Pragmatic Realism, Idealism, and Pluralism: A Rescherian Balance?

Abstract

One of the most remarkable features of the kind of pragmatism committed to advancing scientific rationality and objectivity – and thus to criticizing subjectivist and relativist misconstruals of pragmatism – that Nicholas Rescher has defended for several decades is its attempt to maintain a balance of a number of philosophical ideas that are often thought to be in tension with each other. Rescherian pragmatism is realistic (even “metaphysically realistic”), but it is also idealistic (in the sense of what he calls “conceptual idealism” or “pragmatic idealism”); moreover, its realism and objectivism do not seem to preclude a pluralistic conception of a variety of different perspectives (or “systems”, “conceptual schemes”) that we may employ for conceptually categorizing reality. These views are highly relevant to the general realism discussion as well as its special applications in the philosophy of science, to which Rescher has been a key contributor for decades.