to the scientific image. | |
| From: R.D. Ingthorsson (A Powerful Particulars View of Causation [2021], 8.13) | |
| A reaction: This is why indirect realism is the best view for a realist who largely accepts the authority of science, Philosophers can wallow in the manifest image all they like (and most of them seem to love it), but truth is in the scientific image. |