Necessity and Realism: Milton Fisk's Nature and Necessity

Abstract

For about two hundred years, well-trained philosophers believed that was something we were responsible for, rather than something we discovered in world. The world, or at least world as given to us, was composed of externally related simples. Only thought, or habit, or transcendental ego, or language-using organism, or something else with which reader could readily identify, related these simples (or, at least, related them internally). That special tightness of connection called necessity was to characterize those special ways of linking up simples which we somehow found unavoidable. This confident unanimity, which lasted from Hume and Kant through Russell and Husserl and on into heyday of Oxford philosophy, has now been dissipated. On one hand, pragmatists who, with Quine, know no higher or purer sense of than Hume's regularities ([1 1]: 56) see philosophical inquiry as continuous with science, rather than as discovering bounds of sense, or truths created by the way we speak. For them, necessity is concept we could get along nicely without. On other hand we have philosophers who, like Whitehead and neo-Thomists before them, urge a recurrence to pre-Kantian modes of thought ([13]: vi). On their view, successful scientific inquiry is made possible by necessities existing in objects of inquiry rather than in us. Putnam's ([10]), Boyd's ([1]), and Field's ([4]) rejoinders to Quine's scepticism about objectivity and correspondence, Goldman's ([6]) and Kripke's ([8] ) suggestions about need for causal theories of knowledge and reference, Kripke's ([8]) and Plantinga's ([9]: 3ff) attempts to de-epistemologize our modal notions, and Dummett's ([3]: 671) attempt to give semantical (rather than epistemological) sense to realism-idealism debate, are all parts of determined, if unfocused, effort to formulate realistic views of inquiry and truth which avoid both positivist dogma and pragmatist license. Fisk's Nature and Necessity ([5] ) is most radical and provocative contribution so far to this realist reaction against pragmatist