Real Realism Research Articles

Invisible disagreement: an inverted qualia argument for realism

Scientific realists argue that a good track record of multi-agent, and multiple method, validation of empirical claims is itself evidence that those claims, at least partially and approximately, reflect ways nature actually is independent of the ways we conceptualize it. Constructivists contend that successes in validating empirical claims only suffice to establish that our ways of modelling the world, our “constructions,” are useful and adequate for beings like us. This essay presents a thought experiment in which beings like us intersubjectively validate claims about properties of particular things in nature under conditions in which those beings have profoundly different personal phenomenological experiences of those properties. I submit that the thought experiment scenario parallels our actual situation, and argue that this shows that successes in intersubjectively validating empirical claims are indeed enough to claim victory for the realist. More specifically, I champion a variation of realism that marries Ronald Giere’s brand of ‘perspectival realism’ with Philip Kitcher’s ‘real realism,’ and posits that causal relations between ourselves and properties instantiated in nature ground our references to the relevant properties even though our conceptions of them are perspective relative (or filtered through, and distorted by, a perspective).

Everything

To picture reality either as not involving its being pictured or as reducible to its being pictured yields inconsistent pictures, since in neither case can anything be pictured. The picture of reality as picture-involving yields the only consistent picture of reality. Yet its cost is completeness, and the reason for this is reality. The claim that picturing reality is involved in reality is idealism, but it is not an idealism that compromises reality’s ontological autonomy. Using Bosanquet’s reality theorem to the effect that “Everything is real, so long as you do not take it for more than it is,” I argue that idealism per se is falsely held to vitiate reality’s autonomy. It does so only when the ideal is awarded an inflated status as fundament or source of reality. Bosanquet’s theorem makes it clear that inflation of this sort is not exclusively the hallmark of realisms or idealisms. Since by contrast the idealist is additionally realist concerning the ideal, fundamentalist and/or spontaneist ontologies become importantly exclusivist, yielding pictures that cannot picture picturing without inflation of either picturing capacities or unpictured reality. Therefore the picture of reality as picture-involving is alone able to account for picturing. If there is picturing then, I claim, real realism is inflationary.

Realism and Receptivity: The Role of the Transcendent in Pragmatism

Philip Kitcher’s arguments for realism and secular humanism reveal a question as to the role of transcendence in pragmatism. There is a tension between Deweyan anti-foundationalism and naturalism—between the continuity of experience and nature, and the external reality of the universe—which re-emerges in Kitcher’s “real realism.” The transcendence of the natural and the transcendence of the supernatural are distinct as regards their accessibility to inquiry. But the pragmatic fallibilist resistance to sources of justification external to the process of inquiry, or “sky-hooks,” also clashes with the transcendence of nature insofar as it is viewed as a foundation. I argue that transcendence can be conceived not as a substance or ground, but as a possibility of radical receptivity or renewal, and that this is compatible with the continuity of inquiry. If this shift is made, religious transcendence can appear less as a flight to another world and more a method of producing a break with the (sinful) past, a possibility absent in Kitcher’s secular humanism and one arguably more important than its lack of religious community.

Preludes to pragmatism: toward a reconstruction of philosophy

1. The Importance of Dewey for Philosophy (and much else besides) 2. The Naturalists Return 3. Real Realism: The Galilean Strategy 4. On the Explanatory Role of Correspondence Truth. 5. Pragmatism and Realism: A Modest Proposal 6. Does 'Race' Have a Future? 7. Mathematical Truth? 8. Carnap and the Caterpillar 9. Philosophy Inside Out 10. A Pragmatist's Progress: The Varieties of James' Strategies for Defending Religion 11. Challenges for Secularism 12. Militant Modern Atheism 13. Naturalistic Ethics without Fallacies 14. The Hall of Mirrors 15. Education, Capitalism, and Democracy 16. Public Knowledge and its Discontents 17. Varieties of Altruism

Representations and the Galilean Strategy

SummaryThe aim of this article is to show that, in his use of the word ‘representation’, Philip Kitcher is committed to a particular notion of representation, which is essential to his argument for Real Realism in his paper Real Realism: The Galilean Strategy (Real Realism herinafter). After a short presentation of Kitcher’s original argument for Real Realism, I show that Kitcher’s notion of representation is not indisputable. By producing an alternative version of Kitcher’s argument, one which does not rely on this term ‘representation’, I show the force and functioning of the Galilean strategy itself. A comparison of the two formulations of the argument reveals what is additionally brought in by Kitcher’s notion of representation: specifically, a particular answer to the question of what truth consists in. This presumed correspondence theory of truth is needed to achieve Real Realism by the Galilean strategy. The positive upshot is, however, that one can support the Galilean strategy as such, without being a Real Realist: One can apply the strategy to any other conception of truth.

Return of the jedi : realism and the study of the european union

Many observers of European Union affairs discard the theory of Realism in the belief that this “crude” theory of sovereignty and conflict cannot grasp the “sophisticated” politics of dialogue and compromise in the EU. However, this rejection is based more on a false stereotypical view of Realism than on the insights generated by real Realism. In consequence, the purpose of this article is two-fold: to debunk the stereotype, and to outline strengths and weaknesses in the Realist research agenda.

Real Realism: The Galilean Strategy

This essay aims to disentangle various types of anti-realism, and to disarm the considerations that are deployed to support them. I distinguish empiricist versions of anti-realism from constructivist versions, and, within each of these, semantic arguments from epistemological arguments. The centerpiece of my defense of a modest version of realism – real realism – is the thought that there are resources within our ordinary ways of talking about and knowing about everyday objects that enable us to extend our claims to unobservable entities. This strategy, the Galilean strategy, is explained using the historical example of the telescope.

Real Realism: The Galilean Strategy

This essay aims to disentangle various types of anti-realism, and to disarm the considerations that are deployed to support them. I distinguish empiricist versions of anti-realism from constructivist versions, and, within each of these, semantic arguments from epistemological arguments. The centerpiece of my defense of a modest version of realism – real realism – is the thought that there are resources within our ordinary ways of talking about and knowing about everyday objects that enable us to extend our claims to unobservable entities. This strategy, the Galilean strategy, is explained using the historical example of the telescope.

Hollywood Movie Dialogue and the "Real Realism" of John Cassavetes

Hollywood Movie Dialogue and the "Real Realism" of John Cassavetes

Hollywood Movie Dialogue and the "Real Realism" of John Cassavetes

Hollywood Movie Dialogue and the "Real Realism" of John Cassavetes

How Life Writes the Book: Real Socialism and Socialist Realism in Stalin's Russia

How Life Writes the Book: Real Socialism and Socialist Realism in Stalin's Russia

Order and international society: the real realism?

The school of thought known as Realism (with a large R) has been a central focus of debate in international theory. Nevertheless, its content and epistemological status (and therefore the criteria for its evaluation) remain elusive. In part this is due to the variety of contexts and debates within which Realism has been discussed in the field. In the 1930s and 1940s the debate was framed around a Realist-Idealist axis. In the 1970s Realism was contested by liberal analyses of the causes and consequences of an allegedly growing global interdependence. In the 1980s there emerged a three-cornered debate between competing Kuhnian ‘paradigms’, among which Realism dominated. Given that the meaning of Realism has been partly constructed by historically variable theoretical and political issues, its identity has also varied over time. If, however, one chooses to think about Realism outside of these various contexts within which it has been both defined and evaluated, it remains unclear how such diverse thinkers as Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Carr, Morgenthau and Kenneth Waltz can coherently be considered as part of a single tradition of thought. Sensitivity to their differences may be a virtue for the historian of ideas, but it runs the risk of undermining the point of the exercise! Despite these problems, which are only partially corrected by distinguishing between types of Realism (notably classical and ‘neo’ or ‘structural’ varieties), most scholars would agree with Alan James that Realism is a school whose members harbour shared assumptions about the primacy of states as international actors, the separation of domestic and international politics, and who describe the latter in terms of anarchy and a concomitant ubiquitous struggle for power and security.