Defense Of Realism Research Articles

NOTAS SOBRE O CONCEITO DE VERDADE

Descrevem-se aqui as teorias tradicionais de verdade, desde aquela por correspondência até a por consenso. O construtivismo é então apresentado como alternativa para as ciências humanas, que apresentam um caráter emancipatório, e isto entra na composição de seu conceito de verdade. No caso da religião, a verdade é mais experiencial, mas a teologia precisa seguir os critérios de verdade das demais ciências. Assim, a crítica dos neo-ateus não se sustenta, pois abordam a religião só em seu conteúdo cognitivo. Eles têm sua razão, no entanto, dada a propensão humana ao engano e ao autoengano (ilusão), os quais, no entanto, se referem a todas as esferas de conhecimento. A teologia também tem de se questionar sobre que tipo de evidências empíricas dispõe para embasar suas afirmações. A pluralidade religiosa (e, portanto, de reivindicações de verdade) surge como problema, mas o entendimento das raízes comuns da religião, fornecido pelas ciências evolutivas, fornece uma base importante para se lidar com o problema. Em resumo, o que se apresenta aqui é um esboço de defesa do realismo em teologia.

Psychopathology and Truth: A Defense of Realism.

Recently Kenneth Kendler and Peter Zachar have raised doubts about the correspondence theory of truth and scientific realism in psychopathology. They argue that coherentist or pragmatist approaches to truth are better suited for understanding the reality of psychiatric disorders. In this article, I show that rejecting realism based on the correspondence theory is deeply problematic: It makes psychopathology categorically different from other sciences, and results in an implausible view of scientific discovery and progress. As an alternative, I suggest a robustness-based approach that can accommodate the significance of coherence and pragmatic factors without rejecting scientific realism and the correspondence theory of truth.

In Defense of Realism and Selectivism from Lyons’s Objections

Lyons (in: Humphreys (ed) The Oxford handbook of philosophy of science, Oxford University Press, New York, pp 564–584, 2016; Synthese 194(9): 3203–3219, 2017; Spontaneous Gener J Hist Philos Sci 9(1): 146–150, 2018) formulates Laudan’s (Philos Sci 48(1): 19–49, 1981) historical objection to scientific realism as a modus tollens. I present a better formulation of Laudan’s objection, and then argue that Lyons’s formulation is supererogatory. Lyons rejects scientific realism (Putnam, Mathematics, matter and method: philosophical papers volume I, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1975) on the grounds that some successful past theories were (completely) false. I reply that scientific realism is not the categorical hypothesis that all successful scientific theories are (approximately) true, but rather the statistical hypothesis that most successful scientific theories are (approximately) true. Lyons rejects selectivism (Kitcher, The advancement of science: science without legend, objectivity without illusion, Oxford University Press, New York, 1993; Psillos, Scientific realism: how science tracks truth, Routledge, New York, 1999) on the grounds that some working assumptions were (completely) false in the history of science. I reply that selectivists would say not that all working assumptions are (approximately) true, but rather that most working assumptions are (approximately) true.

Dialéctica moderna y límite mental: el realismo como hallazgo en Leonardo Polo

Against contemporary philosophy, Leonardo Polo's thought is a defense of realism. This realism is neither the forgetfullness of Modern Philosophy (mere approbation of classic philosophy) nor a critic-realism. The author calls "methodic realism". Between Modern Philosophy and traditional metaphysic, L. Polo's philosophy can be called metaphisics.

On Lenin’s Materialism and empiriocriticism

In May 1909, Lenin published Materialism and empiriocriticism, a polemical assault on forms of positivistic empiricism popular among members of the Bolshevik intelligentsia, especially his political rival Alexander Bogdanov. After expounding the core claims on both sides of the debate, this essay considers the relation of the philosophical issues at stake to the political stances of their proponents. I maintain that Lenin’s use of philosophical argument was not purely opportunistic, and I contest the view that his defence of realism was designed as a philosophical rationale for revolutionary vanguardism, arguing instead that Lenin primarily saw himself as defending the world-view of ordinary rank-and-file Marxists against varieties of philosophical obscurantism. Although of marginal influence at the time of its first publication, Materialism and empiriocriticism was later celebrated as a model of philosophical excellence, as the cult of Lenin was fashioned by Stalin. As a result of the text’s subsequent prominence, Lenin’s manner of philosophizing, with its vitriol and abuse, had a disastrous influence on the subsequent course of Soviet philosophical culture.

A new twist to the No Miracles Argument for the success of science

J. D. Trout has recently developed a new defense of scientific realism, a new version of the No Miracles Argument. I critically evaluate Trout's novel defense of realism. I argue that Trout's argument for scientific realism and the related explanation for the success of science are self-defeating. In the process of arguing against the traditional realist strategies for explaining the success of science, he inadvertently undermines his own argument.

La comunidad imposible: atisbos sartreanos

In this paper, Sartre’s ontology is regarded as a precedent of the current political philosophers who state the impossibility of a being-in-common. In this sense they all distance themselves from Hegel and Heidegger, except that the thinkers of the impossible community cannot avoid speculating about death even if they deny that it has any sense. For Sartre though, the incompatibility between death and the freedom to exist remain essential, as well as a defense of realism. Moreover, this paper traces Sartre’s concept of the real and both his tendency and opposition to materialism.

The Imperceptible Work of God: Pamela Sue Anderson’s Re-visioning Gender in Philosophy of Religion: Reason, Love and Epistemic Locatedness

This essay offers a response to Pamela Sue Anderson’s book, Re-visioning Gender in Philosophy of Religion. It focuses on three key aspects of Anderson’s work: first, her concern with the often imperceptible reality of gender exclusions; secondly, her discussion of ineffability in dialogue with Adrian Moore’s work and thirdly, her defence of realism in response to Grace Jantzen. These themes constitute a welcome articulation of rationality within a feminist framework, whilst opening up rationality to the validity of non-propositional truths. The essay ends by suggesting that Anderson does more to work out new conceptualizations of the divine, arguing that her work and that of Jantzen are not so far apart on this point as might first appear.

Matthew Beaumont, Adventures in RealismAdventures in Realism. Edited by Matthew Beaumont. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007. Pp. vi+280.

<i>Matthew Beaumont,</i> Adventures in Realism<i>Adventures in Realism</i>. Edited by Matthew Beaumont. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007. Pp. vi+280.

On Devitt’s Defence of Realism

In this paper I question the view that realism must delineate the basic ontological furniture of the world rather than giving arguments in semantic or epistemic terms for the existence of a mind-independent world. I call this view of stating and defending realism the Ontological Defence of Realism (or ODR) and take Devitt’s account of realism as a paradigmatic case of ODR. I argue that ODR cannot block ‘verificationist antirealism’ because the specific (physical) nature of what exists is not enough to secure the mind-independence of what exists and, additionally, every element purported to achieve this, it compromises seriously the idea that realism is primarily an ontological issue. I also stress that ODR is in tension with a plausible realist insight namely the priority of the world over our theorizing. Because of this tension ODR weakens realism in several domains with no good reason. Specifically, I argue that in these domains ODR faces a dilemma: either to reject realism or to take realism to be dependent on a reductive account violating the realist insight. My point is that we should keep realism and ontology distinct and that compliance with the realist insight initiates a better strategy for the defence of realism. I address three possible objections thereby further clarifying my point. I conclude by presenting my view about the relation between ontology and realism.

Ontología Histórica y Nominalismo Dinámico: La propuesta de Ian Hacking para las ciencias humanas

In recent years Ian Hacking has devoted himself to work mainly on human sciences. The purpose of this article is to present some of the notions coined by the Canadian philosopher -essentially the notions of historical ontology and dynamic nominalism- for that field. Based on this presentation, we conclude that the proposed historical ontology deals with the particular trajectories of the being and it is part of a wider contingentist perspective that is outlined in several of his works. At the same time, we see how Hacking proposes a nominalism different from the traditional and how he makes it work in relation to his professed defence of realism.

A coherent collection in defense of realism

In this collection of essays, Stathis Psillos continues the defense of scientific realism that he began in his Scientific Realism: How Science Tracks Truth (Routledge 1999). As in the earlier book, Psillos understands scientific realism as the combination of a robust metaphysical outlook and an attitude of epistemic optimism. The former amounts to the thesis that our efforts to conceptualize the world do not make any non-conceptual (in particular causal) contributions to it; the world, as it is sometimes said, is ‘mind-independent’. The epistemic optimism consists in the belief that the aforementioned efforts are by and large successful, and this not only insofar as the observable world is concerned: thanks to modern science, we have also been successful in charting, at least to a considerable extent, the unobservable entities and processes that underlie the observable phenomena. Much of Psillos’ 1999 book was concerned with defending—and clarifying the scope of—a robust epistemic optimism. Already in that book he criticized those who hold that we are only in the position to fathom the structure of the unobservable world—be it because of epistemic limitations on our part, or be it on metaphysical grounds, because structure is all there is. His new book contains essays providing further reasons for believing that there is more to the world than structure, and that we can be optimistic that this ‘non-structure’, too, is within our epistemic reach, at least in principle. Our putative warrant for this optimism is to come from the reliability of scientific method, in particular from what Psillos regards as the cornerstone of that method: Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE). In Scientific Realism, he gave a thorough defense of this rule against the backdrop of

The Argument from Underconsideration as Grounds for Anti‐realism: A Defence

The anti‐realist argument from underconsideration focuses on the fact that, when scientists evaluate theories, they only ever consider a subset of the theories that can account for the available data. As a result, when scientists judge one theory to be superior to competitor theories, they are not warranted in drawing the conclusion that the superior theory is likely true with respect to what it says about unobservable entities and processes. I defend the argument from underconsideration from the objections of Peter Lipton. I argue that the inconsistency that Lipton claims to find in the argument vanishes once we understand what the anti‐realist means when she claims that scientists are reliable. I also argue that collapsing the distinction between relative and absolute evaluations, as Lipton recommends, has its costs. Finally, I briefly examine Richard Boyd’s influential defence of realism.

The Towneley Cycle: Unity and Diversity by Peter Happé

MLR, I03.3, 2oo8 823 a new socio-political significance in an open society. People were sick of ideology [. . .]' (p. i89) and the form 'would never again be permitted [. . .] to kowtow to respectability' (p. I9I). But if the defence of reputation is no longer an issue, why do publishers, editors, and film-makers employ lawyers?What about ghost-written autobiography? And if 'ideology' was dead, how do we explain theCold War? The new subjectivism ofmodernism and postmodernism isapparently embraced yetwith no acknowledgement of the epistemological collapse, the sense ofmultiple selves, essential to the deconstruction ofVictorian realism. Hamilton's book is, in effect,a defence of realism, his chapter on thedeath of theauthor a lightweight snook-cocking at Barthes and Bakhtin asmembers of 'a group of intellectuals' (p. 206) resentful of the power of authors to control their texts. 'Barthes and Derrida', he asserts, 'were exposed and derided' (p. 2I3). Of course theyweren't: and yetHamilton wishes to defend feminism, gay liberation, cultural multiplicity, and the study of ordinary lives, strangely ignoring theways inwhich postmodern notions of the self have enabled such liberal thinking.The biography he admires is 'history without theory' (p. I90). Yet his own history isdeeply ideological. What is lacking here isany serious engage ment with the ethics of biography. Only one side of this ispresented: the rightof free speech. The other, the colonization and prostitution of a lifeforprofit, is largelyneg lected.He cites Janet Malcolm's The Silent Woman (I 994) as 'by farthemost brilliant expose of theworkings ofmodern biography' (p. 276), yet the object of her assault is the object ofHamilton's defence. The moral question she examines-who owns a life?-is effectively answered by him as 'The biographer'. And the big question, 'Where does factend and interpretation begin?' (p. I5), is sidestepped. UNIVERSITY OF LEICESTER MARTIN STANNARD The Towneley Cycle: Unity and Diversity. By PETER HAPPE. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. 2007. xiv+290 pp. ?6o. ISBN 978-o-7083-2048-8. The Towneley plays, one of the four cycles ofmedieval English drama, are linked with Wakefield and have contributions by an unknown 'WakefieldMaster'. His dra mas (which include local shepherds with a firmgrip on reality)have long been praised fordepictions of lifeboth sacred and profane. Some think that if Bruegel had not been a Flemish painter but aYorkshire playwright, his work would have been much like thatof the Wakefield Master. To thewriting of thatunknown genius, as also the rest of the cycle, Peter Happe isan expert guide. During fourdecades he has enlightened readers on themodes and contexts of early English drama, and sowrites with the experience of a lifetime.The result is a carefully structured and disciplined book in fourparts. It begins with the textof the cycle; goes on to performance, and then ideology and interpretation; and closes with a brief account of textual negotiation. The firstsection hence discusses the unique sixteenth-century manuscript, once in thekeeping of theTowneley familyofLancashire, but now inCalifornia. Subjects to the forehere are the adaptation of the cycle from theYork one, theprovenance and authorship of thematerial, and what we can gather of the Wakefield Master himself. The second section, on performance, contains much novel material, since itdiscusses productions not just of the fifteenthcentury but of the twentieth and twenty-first. This is refreshing.Happe assembles a mass of experience from recent actors and directors of theplays.We hear of theirproblems and rewards as regards performance out of doors, waggons vs. a fixed stage, communication with audiences of bystanders, and so on. Happe thus takes his dramas out of the stale air of a library to their rightful place below the skies of an English high street. 824 Reviews The third section engages with questions of gender, religion, popular culture,mu sic, class, and social justice (with the Wakefield Master's known eye for theunderdog, like amedieval Mayhew), as also theoverarching dimension of theplays as a comedy human and divine. This includes (p. 226) the special interestof the Wakefield Master (forwhom heaven and hell were not vague concepts but present realities) in human evil. The final section rounds things up onmatters of interpretation and reception. This is a clear, sober, and absorbing study,quietly original and full of good...

Biography: A Brief History by Nigel Hamilton

822 Reviews an admirer of 'the literatureof Sade as a dramatic talewith his historical implications pronounced by a taler', and aman who found away around a 70,000 yen finebecause 'he always arrived to the tribunal too late, and escaped the finaljudgement' (ii, 122 1 22). The Final Judgement on this encyclopaedia isnot yet in,but one can only hope foran elan of linguistic charity from scholars conscious of theirown foibles. RYERSON UNIVERSITY, TORONTO MICHAEL R. FINN Biography: A Brief History. By NIGEL HAMILTON. Cambridge, MA, London: Har vardUniversityPress. 2007. xv+345pp. kI4.95. ISBN978-o-674-02466-3. This book comes plastered with accolades: 'profound', 'insightful and provocative', 'lively', 'emphatic'. It isall these things except for, perhaps, the first.Polemical, viva ciously written, beautifully illustrated and produced, itprovokes reaction. Indeed, it is somewhat 'reactionary', a defence of biography, applauding thenotion of a unitary self, of the 'individual' as the conceptual centre ofWestern liberal democracy. Bio graphy asks why there is 'no single, accessible introduction to the subject' (p. i)-and provides one. The limitation of the term 'biography' to the respectful printed record, it isargued, has marginalized women and homosexuals in a dominant patriarchy, and the form it self as an object of study.Only one university,Nigel Hamilton points out-Hawaii takes the subject seriously and has a scholarly journal dedicated to it. 'Biography', then,must include autobiography and portraiture of any kind (painting, memorial busts, biopics, TV documentaries, newspaper and magazine articles). No distinction ismade between self-portrait and portrait, between scholarly and journalistic work, between fiction and non-fiction. It is, simply, 'life-recording' (p. iI) inwhatever medium. This noble race of life-recorders, however, has constantly been obstructed by the agencies of the state and other vested interests.The devils in thismelodrama are the opponents of free speech: theministers political and theological, theHays Office, literaryestates, the copyright and censorship laws.The pre-Boswellian heroes are Plutarch, St Augustine, Cellini, Sir Walter Raleigh ('biography's first martyr' (p. 69) afterhis imprisonment and execution forpublishing The Historie of the World (I 6 I4)), and Dryden. Then comes a culture-shift away from laundering hagiography. 'If aman is towrite A Panegyrick,' Samuel Johnson advised Boswell, 'hemay keep vices out of sight, but ifhe professes towrite A Life he must represent it really as it was' (p. 87). Hamilton's preference isclearly forthe 'warts-and-all' life: 'messy,vivid, and colourful' (p. 9 I). It ispresented as offering 'therapeutic benefit' in an 'education of the senses' (p. 89). This steady drift towards realism isexemplified by Lytton Strachey's Eminent Vic torians (I 9 I8) and Harold Nicolson's Portrait of aMarriage (I 973). The firstironized the 'two fatvolumes' (p. i I9) of 'Victorian pseudobiography' (p. ioo), the second outed Nicolson's parents as practising homosexuals. The 'subjective' biography had arrived, thebiographer as artist, validating themarginal (p. I65). Confessional auto biography developed exponentially. Freud had made all this possible with his case studies and his Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood (I910). Virginia Woolf experimented with the form,writing a lifeof her dog. Picasso is cited as an othermodernist cracking thevarnished surface of portraiture, redefining itas a record of "'the artist's personal responses to the subject'" (p. I63). The resultwas that the traditional print lifecame tobe seen as 'unchallenging, [. . .] inartistic,psychologically deficient, and sexually prim [. . ]. Itwas over' (p. I90). This is the point atwhich oversimplified history begins to strain beneath its ge neralizations. After the Second World War, apparently, 'biography had finally found MLR, I03.3, 2oo8 823 a new socio-political significance in an open society. People were sick of ideology [. . .]' (p. i89) and the form 'would never again be permitted [. . .] to kowtow to respectability' (p. I9I). But if the defence of reputation is no longer an issue, why do publishers, editors, and film-makers employ lawyers?What about ghost-written autobiography? And if 'ideology' was dead, how do we explain theCold War? The new subjectivism ofmodernism and postmodernism isapparently embraced yetwith no acknowledgement of the epistemological collapse, the sense ofmultiple selves, essential to the deconstruction ofVictorian realism. Hamilton's book is, in effect,a defence of realism, his chapter on thedeath of theauthor a...

Is Realism Passé? a Realist Rejoinder: The Case of Ethiopia/Eritrea

Questions of norms, culture and ethnicity pose the principal challenge to realism in the present day, finding articulation in constructivism (which, in itself, is abroad category), the idea of the “security community”, and a growing pool of research on Third World internal wars. In the first section, we shall concentrate primarily on the ideas of Peter Katzenstein, Michael Barnett, Kaveji Holsti and Steven David to understand the charges leveled against realism, and to bring to light its many perceived inadequacies. The second section shall attempt to offer a defence of realism, positing answers to the questions and claims surveyed in the first section. We shall primarily explore the works of Kenneth Waltz, Michael Desch and Barry R. Posen in this section. The third and final section shall focus on a case study of the Ethiopia/Eritrea conflict, in trying to clinch the importance of realism as an explanatory theory of international relations (IR) — by laying out the narrative of the Eritrean secessionist movement and the puzzling balancing behaviour exhibited by the Ethiopian state, and consequently explaining the same in realist terms.

Johannes Sharpe's Ontology and Semantics: Oxford Realism Revisited

AbstractThe German Johannes Sharpe is the most important and original author of the so called "Oxford Realists": his semantic and metaphysical theories are the end product of the two main medieval philosophical traditions, realism and nominalism, for he contributed to the new form of realism inaugurated by Wyclif, but was receptive to many nominalist criticisms. Starting from the main thesis of Wyclif's metaphysics, that the universal and individual are really identical but formally distinct, Oxford Realists introduced a new type of predication, based on a partial identity between the entities for which the subject and predicate stood, called predication by essence, and then redefined the traditional post-Aristotelian categories of essential and accidental predication in terms of this partial identity. Sharpe substantially shares the metaphysical view and principles of the other Oxford Realists, but he elaborates a completely different semantics, since he accepts the nominalist principle of the autonomy of thought in relation to the world, and Ockham's explanation for the universality of concepts. Unfortunately, this semantic approach partially undermines his defence of realism, since it deprives Sharpe of any compelling semantic and epistemological reasons to posit universalia in re. Therefore, Sharpe's main ontological theses certainly are sensible and reasonable, but, paradoxically, within his philosophical system they cannot in any way be considered as absolutely consistent.

En respuesta al comentario de Carlos Pereda sobre Un lugar para la moral

Carlos Pereda califica mi concepción de la moral de realismo particularista y objeta a mi defensa tanto del realismo como del particularismo. En mi respuesta trato de mostrar cómo nuestras discrepancias en torno al papel de los principios en la deliberación moral es, excepto en un punto crucial, cuestión de énfasis. No ocurre lo mismo, sin embargo, con mi reivindicación del realismo moral, pues parte de lo que intento mostrar en el libro es que los programas constructivistas de los que habla Pereda no pueden pensarse coherentemente.

Time and Motion in Walter Burley's Late Expositio On Aristotle's Physics

AbstractWalter Burley (1274/75-1344/45) is mostly known for his defense of realism against William of Ockham. The concept of time that he developed in his late literal commentary on Aristotle's Physics has even been labelled 'extremely realistic,' in contrast to William of Ockham's so-called 'extremely subjectivistic' alternative. However, as is shown in this article, when Burley's concept of time is viewed against the background of medieval theories of time, it appears that it is mainly a restatement and further elaboration of opinions held by Averroes. A detailed investigation of Burley's explanation of the reality, definition, and unicity of time, as well as of the relation between time and the intellective soul shows that his realism is certainly far less extreme than it has been believed.

Rejoinder to a Postmodernist

This article, a defense of realism and representationalism in history against the postmodernist philosophy of language, is a critical rejoinder to Keith Jenkins's reply to my earlier essay in this journal in 1999 on postmodernism and historiography. Beginning with some remarks on the relationship between philosophy and historiography, this article goes on to note some of the weaknesses in postmodernist Jenkins's discussion of realism, representationalism, Richard Rorty, and Jacques Derrida's well‐known dictum that there is nothing outside the text. It also considers Jenkins's talk about emancipation and the end of history and shows why it cannot be taken seriously. The article's conclusion is that postmodernism has nothing to contribute to the understanding of history as a form of thought or body of knowledge.