Realism Antirealism and Epistemology

REALISM/ANTIREALISM AND EPISTEMOLOGY Edited by Christopher B. Kulp ROWMAN & LITTLFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Lanham· New Yo...

Author: Christopher B. Kulp

112 downloads 1309 Views 7MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

REALISM/ANTIREALISM AND EPISTEMOLOGY

Edited by Christopher B. Kulp

ROWMAN & LITTLFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Lanham· New York· Boulder· Oxford

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Published in the United States of America by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 4720 Boston Way, Lanham, Maryland 20706 12 Hid's Copse Road Cummor Hill, Oxford OX2 9JJ, England Copyright © 1997 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Chapter 2, "Does the Real World Exist?" by John R. Searle, originally published in The Construction a/Social Reality. © 1995 by Free Press. Reprinted by permission. Chapter 5, "Indeterminism and Antirealism," © 1997 by Donald Davidson. Chapter 7, "Realism, Antirealism, and Pragmatism," © 1997 by Richard Rorty.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cata1oging-in-Publication Data

Realism/antirealism and epistemology / edited by Christopher B. Kulp. p. cm. - (Studies in epistemology and cognitive theory) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8476-8335-4 (alk. paper). - ISBN 0-8476-8336-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Realism. 2. Knowledge, theory of. 3. Justification (theory of knowledge). I. Kulp, Christopher B. II. Series. 96-34977 B835.R323 1997 CIP 149'.2---dc20 ISBN 0-8476-8335-4 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN 0-8476-8336-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) Printed in the United States of America

8™The pa~t: u~~ in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American

NaUonal St~~'''t~r Informati,on,S,ciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Mat~riaPs, 2f'9.f8-1984. " f

ANSr

To my parents, Lucille and Henry Kulp

Contents ix

Acknowledgments

1

In trod uction

1

Christopher B. Kulp

2

Does the Real World Exist?

15

John R. Searle

3

Realism and the Tasks of Epistemology

53

William P. Alston

4

Why the Theory of Knowledge Has to Be Realistic

95

Roderick M. Chisholm

5

Indeterminism and Antirealism

109

Donald Davidson

6

Pragmatism and Reasons for Belief

123

Gilbert Harman

7

Realism, Antirealism, and Pragmatism: Comments on Alston, Chisholm, Davidson, Harman, and Searle

149

Richard Rorty

Index

173

About the Contributors

177

vii

Acknowledgments

The papers in this volume stem from a conference, "The Implications of Realism and Antirealism for Epistemology," held at Santa Clara University in February 1992. I wish to thank the university for the funding and support that made the conference possible, and my friend and colleague Philip Kain for his considerable assistance in putting on the conference. I also wish to thank the contributors for their willingness to publish their papers, in many cases in substantially revised form, as well as the Free Press for permission to reprint John R. Searle's contribution from his book The Construction of Social Reality.

ix

Introduction

Christopher B. Kulp

here has been marked disagreement during the last few decades over just how we should understand the terms 'realism' and 'antirealism'. To what do the terms refer? This is no easy question. Some writers think there is something specific that makes a theory, proposition, or term X realist or antirealist. Others despair of being able to specify the property (or set of properties), or the necessary and jointly sufficient conditions that would qualify X as realist or antirealist. They think there is nothing common to all realisms and antirealisms. And among those who think there is something specific that makes X realist or antirealist, there is disagreement over what this is. All of this needs a bit of unraveling. Take the first group-those who think there is something specific for X to be realist. Some members of this group see realism as fundamentally an ontological thesis. They think that what is common to realisms is the ontological claim that some relevant thing Y exists. Conversely, they think that antirealisms imply that Y doesn't exist. To illustrate, consider naive realism in the theory of perception. According to naive realism, when person S sees a tree, what S sees-the object of S's visual perception-is a material object, a tree, which exists independently of S's perceptual act. Naive realism is a realist theory of perception in that it is committed to the "reality" of material objects. Material objects, as a class of mind-independent entities, are accorded positive ontological status. Contrast this with the version of phenomenalism advanced by John Stuart Mill in An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy. 1 According to this theory, when S has a visual perception of a "tree," what S actually perceives is not a material object but a visual sensation. Material objects are not mind-independent entities but "permanent possibilities of

T

2

Realism/Antirealism and Epistemology

sensation"; and 5's "tree" is to be understood as the sensations 5 would have were 5 subject to certain conditions. Thus, unlike naIve realism, Mill's phenomenalism does not accord positive ontological status to material objects qua mind-independent entities. One might say it is antirealist with regard to material objects. We can go on in a similar vein with other instances of realism and antirealism. Realist/ antirealist debate in mathematics deals with issues such as whether the objects of mathematical inquiry-for example, numbers or sets-exist independently of mathematicians or are merely "constructed," the conceptual creations of human beings. In ethics, realists and antirealists dispute the existence of culture- or language-independent moral facts. In the philosophy of mind, they dispute the existence of mental states that are irreducible to physical states. Some philosophers, however, see the distinction between realism and antirealism not so much in terms of ontology as of truth. On one prominent version of this construal of realism, a proposition (statement, sentence) p is "realist" if and only if it says something about the way the world is. Thus, a proposition p of the form 'X is cond-prob(h, e) Here, for example, h might be 'All emeralds are green', e might be evidence indicating that all emeralds examined for color have been found to be green (i.e., grue), andfmight be evidence that 'green' rather than 'grue' has been used in past projections. 3o This can seem strange, as if one were supposing that one would have made it more likely that all emeralds are grue if one had made predictions using 'grue' rather than 'green'. But the issue is degree of rational belief, not objective chance. There is no suggestion that the way one uses language to make predictions will have an effect on the objective frequencies with which nonlinguistic properties are correlated with each other. It might be suggested that, as one finds out what projections one is inclined to make, one finds out which hypotheses are more likely to be


139

true, given certain evidence. But that is not quite right. Even at the beginning, one is inclined to project 'green' rather than 'grue.' It is true even at the beginning that the probability that all emeralds are green, given that some have been observed to be green, is greater than the probability that all emeralds are grue, given that some have been observed to be grue. What one learns from patterns of past projection is what one's inductive principles are-not what principles one explicitly accepts, but what principles one implicitly follows. Initially, one just made inferences without having a theory about how one does it. As one sees what predicates one projects, one acquires information about one's prior probabilities, one's inductive principles.

Explanation and Prior Probabilities

In the same way, explanatory considerations, like simplicity, playa role in determining prior probabilities. Suppose one has two hypotheses, hand h', both of which accommodate the evidence e, but one takes h to be the better explanation because it is simpler. Suppose that this difference inclines one to infer h rather than h' or any of the infinitely many other competing hypotheses that could account for e. This does not mean that such explanatory considerations playa role in addition to conditionalization. Rather, the fact that one is inclined to infer h rather than h' shows that

cond-prob(h, e»> .5»cond-prob(h', e) This implies that

prob(h&e»>(prob(h'&e) in one's prior probability distribution. Here it may be useful to observe that the requirements of probabilistic coherence are consistency requirements, not directly requirements about inference. To take another example, if one believes both p and q, and sees that these propositions together imply r, that is not necessarily a reason to believe r. One may, for example, also believe not r. So maybe one has a reason to stop believing p or stop believing q. Nothing in logic or probability theory says that one has to stick with previous commitments. 31 When one realizes what those commitments entail, one is free to revise them, as far as anything that logic says. At best, one sees that something has to be done, but what is done may be to

140


change some of one's initial assumptions. It may also be useful to notice an ambiguity in the notion of "prior probability." The relevant meaning is not a probability arrived at ahead of time. Rather, what is meant is something mathematical: a probability distribution prior-prob that is related to one's current probability distribution prob via the formula of conditionalization:

prob(p)

prior-prob(p&e) prior-prob(e)

The distribution prior-prob can be a prior probability in the relevant sense without being a probability distribution one had ahead of time.

Belief and Degrees of Belief

To think of matters in terms of subjective probabilities is not to suppose that people have explicit degrees of belief that they use in deciding what to do and how to change their views in the light of new evidence. Nor is it even to suppose that degrees of belief are precisely determined. Degrees of belief are vaguely determined by a person's overall psychological or neurophysiological state, or perhaps by one or another part of that overall state. Something like a behavioristic account of degrees of belief may be right. Degrees of belief may be determined by a person's dispositions to make choices. Perhaps people have all-or-nothing beliefs and goals that are responsible for these behavioral dispositions. Degrees of belief can be determined by these dispositions without being functional aspects of a person's psychology.32

Nonepistemic Reasons and Temporal Dutch Books

One believes H that smoking cigarettes greatly increases a person's chances of getting cancer and dying early. One assigns a high probability to this conclusion. One thinks this probability would be unaffected by 0 receiving an offer from a tobacco company of a large amount of money if one would come to believe that smoking does not increase a person's risk of getting cancer. Let's suppose that prior-prob(H) = .9 and cond-prob(H,O) = .9, according to one's current probability distribution. Suppose one also thinks that if the tobacco company were to make one such an offer, one

Pragmatism and Reasans for Belief

141

would have a strong reason to form the belief that smoking is not bad for people. In other words, one thinks that if 0, one's prob(H) should become very low. But then one seems to be subject to a Temporal Dutch Book. 33 One seems to be committed to thinking that each bet in a Temporal Dutch Book should be accepted when offered, even though one is also committed to thinking one is guaranteed to lose. The point is tricky in the present case, because it is hard to bet on something like H. What counts as winning or losing the bet? So let us change the example slightly. Suppose a government study is being made and the question concerns how that study will come out. Suppose H is the proposition that the study will conclude that cigarettes cause cancer and that not H is the proposition that the study will not reach that conclusion. This study will come out a year from now and 0 is that the cigarette company offers one $100,000 to believe not H. Part of the relevant Temporal Dutch Book would be a bet on not O. Part would be a bet on O&H. Part would occur only if O. At that point one would be offered to bet on not H. Consider this last bet: at that point one would have shifted one's degree of belief in H to 0.1. So one would at that point be prepared to bet heavily against H, giving 9 to 1 odds! Now, when one is considering the offer of the tobacco company, should one conclude that one should change one's opinion of what a fair bet would be in this way? Should one really be prepared to give 9 to 1 odds against H? If one thought that someone would actually bet a large amount with one if one were to offer him such odds, then one now (before changing one's degree of belief) must conclude this offer from the tobacco company is not a good deal after all. One will get the $100,000 but almost certainly lose even more betting against H. In this case, whether one is willing to modify one's degrees of belief will depend on how one thinks one will have to act on one's modified degrees of belief after one makes the change. Here is a distinction between evidence and other sorts of reasons for believing something. Putting the point in another way, one will not want to view the sort of change of belief resulting from the tobacco company's offer as simple conditionalization. Envisioning the possibility of the offer ahead of time does not lead one to change one's prior probabilities in the way that envisioning getting certain sorts of evidence can lead one to change or firm up prior probabilities. So it looks as if epistemic reasons can be distinguished from other sorts of reasons by the following criterion. Suppose one would consider R to be a reason to believe H. If one's subjective probabilities are such that

142


prob(H&R) b(H) probeR) >pro then one is treating R as an evidential or epistemic reason. Otherwise one is treating R as a different sort of reason, possibly a purely pragmatic reason. It remains possible that some pragmatic reasons are also epistemic reasons. In particular, considerations of simplicity do seem to affect prior probabilities in the way that is characteristic of evidential reasons and not characteristic of the tobacco company's offer by the current test. This is so even if the only justification for this use of simplicity is a pragmatic justification to the effect that simpler hypotheses are easier to use.

Why Aren't Nonepistemic Reasons Incoherent?

This still leaves a problem. On the one hand, there is the Temporal Dutch Book argument that it is incoherent, and thus irrational, to be committed to a policy of updating degrees of belief in a way that does not coincide with conditionalization. On the other hand, there is the rationality of the policy of updating degrees of belief for the sorts of practical reasons that are involved in the RST example. Since it can be rational to be ready to increase one's degree of belief in a proposition simply in order to obtain the RST advertising account, something has to be wrong with the Temporal Dutch Book argument applied to this case. To see what is wrong, we need to distinguish two ways in which one might be committed to a policy p for updating one's degrees of belief given certain considerations e: (1) one is committed to thinking now that, given e the probability assignment according to p determines what bets would be fair; (2) one is committed to adopting a new probability assignment according to p given e for determining what bets one then thinks would be fair. These commitments are different. With respect to the RST account, one may have commitment 2 without having commitment 1. The Temporal Dutch Book argument is a good argument only with respect to commitment I, not with respect to commitment 2.34 A Temporal Dutch Book argument with respect to commitment 2 would overlook how the rationality of committing oneself to what one will do in hypothetical situations can depend on how likely such situations are and, more generally, on what is to be gained from undertaking such a commitment. To attach a high degree of belief to "cigarettes don't cause cancer" is


143

to commit oneself to accepting a bet that one antecedently expects would be ruinous. It can be rational to make such a commitment if one thinks it sufficiently unlikely that one will be called upon to keep the commitment. It can be rational to allow oneself to have commitments that subject one to a hypothetical Temporal Dutch Book if the chances are sufficiently low that one will have to accept the relevant bets.35 A similar point arises in discussions of deterrence: it can be rational to commit oneself to an act of retaliation that would be very costly by one's present lights if the expected gains from so committing oneself outweigh the expected loss from retaliation, discounted by the probability that retaliation will be required. 36

Explanation, Reasons, and Truth Again If, as I suppose,37 degrees of belief and probabilities are not themselves basic but derive from considerations of inference to the best explanation, then there ought to be a way of accounting for the distinction between epistemic and nonepistemic reasons that does not make such a heavy appeal to considerations about degrees of belief. I would like to be able to offer a nonprobabilistic account, but I have not found a fully satisfactory one. The best I can do is to return to the suggestion considered earlier: epistemic reasons involve an explanatory connection to the truth of what they are reasons for. A problem case is that in which RST requires of its advertising agencies that they do not just believe P, that cigarette smoking does not cause cancer, but also believe that the truth of P is part of the explanation of RST's policy with respect to agencies. The trouble is that this reason now does involve accepting a connection between the truth of P and the nonepistemic practical reasons that one has to believe that P. Here two possibilities need to be considered: (a) part of the reason for the policy is in fact that cigarettes don't cause cancer; and (b) their making the offer is explained entirely in some other way. The question is whether (a) is a better account than (b). Suppose that one's reason for concluding that (a) is a better explanation than (b) is that one will gain financially from so concluding. This makes (a) a better explanation in the sense of being more inferable, but it does not make (a) better as an explanation. It does not make (a) explain any better. On the other hand, the simplicity of a hypothesis may make an explanation better in the sense that the explanation explains better. Perhaps simpler explanations provide a better explanation in the sense that they provide a better understanding.

144


It may still be true that this is entirely a pragmatic matter. Simpler explanations may be easier to grasp in some way. Nevertheless, simplicity may play the relevant role in connecting a belief to the truth of what is believed, a role not played by expected monetary gain when RST is looking for an agency. So, maybe there is a way to salvage the idea that an epistemic reason for p must involve a relevant sort of explanatory connection between the truth of p and the reason. But this idea needs further development.

Conclusion

There is an intuitive realist distinction between epistemic and nonepistemic practical reasons for belief. This poses a problem for pragmatism, which holds that what are normally considered epistemic reasons often depend on practical considerations. Foundational considerations in the theory of subjective probability point to a solution to the problem. A commitment to inference to the best explanation does not lead to the incoherence of supposing that Temporal Dutch Books can be fair, because the commitment to inference to the best explanation helps to determine one's prior probability distribution (in the relevant sense of "prior probability"). Acceptance of nonepistemic reasons differs in not helping to determine one's prior probability distribution, and that allows a pragmatist to make the relevant distinction. I conclude that pragmatists can allow for a distinction between epistemic and nonepistemic reasons without supposing that all practical reasons for belief are nonepistemic reasons.

Notes Preparation of this essay was supported in part by a grant to Princeton University from the James S. McDonnell Foundation. 1. In his comments on an earlier version of this paper at a conference in Santa Clara, California, 28-29 February 1992, Richard Rorty persuasively argued that pragmatism rejects both realism and antirealism. 2. Louis P. Pojman, "Believing and Willing," Canadian Journal of Philosophy 15 (1985): 37-55, esp. 38--47. Pojman gives two arguments against supposing that one can normally believe something at will: a "phenomenological argument," which I dispute in this section, and an argument from "the logic of belief," namely, that it is incoherent to believe p and also believe that one believes p for reasons that do


145

not bear on the truth of p. Below I discuss the related idea that epistemic reasons have to be conceived as connected with the truth of what one believes. 3. Jack Meiland, "What Ought We to Believe, or the Ethics of Belief Revisited," American Philosophical Quarterly 17 (1980): 15-24. 4. Jonathan Bennett, "Why Is Belief Involuntary?" Analysis 50, no. 2 (March 1990): 87-107. In this article, Bennett begins with the intuition that there cannot be practical reasons simply to believe something-in contrast with practical reasons to get oneself to believe something. He then describes his various unsuccessful attempts to explain why that should be so. I believe that consideration of a range of cases undermines his intuition. 5. R. Carnap, "Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology," Revue Internationale de Philosophie 4 (1950): 20-40. 6. W. V. Quine, "Carnap and Logical Truth," in The Ways of Paradox (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966). 7. See also W. V. Quine, "Truth by Convention," in Ways of Paradox; W. v. Quine, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," in From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953); W. V. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960). I discuss some of the issues in "Quine on Meaning and Existence 1: The Death of Meaning," Review of Metaphysics 21 (1967): 124-51; "Meaning Holism Defended," Grazier Philosophische Studien 46 (1993): 163-71; and "Doubts about Conceptual Analysis," in Philosophy in Mind: The Place of Philosophy in the Study of Mind, ed. M. Michael and J. O'Leary-Hawthorne (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994). 8. Gilbert Harman, Change in View: Principles of Reasoning (Cambridge: MIT Press/Bradford Books, 1986); and "Rationality," in Invitation to Cognitive Science, ed. Dan Osherson, 2d ed. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995). 9. This sort of simplicity is relevant to all domains, because in any domain of inquiry it is necessary to reduce candidate theories to a small number. Whether some other sort of simplicity is a virtue may depend on considerations specific to a given domain, a point made by Elliott Sober in Reconstructing the Past (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988). I offer more discussion in my paper, "Simplicity as a Pragmatic Criterion for Deciding What Hypotheses to Take Seriously," in Grue: The New Riddle of Induction, ed. Douglas Stalker (Peru, Ill.: Open Court, 1994), 153-71. 10. Alvin Goldman, "A Causal Theory of Knowing," Journal of Philosophy 64 (1967): 357-72; Gilbert Harman, "Knowledge and Explanation," in Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 126-41. 11. However, I return to something like this idea at the end of the paper. 12. See, e.g., Richard Foley, The Theory of Epistemic Rationality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987). 13. Foley (Epistemic Rationality, 11.) incorrectly supposes that normal intrinsic curiosity involves this general desire. 14. Earl Conee ("The Truth Connection," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52 [1992]: 657-69) argues persuasively that the epistemic goal is knowledge rather than truth. But, again, normal curiosity is not the desire to know everything. 15. Conee ("Truth Connection," 664) gives a similar example.

146


16. Foley, Epistemic Rationality, 7-8. 17. C. G. Hempel, "Inductive Inconsistencies," in Aspects of Scientific Explanation and Other Essays in the Philosophy of Science (New York: Free Press, 1965). 18. See, e.g., Isaac Levi, Gambling with Truth (New York: Knopf, 1967). 19. Conee ("Truth Connection," 667) observes that a nonepistemic reason for believing something is a consideration that is not evidence for the truth of the proposition to be believed; an epistemic reason is a consideration that is evidence of the truth of that proposition. This raises the question of what is meant by "evidence of truth." I assume that, to a first approximation, evidence of the truth of a proposition is any consideration that makes the proposition more likely to be true. 20. A belief about the objective chance of p can provide an epistemic reason to believe p. But one has epistemic reasons to believe p without having beliefs about the objective chance of p. For many propositions p that one has reason to believe, it is not even clear what the objective probability of p might be. Suppose p is the proposition that cigarettes cause cancer, for example. 21. Discovery of a proof can change the probability that it is rational for one to assign to a proposition. I discuss the relevance of implication and inconsistency to inference and reasoning in Change in View, chap. 2. 22. Donald Davidson, J. J. C. McKinsey, and Patrick Suppes, "Outlines of a Formal Theory of Value, 1," Philosophy of Science 22 (1955): 146, attributing the point to Norman Kalkey of the RAND Corporation. 23. Brian Skyrms, "Higher-Order Degrees of Belief," in Prospects for Pragmatism, ed. D. H. Mellor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 118-20; Brian Skyrms, "Coherence," in Scientific Inquiry in Philosophical Perspective, ed. Nicholas Rescher (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987),225-42. 24. The marginal utility of money is diminishing if the value of an additional dollar declines as one's wealth increases. 25. Van Fraassen gives an elegant "two-minute" proof in Laws and Symmetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 159-60. 26. The argument is attributed to David Lews in Paul Teller, "Conditionalization and Observation," Synthese 26 (1973): 218-58. 27. This is not to say that it is always incoherent to expect to have degrees of belief that, together with one's present degrees of belief, would (if one acted on them) subject one to a Temporal Dutch Book. See David Christensen, "Clever Bookies and Coherent Beliefs," Philosophical Review 100 (1991): 229-47. Christensen takes this observation to refute the principle of reflection in Bas van Fraassen, "Belief and the Will," Journal of Philosophy 81 (1984): 235-56, and to cast doubt on Temporal Dutch Book arguments in general. Christensen bases his objection to reflection on van Fraassen's rough statement: "To satisfy the principle, the agent's present subjective probability for proposition A, on the supposition that his subjective probability for this proposition will equal r at some later time, must equal this same number r." ("Clever Bookies," 244). A better statement of reflection begins with the supposition that the agent is committed to a certain principle P for changing the probability distribution to use for determining what bets would be fair, in light of new evidence e. The agent further supposes that at a later time t the subjective probability for A determined by


147

P given the evidence up to that time will equal r. Reflection says that the agent's present subjective probability for A conditional on this supposition must also equal r. Christensen's observation is no objection to the Temporal Dutch Book argument for reflection, if the principle is understood in this way. I make a similar point about the correct formulation of conditionalization in the section below "Why Aren't Nonepistemic Reasons Incoherent?" 28. Van Fraassen, Laws and Symmetry, 160-76. Van Fraassen raises other objections to inference to the best explanation; I will not be concerned with these. 29. Nelson Goodman, Fact, Fiction, and Forecast, 4th ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983). 30. Goodman defines 'grue' in the following way. Select a future time F. Then something X is grue at a time T if and only if, either (1) X's color is observed at some time before F and X is green at T, or (2) X's color is not observed at some time before F and X is blue at T. A key point is that any emeralds so far observed to be green at the time of observation are also known to be grue at the time of observation. 31. Van Fraassen, "Belief and the Will," 235-56. Harman, Thought, 161-63; Harman, Change in View, chaps. 1-2. 32. In Change in View, chap. 3, I argue against taking degrees of belief to be functional aspects of human psychology. 33. Note: I say "seems to be." The issue is discussed further in the following section. 34. This is the same as what is said about reflection in note 27, above. 35. It can, of course, even be rational to be committed to an actual Dutch book, temporal or otherwise, if one's expected losses from the Dutch Book are not as great as the expected gains from the commitment. 36. Thomas Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), chaps. 1-2; and Thomas Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), chap. 2. 37. See note 32, above.

7 Realism, Antirealism, and Pragmatism: Comments on Alston, Chisholm, Davidson, Harman, and Searle

Richard Rorty

oderick Chisholm begins his paper by saying that he assumes his principal role in this volume is "to try to make sure that traditional theory of knowledge has a fair hearing." I assume that my principal role is to make sure that pragmatism gets its innings. Pragmatists see a lot of the problems of modern philosophy as created by unnecessary dualisms (subject vs. object, subjective vs. objective, mind vs. world, etc.). They see epistemology as one of the weeds which sprout in the gaps created by such dualisms. So I take the title of this book-Realism/Antirealism and Epistemology-as an invitation to discuss the consequences of an unhappy distinction for a dubious discipline. At the beginning of his paper, Donald Davidson groups pragmatism together with idealism, verificationism, and other dubious and obsolete positions as a form of antirealism. He defines antirealism invidiously, as the attempt to "read out of existence whatever it decrees lies beyond the scope of human knowledge" and as "trying to trim reality down to fit its epistemology. " Since I persist in trying to interpret Davidson as the most sophisticated and radical of the American pragmatists, it suits my purposes to define pragmatism as the attempt to do something Davidson approves of: getting rid of the scheme-content distinction, and thus of the question of the adequacy of our minds, or our language, to reality. As I see it, pragmatists do not trim reality down to fit their epistemology. Rather, they refuse to have either an ontology (an account of content) or an epistemology (an account of the relation between content and scheme). If you forget about representational relations between mind and world and stick to causal relations between organisms and environments, as Davidson does, it is not clear that you will want, or can get, a theory of knowledge. 1 I think

R

149

150


Davidson comes pretty close to abandoning both ontological and epistemological questions-though, as I shall argue in the next section, not quite close enough. It is true that people become pragmatists for the same reason they become idealists or verificationists: they hope to frustrate the skeptic-the philosopher who says that there may be a lot that we cannot know. Idealists, verificationists, and pragmatists ask the skeptic the same rhetorical question: "Like what, for example?" They hope to force her into a dilemma: either she explains her chosen example of the unknowable in terms of the knowable (in which case it turns out to be knowable after all), or she confesses that it is ineffable (thus ceasing to be a skeptic and becoming a dogmatist).2 Idealism became unpopular because it added a constructive ontological suggestion ("reality is spiritual in nature") to this destructive rhetorical question. Verificationism made the same mistake when it asserted that everything is either a sense experience or a logical construction out of sense experiences. Pragmatists eschew such constructive suggestions and refuse to offer an ontological view. They stick to rhetorical questions. They back up the dilemma propounded above with the question: "What does the idea of seeking knowledge, or truth, add to that of collaborative attempts to achieve such concrete, easily recognizable goods as predictive power, reciprocal trust, or aesthetic bliss?" When they ask this second rhetorical question, pragmatists hope to elicit the answer. It adds nothing save the possibility of being first skeptical, and then epistemological. They hope thereby to block epistemological questions like "Can we know reality, and if so how?" and semantical successor questions like "Can we know when we are referring to reality, and if so how?"and "Is our language ever adequate to reality, and if so when?" They think nothing useful would be lost if philosophers were to stop asking such questions. Getting rid of such questions amounts to giving up on the idea of answering the skeptic by explaining how a scheme fits, or is adequate to, or is in some other way desirably in touch with, a content. Philosophers like Thomas Nagel and Colin McGinn, who are convinced that the skeptic's motives should be respected, think that this is (in Davidson's words) sour grapes; they see Davidson as throwing away content (the world, reality, truth, the goal of inquiry) in order to evade the thought that our schemes might be inadequate to it. So these philosophers typically view Davidson's abandonment of the scheme-content distinction as itself an attempt to trim reality down to size. This is why they call Davidson an antirealist and ignore his repeated protests that he rejects both antirealism and realism.

Realism, Antirealism, and Pragmatism

151

I propose that we follow McGinn (seconded by Alston at p. 60) in saying that "one is not a realist [nor an antirealist] tout court; one is a realist [or an antirealist] with respect to some or other type of subject matter." The terms 'realist' and 'antirealist' should be confined to people who are willing to take seriously the question "Is there a matter of fact about X?" for some specified X. That question neatly fuses the bad epistemological question "Can ... be known?" with the equally bad ontological question "Is ... really real?" Until we drop this fusion of bad old questions, we shall be haunted by the ghost of the scheme-content distinction: the distinction between what there is not a fact about (the subjective) and what there is a fact about (the objective). Pragmatists think that distinction should never be drawn.

Davidson on Objects, Objectivity, and the Indeterminacy of Translation

Davidson, however, flirts with this distinction in his paper for this volume. In its concluding paragraphs, after delighting us pragmatists by saying that "the only ultimate source of objectivity ... is intersubjectivity," he shocks us by making what seems to be an invidious distinction between the ontological status of numbers and of sentences. "Numbers," Davidson says, "like the objects we apply them to, lie, as it were, halfway between ourselves and others. This is what it means to say that they are objective, that they are objects." By contrast, he says, "It cannot be that way with our sentences"(122). He thus continues the Quinean line of thought according to which some things are less suited to be "objects" than others. Even though Davidson long ago waved aside Quine's preoccupation with the physicists' particles as "adventitious philosophical puritanism," and even though he says he is "no nominalist," he still seems willing to make invidious ontological distinctions. This willingness shows up again when he says that "The only object required for the existence of a belief is a believer ... being in a state does not require that there be an entity called a state that one is in" (4). Here we pragmatists want to know what practical difference it makes whether or not states are entities. To be sure, having a belief is different in many respects from having a cat, and both are different in many respects from having a lot of money, having progeny, having musical talent, and having Burmese citizenship. But does a term like 'object' or 'entity' help to explicate the relevant similarities and differences?3 Pragmatists think it simplest, and least ontological, to say that, since

152


objectivity is just intersubjectivity, anything you can talk about-that is, anything you can get some minimal amount of intersubjective agreement about-is, equally with anything else, both an entity and an object. Unicorns, citizenships, round squares, numbers, sentences, tables, quarks, propositional attitudes, and heights are, like everything else you care to mention, on a par when it comes to objectivity, factuality, and every other ontological virtue. (This, of course, is just a way of saying that there is no such thing as an ontological virtue. Paraphrasing what W. 5. Gilbert said about titles of honor, where everything's something, nothing's anything special.) Davidson's reason for saying that our sentences are not objects is a bit cryptic: You and I cannot come to agree on the relevant properties of our sentences as a preliminary to using them to interpret others, for the process of coming to such an agreement involves interpretation of the very sort we thought to prepare for. It makes no sense to ask for a common standard of interpretation, for mutual interpretation provides the only standard we have. (122)

Presumably the "relevant properties" in question are those that tell us which propositional attitudes the sentences express. If so, then Davidson's reason for saying that sentences, unlike numbers, are not out there, halfway between us and our interlocutors, can be paraphrased as follows: Although you and I can of course identify your and my utterances or inscriptions, as noises and sets of marks produced in particular circumstances and contexts, this is not an identification of them as sentences. For a sentence is something that can be held true, can express a belief. We cannot use marks and noises as reference points in our identification of propositional attitudes unless we have already identified which attitudes these sentences express. But if this paraphrase is right, then Davidson might equally well have said that marks and noises are out there, halfway between us and them, and that some of those marks and noises tum out to be sentences, also halfway between us and them. To say that some objects tum out to be this or that-tum out to have another description than the one we used at first-is just to say that they have been related to a different set of objects and thereby have been placed in a new context, fitted into another pattern. You cannot, however, identify or talk about an object without having already fitted it into some complex pattern, though any old complex pattern will do. So when Davidson says that "correct interpretation keeps track of a


153

complex pattern," we should respond that any and every description of anything as anything keeps track of a complex pattern. Even what Sellars called "natural-linguistic objects"-sentences described as marks and noises-are the natural-linguistic objects they are because, as Saussure pointed out, they have been placed within a complex pattern of phonic or graphical relations. 4 In short, relationality and objecthood are the result of having been placed within a complex pattern of relations to other objects. They go all the way down. You cannot use relationality to divide quasi-objects, pseudo-objects, fishy objects, from fine upstanding nonfishy objects. If you don't have any relations, you're nothing-or, at best, ineffable. 5 This amounts to saying: no describability, no objects. That dictum is the kernel of truth in what Davidson describes as the antirealists' "sour grapes" attitude: in Berkeley's claim that to be is to be perceived, James's that "reality is what it is known as," and Ayer's that we can't talk about X unless we can verify statements about X. These are three relatively awkward and misleading ways of making a more basic, better, claim: the requirements for objecthood and for know ability are no more and no less stringent than the requirements for describability and for effability. This is because all four sets of requirements are identical. Nothing effable is anything apart from its relations to other things, because you can't eff without describing, and you can't describe without relating. 6 I think that this pragmatic panrelationalism, and the consequent refusal to withhold full objecthood from any describable, should be congenial to Davidson. As far as I can see, his main reason for avoiding it is his conviction that Quine is right, and Chomsky wrong, about the" double" or "extra" indeterminacy of translation. Davidson shares Quine's conviction that there is something more to this indeterminacy than the ordinary underdetermination of theory by evidence. I do not share this conviction, and I doubt that it can be made compatible with Davidson's naturalization of semantics: his view that a theory of truth and meaning for a language is an empirical account of linguistic behavior. In his paper in this volume, Davidson says that the difference between indeterminacy of translation and undetermination of theory is that "the empirically equivalent theories it accepts for understanding an agent are not incompatible, any more than measurements of weight in pounds and kilos are incompatible theories of weight" (115). But we who follow Chomsky 7 should not accept Davidson's claim that measurement in pounds is compatible with measurement in kilos. Although it does indeed sound funny to describe these as "incompatible theories of weight," it does not sound so funny to describe them as

154


incompatible measurements. If you, on your side of the double-faced scale, keep calling out that the load weighs twenty, and I keep calling out that it weighs thirty-six, we are making prima facie incompatible statements. To be sure, all we have to do to straighten things out is to put each other's activities in context by relating those activities to the right things (i.e., the two faces of the scale) and then add, implicitly or explicitly, little phrases like 'in pounds' or 'in kilos' to the numbers we call out. But the same goes for a lot of other prima facie incompatible statements-for example, those made by Copernicans and Ptolemians. All we have to do to straighten some of these apparent incompatibilities out is to add little phrases like 'from a geocentric perspective' and 'from a heliocentric perspective.' More generally, by lavishly applying the maxim that whenever you meet a contradiction, you should make a distinction, you can render any two empirically equivalent theories compatible. 8 You can, if you really want to, treat them as stylistic variants on one another. But, it may be objected, in the one case the two parties are separated merely by alternative conventions, whereas in the other they disagree about the facts. That line of thought was enticing before Quine began attacking the conventional-empirical and language-fact distinctions, but it sounds fishy now. It should, I think, sound especially fishy to Davidson, the philosopher who generalized Quine's polemic into a criticism of all forms of the polymorphic scheme-content distinction. There is, I think, a way of saving the intuition to which Davidson is appealing without reinstating that latter distinction-though it is a way that lends no aid or comfort to the attempt to deprive states, or anything else, of the status of "objects." Instead of distinguishing language from fact, we can distinguish relative ease from relative difficulty of ironing out apparent disagreements by making distinctions. If just a few readily applicable distinctions will do the job, we shall say that the disagreement was merely apparent (and, if we have not read Quine, "merely verbal"). When it looks as if it will take a lot of distinctions to do the job, so many that it would be hard to keep them all in mind, we start saying that the disagreement is real (and, if we have not read Quine, "factual"). As the distinctions begin to pile up, we stop saying, "Do it either way, as you like," and start saying "We've got to figure out which way is right." Thus, in the case of interpretation, if only a few readily understandable transformations are required to convert translation manual A (in which 'Rome' means Rome) into translation manual B (in which 'Rome' means an area one hundred miles south of Rome), and conversely, we may say that we could get along well enough with either manual. But if a lot of hard-to-remember transformations are required, we shall say that the eas-


155

iest-to-use manual gets the language right and that the competitor is just weird. Pace Quine, getting something right makes just as much sense here as it does in the astrophysical case. In both cases, we should gloss 'right' not as 'true to the intrinsic nature of the objects in question' but as 'suitable tool for getting what we want'. Of course, despite my facile reference to geocentric and heliocentric perspectives (the easy way out that Osiander suggested in his introduction to Copernicus's book), you cannot really clear up the Ptolemy-Copernicus dispute that easily (except for a few pedagogical and navigational purposes).9 But all I need for my argument is the claim that a seamless continuum (of progressively increasing difficulty of reconciliation) stretches from the pounds-kilo case to the Ptolemy-Copernicus case. Different interpretations of quantum theory are nearer to the former, to the end where we say, "Oh, that's a merely philosophical difference. Who cares?" Different interpretations of the meaning of life (or of the Christian Scriptures) are closer to the latter, to the end where we insist that we have to get it right. This continuum of degrees of difficulty of reconciliation ignores traditional distinctions between convention and fact, modes of symbolization and empirical content, Natur- and Geisteswissenschaften. It does not lend itself to the suggestion that we can divide up inquiry into the part in which there are "objective grounds for choosing between competing hypotheses" and the part in which there are no such grounds. On the view I am suggesting, there is no temptation to defend, as Davidson does in his paper, the claim that attributions of propositional attitude are objective. This is because the term means no more than "intersubjective" and because nobody has ever denied that we largely agree about what justifies such attributions. As far as I can see, there is no conflict between abandoning the" double" indeterminacy of translation along the lines I am suggesting and Davidson's claim that "the concentration of psychology on the causal role of reasons rules out any hope that the basic mental concepts can be fitted into a closed system of laws" (111). There is, however, one passage in his section on anomalous monism that gives me pause: the suggestion that there is a promise "intrinsic to physics" that causal concepts such as "catalyst" can "with time and research, be supplanted by an account of the mechanism that will explain what the clumsy causal notion merely finessed." I am suspicious of this explaining-finessing distinction. Consider the biological, instead of the mental. Are the teleological notions employed by biologists clumsy causal notions, which physics promises to supplant? Are biologists who use these notions finessing

156


something that we are confident will eventually be explained? I think that although we all trust that biology will be unified with chemistry and physics in the way Carnap assumed it would,lO we should not say that, prior to this unification, we shall be finessing rather than explaining, being clumsy where we may hope to become graceful. We are, instead, explaining as well as we ever shall. The programmer's software explanation of why the computer is hung up in a loop is as graceful an explanation as we shall ever get (even though a tedious hardware explanation could be given, if anybody were fool enough to ask for it). The chemist's invocation of a catalyst to explain why the reaction took place is equally graceful and complete (even though we could explain it all over again at the molecular or atomic level, if anybody really wanted us to do so). Perhaps I am making too much of one of Davidson's incidental remarks. But I do so for the same reason that I have made a fuss about his use of 'object' and about his continuing sympathy with Quine's doctrine of an "extra" indeterminacy. The idea that the natural sciences, and especially physics, have some sort of ontological privilege goes very deep in Quine. It is clear that many of Davidson's principal differences from Quine stem from his rejection of this idea. ll But I cannot help feeling that there is still a little too much physicalism-and thus a little too much invidious ontologizing-left in Davidson's views and that those views would be more coherent if it were eliminated.

Alston on "Realist Truth"

Pragmatists base many of their arguments on the claim that it doesn't make any difference whether we think of ourselves as striving for truth or for justification, since the difference between the two searches could make no difference to what we actually do. The only way we have of detecting truth, after all, is to inquire into the justification of various truth candidates. So if Alston were right in saying that "a requirement for condition C's justifying belief B is that C renders B significantly likely to be true" and that "we have a lodestar that will guide us in distinguishing between genuine justification-makers and impostors" (81), pragmatism would be in big trouble. On a pragmatist conception, we have no way of distinguishing between genuine justification-makers and impostors, but only ways of distinguishing between what it would take to justify p to an audience A and to another audience A'. There is no such thing, for pragmatists, as justification tout court, precisely because if there were, we should have to have, per impossible, a lodestar of the sort Alston describes. Some audiences, of course, are


157

better or worse informed, more or less skeptical, than others. We can and do make invidious distinctions between audiences, in the manner suggested by Ginet (in a passage which Alston quotes): "the ultimate authority for this ranking must be the concurring judgments of reasonable, experienced people" (81). But what lodestar will guide us when we need to decide whether we ourselves are being reasonable, rather than gullible, in thinking a certain audience reasonable and experienced in a certain area of inquiry? Alston says that "a truth-conducivity conception of justification gives us something better" (81) than an appeal to intuition. But he does not do much to justify this claim about the function of his lodestar, nor to explain how we know a real lodestar from a pseudo-lodestar. Alston follows up his sentence about the lodestar with: At least we do if, as seems to be the case, we can often tell when conditions do render a belief probably true. If a certain type of perceptual presentation is a strong indication that there is a maple tree in front of me, then such a presentation passes at least that truth-conducivity requirement for being a justifier of that belief. (81)

But is the unanimous agreement of the learned men of 1200 on geocentrism, or of members of today's Royal Society on quantum mechanics, a strong indication that geocentrism, or quantum mechanics, is true? Does such agreement also pass the truth-conducivity requirement? Presumably not, but why not? Presumably because (as Alston says later) "for innumerable perceptual, introspective, and memorial cases, as well as for simple empirical generalizations and predictions, we are in a strong position to determine truth value" (87) whereas for more controversial matters we are not. The line between the relatively uncontroversial and the relatively controversial is the only one Alston offers as a way of demarcating areas of inquiry in which we have the help of a lodestar from areas in which, presumably, we do not. Alston does, however, seem to take seriously the claim that I may not be justified in my ordinary, noncontroversial, perceptual beliefs. "Questions about epistemic justification," he says, "are often 'essentially contested questions'" (88). But surely anybody who would contest the justifiability of my perceptually acquired beliefs about maple trees would also contest my claim to be in a strong position to determine the truth value of those beliefs. If we take one contestation seriously, why not the other? How can you be skeptical about justifiability without being equally skeptical about truthconducivity? How could we be, as Alston says we are, "in a much worse

158


position to determine Putnamian truth than we are to determine realist truth" (90)-in a worse position to decide on justifiabilty than on truth? Only if our tests for truth-value were distinct from our tests for justification would it be the case that, as Alston says, "switching from a realist to an epistemic conception of truth greatly worsens our capacity to determine the truth values of beliefs" (90). But what would be an example of such distinctness? To provide such an example, Alston would need to break out of the social practices that determine who is justified in believing what into a realm in which social practices and intuitions play no part-a realm in which the question of the question "Is this apparent truth-conducivity real?" somehow cannot arise. We would need to be shown a lodestar that - unlike our custom of taking perceptual reports of maple trees, but not of UFOs, at face value-gives us a kind of guidance that operates independently of our social practices (or else get an explanation of how the lodestar influences some social practices at some times, but not others at other times). While waiting to be shown this star, the pragmatist will continue to follow Sellars and Brandom in thinking that the sociological distinction between the relatively noncontroversial and the relatively controversial is of no help in detecting truth-conducivity. It is of no help, in demonstrating the existence of such a lodestar, to say that without one we shall be unable to distinguish between epistemic and prudential justification. Alston is quite right that if we turn our backs on truth we shall be left wondering "how to distinguish epistemic justification from other modes." But that is fine with pragmatists. They see the distinction between epistemic and prudential justification as bound up with the bad picture that held us captive and from which Davidson has helped to free us-the picture of two kinds of relations between our beliefs and reality: one merely causal and the other representational. Pragmatists do not agree with Alston that flit is obviously important for attainment of our goals that we have a correct rather than an incorrect 'map' of the things we must interact with" (59). For all the reasons that have led Davidson to say that nobody has been able to put any flesh on the metaphor of "correspondence" or on the claim (made by Alston, at p. 59) that "facts are truth makers," pragmatists think that we will never be able to explain why we interact successfully with things by the fact that we have accurately "mapped" them. Explanations of this sort of our practical successes are always "dormitive power" explanations. Just as there is no test of truth conducivity independent of a test for justifiability, so there is no test for successful mapping independent of successful coping.12 Alston says that "we can zero in on the realist concept of truth, as I have just done in terms of the T-schema, without being committed to any partic-

Realism,Antirealism, and Pragmatism

159

ular view as to what this correspondence relation is on which truth supervenes" (59). But the T-schema, unglossed by any notion of what Alston calls "something like a 'fit,' a 'match,' a 'correspondence' between statement and fact," is too uncontroversial to count as realist. It is only when we gloss the T-schema with some term like 'correspondence' or 'mapping' that Alston's claim that "Truth has to do with the relation of a potential truth bearer to a reality beyond itself' (54) begins to be controversial. Unglossed, it gives us, at most, the Davidsonian claim that an account of human behavior requires a theory that fills in the blanks in a lot of T-sentences. Glossed, it gives us the picture of a relation between a scheme (the potential truth bearers) and a content (reality) that mayor may not fit each other-the picture against which Davidson has leveled familiar objections. Davidsonians do not deny that we humans hold true what we do because of our relations to a reality "beyond" (in the sense of spatiotemporally distinct from) our beliefs. But they see the relevant relations as merely causal. So the question of accurate mapping never arises. To show that that question does arise, Alston would have to show us in more detail why the conception of truth that we get from seeing "that any instance of (10) is analytically true" gives us a "firm grasp of the realist conception of truth" (58; my emphasis). Alston, like Susan Haack,13 thinks that one can milk realism out of the T-schema while staying silent on the nature of correspondence. I follow Davidson in thinking that the T-schema is neutral on all the issues about which Alston and I disagree. Realism with correspondence seems to me unintelligible, and realism without correspondence unrecognizable as realism. More specifically, Alston thinks that anybody who agrees that "what it takes to make a statement true is the actual obtaining of what is claimed to obtain in making that statement" thereby holds a realist conception of truth. This seems to me like claiming that anybody who holds that what it takes to have a substance that puts people to sleep is to have a substance with genuine dormitive power thereby holds a realist conception of dormitivity. Until Alston comes up with distinct, independent tests for the justifiability of statements and for the actual obtaining of what is claimed to obtain in making those statements, I shall continue to think realism a pseudo-issue.

Searle on the Logical Independence of Reality and Representation

I turn now to John Searle's paper. Searle begins by saying that he will defend a view called "external realism," a view that is compatible with

160


giving up both the correspondence theory of truth and the meaningfulness of the idea of a God's-Eye View. 14 This puts him in the position of defending a form of realism that, I suspect, no one has ever attacked. If he were consistent in dismissing the topics of knowledge and truth as beside the point of a discussion of realism, it would be hard to bring Searle's paper into fruitful contact either with the other papers in this volume or with pragmatism. Fortunately, however, he deploys two quite distinct senses of the term 'external realism'-one irrelevant to knowledge and truth, the other relevant. The first sense of 'external realism' is defined by the notion of "logically constituted." Searle says that the external realist is claiming that "reality is not logically constituted by representations, that there is no logical dependence." So an external realist can be an idealist, in the sense of one who believes that all of reality consists of conscious states: "Representations are one thing, the reality represented another, and this point is true even if it should turn out that the only actual reality is representational states" (20-21). Searle goes on to say that "For the realist, it not only could have turned out that there are objects other than representations, but in fact it did turn out that way. For the antirealist, it could not have turned out that there are mind-independent objects" (21). This suggests that a "mind-[logically] independent object" is any object that is not a representation. If that suggestion is right, the antirealist, the one who believes that reality is logically constituted by representations, is somebody who thinks that anything that could possibly exist has to be a representation: that the very idea of a nonrepresentation is some sort of contradiction in terms or is somehow unintelligible. Berkeley may have come close to this view, but it is a long way from anything believed by the critics of realism whom Searle lists (Dummett, Goodman, Kuhn, Feyerabend, Putnam, Rorty, Derrida, Maturana, Varela, Winograd). What principally unites these people is Goodmanian suspicion of the idea that there is a Way the World Is. Searle's discussion of that idea is obscure. Having said, "The view that the world exists independently of our representations of it does not imply that there is a privileged vocabulary for describing it," he quickly goes on to add, "Realism is the view that there is a way that things are that is logically independent of all human representations. Realism does not say how things are but only that there is a way they are" (20). But now, with that introduction of "a way," it is no longer clear what is meant by 'logical independence'. Searle needs a definition of 'logical independence' that is neither (as most previous uses of the term have been) restricted to relations of entailment between propositions nor


161

restricted ad hoc for a single application. All he in fact gives us in his paper is the latter: he tells us that if you don't think it self-contradictory that there should be nonrepresentations in the universe, you thereby show that you believe that "reality is not logically constituted by representations." But this information is of no help whatever for understanding the phrase 'a way things are that is logically independent of representations'. Most of the people on Searle's list argue that a way a world is has to be a way a world is described. Undescribed worlds do not have ways they are. The people Searle wants to criticize deploy what he calls "the argument from conceptual relativity" to argue that the world does not divide itself up into bits, or what Searle calls "aspects," on its own. Many of them will agree with Putnam that elements of what we call "language" or "mind" penetrate so deeply into what we call "reality" that the very project of representing ourselves as being "mappers of something language-independent" is fatally compromised from the start."15

Many will also agree with Davidson that it is futile either to reject or accept the idea that the real and the true are "independent of our beliefs." The only evident positive sense we can make of this phrase, the only use that derives from the intentions of those who prize it, derives from the idea of correspondence, and this is an idea without content. 16

The point on which Davidson and Putnam concur with each other, and with most of the other people on Searle's list, is that causal independence is irrelevant to realism and that no other sense of 'independence' is in sight. If logical independence is to be substituted for causal independence, and if it is to be defined as a relation between items other than propositions, we are entitled to more information about this kind of independence than Searle gives us. Since Searle thinks the claim that there is no privileged vocabulary for describing reality has nothing to do with realism in the sense in which he wishes to defend it, he needs to answer the question, In what sense can a "way the world is" be "independent" of a description of the world? Some philosophers-notably Bernard Williams and David Lewiswould reply that some descriptions of the world are more closely related to the way the world is "in itself." They claim that certain vocabularies are

162


privileged. Searle rejects such claims and thinks of these philosophers as hankering after a "coincidence between truth and reality" (35) that can never be attained. He sees himself as occupying a middle ground between extremes: Williams and Lewis on the one hand and Davidson and Putnam on the other. On Searle's view, there is no way things are in themselves, but there is nevertheless enough of a representation-independent way the world is to make some systems of representation less, and others more, adequate to represent reality (27-28). I do not think that either his paper or the book of which it is part, The Social Construction of Reality, gives us enough help in understanding this intermediate position. When Searle says "some of these systems [of representation] can be used, more or less adequately, to represent" (29), people like Putnam and Davidson will protest that, if no vocabulary is privileged, no system of representation can be more or less adequate for this purpose than any other. I? The situation is not alleviated when we are told, "Carefully stated, external realism is the thesis that there is a way that things are that is independent of all representations of how things are" (39). Sometimes Searle seems to mean no more by this thesis than that a choice of descriptive vocabulary does not determine most of the truth values of the statements made in that vocabulary-a claim with which nobody disagrees. But most of the time he clearly means more than that. To explain what he does mean he would have to find a use for 'a way the world is' that is glossable by neither 'in itself' nor 'under a description'. My hunch is that no such sense can be found. There is a sense in which Searle is right that our "normal understanding" of much of what we say presupposes something like his external realism. But I also think that it is time to give up on this normal understanding. Searle agrees that normal understandings are mortal and gives an example of an earlier shift in normal understanding: the abandonment of the idea that colors are intrinsic properties of things as a result of a better scientific understanding of color perception. IS As I see it, the effect of Darwin's better understanding of the relation between humans and brutes on philosophers like Dewey, Davidson, and Dennett is analogous to the effect of the development of physiological optics on philosophers like Locke and Berkeley.I9 Just as the latter philosophers changed our normal understanding of color, so the former philosophers have been trying to change our normal understanding of truth and knowledge by getting us to drop questions like "subjective or objective?" and "representation or reality?" Such philosophers cannot appeal to intuition, as Searle does. They have to appeal to coherence, by claiming that it will be easier to make


163

things hang together if we give up a certain normal understanding than if we retain it. I have argued elsewhere that pragmatism is indeed counterintuitive, does indeed violate our normal understanding of our place in the universe-but is none the worse for that. 2o Searle ends his paper by saying that "philosophical theories make a tremendous difference to our lives" and that "the rejection of realism ... is an essential component of the attacks on epistemic objectivity, rationality, truth and intelligence in contemporary intellectual life" (50-51). He has expanded upon these concluding remarks in his "Rationality and Realism: What Difference Does it Make?"21 and I have replied to that paper in my "Does Academic Freedom have Philosophical Presuppositions?"22 So I shall not pursue these larger issues here.

Chisholm on the Ultimate Constituents of Reality

Roderick Chisholm opens his paper by agreeing with Michael Dummett that to explain what it is to be a realist about something, one needs the notion of "ultimate constituents of reality" (96). Pragmatists do not think that the philosophical tradition has given a clear sense to 'ultimate' in this phrase. Attempts to do so have, in recent decades, translated claims about the nonultimacy of XS into claims that talk of Xs is reducible to talk of Ys. But that sort of claim has become unpopular in the wake of Quine and Wittgenstein. Many philosophers now doubt that light is shed on philosophical disputes by attempts to specify necessary and sufficient conditions for the truth of statements. To develop Chisholm's point that questions of ontology are not questions of language, however, one would have to specify some way of detecting ultimacy other than the search for such conditions. I am not sure what this would be. Nor am I sure what makes the theory of categories that Chisholm puts forward in the section of his paper called" A Realistic Ontology" realistic (as he says on p. 96 that it is). Perhaps Chisholm's point is that any ontology that claims to have detected ultimacy is automatically realistic? If so, "realistic theory of categories" is pleonastic. After sketching his conception of the theory of knowledge, Chisholm considers "the realistic implications" of this conception (104). He says that "the epistemologist should be a realist with respect to substance" (105). But in the sense of 'realism' Chisholm is using, to be a realist with respect to X is to claim that X is among the ultimate constituents of the universe. It is easy to agree that one can hardly discuss knowledge without discussing psychological properties and can hardly do that without

164


presupposing "that there is an individual substance has that property" (104). But more would be needed to show that substances were ultimate constituents, and as I said above, I am not sure what this more would consist of. Perhaps the kind of argument against an ontology of events that one finds in Kant's "First Analogy of Experience" and again in Strawson's Individuals? When Chisholm turns to criticizing antirealism, he takes Nietzsche as an example of this view, but then he quickly turns to the Cartesian skeptic. Little more is heard of Nietzsche. But I take it that Nietzsche's relevance is that he may have been an example of the self-refuting sort of skeptic who claims to know that nothing can be known. One can agree that this sort of skeptic is, indeed, self-refuting, without seeing a connection between that sort of skepticism and a denial of realism. (Whether Nietzsche's skepticism actually was of this sort is a much disputed question.)23 Since Chisholm agrees with Dummett that realist-antirealist disputes are always "concerning a given subject matter"-whether something is or is not an ultimate constituent of reality-it is hard to fit the Cartesian skeptic, who denies the existence of knowledge, under this rubric. One can imagine such a skeptic saying that he entirely agrees with Chisholm about what the ultimate constituents of reality are and that his disagreements are confined to whether there are any instances of something-knowledgethat Chisholm would not claim was such an ultimate constituent. My own view is that it would be more revelatory of the structure of the controversies in recent philosophy in which the term 'realism' has figured to identify the antirealist not with the person "who is antirealistic about the possibility of succeeding in the epistemic enterprise" (108) but with the person who repudiates the attempt to find ultimate constituents of reality. I see no clear connection between the Cartesian skeptic and such figures as Goodman, Putnam, and Davidson. But these latter figures, with their denial that there is a Way the World Is, do seem to be denying that there is a point to formulating a theory of categories of the sort that Chisholm formulates. 24

Harman on the Epistemic-Prudential Distinction

I have two sets of doubts about Gilbert Harman's paper. The first is the seeming artificiality of his examples. When he says that I might be required to believe something in order to get an account, or to use an encyclopedia, I am inclined to protest that the most I could be required to do would be to act as if I believed this. Pragmatists who agree with Bain


165

that to have a belief is to have a habit of action can still distinguish the account executive who pretends to believe p from the one who really does, by reference to his actual and potential behavior outside the office. My intuition is that when I decide to believe in God, or in the innocence of my friend who has been accused of a vicious crime, or in the constancy of my lover, I am not so much acquiring a belief as exhibiting (or acquiring) faith, hope, and charity.25 When Harman suggests that belief is something you acquire passively, without decision, I tend to agree. When he counters this suggestion by saying that it is hard to distinguish deciding to believe something from adopting a hypothesis to "tryout over the long haul, in depth" (126), I am dubious. I see a big difference between finding myself believing p and finding myself willing to devote a lot of effort to test pout. I have a feeling, however, that at least some of the issues here are what pre-Quineans called 'merely verbal', and I do not want to insist on my intuitions over Harman's. So I shall rest content with saying that when we are active rather than passive, when we find ourselves trying hard not to think about something (e.g., of evidence of the absence of a benevolent and omniscient being, or of my friend's previous criminality, or of my lover's inconstancy), we seem less inclined to call what is going on "the acquisition of a belief." We grope around for other names (faith, trust, obsession, love) for our psychological state. I turn now to my second set of doubts, which concern Harman's attempt to help us pragmatists out by clarifying the distinction between "practical" and "epistemic" reasons for belief. Harman defines pragmatism as the denial that "there is any sharp distinction between purely epistemic reasons to believe something and more practical reasons." It should be noticed that whether this distinction is sharp is a different question from whether Davidson is right in saying that truth "rests ... on the affective attitudes." The latter claim says merely that you have to take desires, hopes, and fears into account in figuring out what people are saying, and thus in figuring out what T-sentences to believe. Such a view offers no support to the idea that you could, or should, abandon your belief that smoking causes cancer because of a belief that you will get money by doing so. Is there an interesting parallel between believing for the sake of the resulting money that smoking doesn't cause cancer and deserting Aristotle for Galileo for the sake of the resulting simplicity? Harman says that "the reasons for selecting the simplest hypothesis are entirely pragmatic." Many people have suggested that to grant this point and nevertheless to accept simplicity as a criterion of theory choice is to start rolling down a

166


slippery slope. At the bottom of that slope, one might have to agree with Harman that it might be rational to be ready to increase one's degree of belief in a proposition simply in order to obtain the RST advertising account. I suspect that the best reason to use simplicity in cosmological theory choice is that all the best cosmological theorists do, and that the best reason not to let our views about cancer be affected by the offer of the RST account is that only the worst account executives do. Saying that these are the best reasons in the neighborhood chimes with Goodman's claim that the rules of logic are descriptions of the inferences we and our friends typically accept, and with Kuhn's statement that there is no such thing as "the scientific method," only sedulous imitation of the scientists whom you want to grow up to be like. This replacement of epistemology with sociology and history contrasts with an idea shared by Alston and Harman: that one can evaluate rationality-where rationality is something like the ability to attain truth and avoid falsity-in a wholesale, philosophical sort of way. Pragmatists tend to eschew this idea, since a theory of rationality looks to us like another name for epistemology. So, of course, does the attempt to get beyond our intuitions and find an area-independent and context-independent distinction between epistemic and practical reasons. It is true that, as Harman says, "there seems to be an intuitively clear distinction between reasons for belief that make the belief more likely to be true and reasons for belief that merely promise some practical benefit of belief without making the belief more likely to be true" (128). But there are lots of seemingly intuitively clear distinctions that experience has shown cannot be backed up in any theoretically fruitful and interesting way-for example, the distinctions between scientific and unscientific approaches, kooks and geniuses, witches and non-witches, analytic and synthetic truths, and moral and prudential considerations. I do not think it likely that we will find an interesting area-independent or disciplineindependent way to tell in which of Harman's two classes a given reason belongs. Harman asks, "How can the intuitively realist distinction between epistemic and nonepistemic reasons be accommodated while allowing for the insights of pragmatism?" Pragmatists are short on insights but long on doubts about dualisms. They wonder about whether we need any sharper or more philosophical-sounding distinctions than the familiar, relatively noncontroversial, area-dependent and context-dependent distinctions between good reasons and bad reasons. The issue between Kuhn and his opponents, on a pragmatist view, is not about what sorts of con-


167

siderations it is rational to invoke when choosing between scientific theories. It is, or should be, about what sorts of considerations in fact get invoked within scientific communities when things get abnormal and messy (and in particular about what sorts of considerations led our ancestors to give up on Aristotle and go with Calileo). Once the historico-sociological task of spelling out these considerations has been accomplished in area after area, discipline after discipline, it is not clear to pragmatists that any philosophical task remains. Harman's concluding proposal about how to tell an epistemic from a nonepistemic reason seems fine for cases in which it is reasonable to ask someone whether Harman's formula on p. 139 holds for r. It works nicely for cases like a bribe offered by a tobacco company-cases in which relevance and irrelevance will strike people as intuitively clear. But I am not sure that it can be made to work in messy situations-those in which relevance is up for grabs, the sorts of cases that philosophers discuss when they argue about "rationality of theory choice." Do I really have a way of determining my prior probability distribution when r is something like "Belief in p may endanger my belief in the divine origin of the church" or "Belief in p will help my candidacy for membership in the Royal Society"? My hunch is that at least at times of scientific revolution, the situation is so confused that nobody has any clear sense of his or her prior probability distributions in the interesting cases. I suspect that sociologists of science like Shapin and Shaffer are right in thinking that it is fruitless at such times to try to disentangle the scientific from the political, the epistemic from the prudential.

Conclusion

Much of what I have said in these comments can be summed up in the claim, for which I have argued elsewhere,26 that truth is not a goal of inquiry. If this claim is right, then many of Alston's and Searle's arguments beg the crucial question. Further, it is less urgent to make the intuitive distinction that Harman is concerned to salvage. Again, the residual Quinean physicalism that I detect in Davidson can be viewed as a result of the traditional mistake of dividing up culture into the part that aims at truth-science, in a sense in which physics is the paradigm of scienceand the parts that aim at something else. That sort of physicalism seems to me the result of taking seriously the unhappy and unnecessary ontological quest for Chisholm's "ultimate constituents of reality" and of turning over authority to pronounce on

168


ultimacy from the philosopher to the physicist. 27 On my view, the results of all areas of inquiry-from microbiology to theology to literary criticism-are likely to be true, for the same uninspiring reasons that Davidson gives for thinking that most of anybody's beliefs are likely to be true. But we may nevertheless have doubts about the worth of one or another of these areas, and thus of those results. We may conclude that we no longer need any theologians, or literary critics, or microbiologists, just as we have decided in the past that we no longer needed any astrologers, monarchs, or torturers. Our decisions about which social practices, audiences, disciplines, and results to encourage and which to discourage are not made by reference to philosophical discoveries. What we call philosophical discoveries are, typically, retrospective justifications of such decisions. 28

Notes 1. John McDowell is right, I think, to emphasize the importance of Davidson's denial that we need "rational constraints on thinking and judging" and of his proposal that we "make do with nothing but causal constraints." Mind and World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), 1994,25. McDowell does not think that this strategy will work. I do. Michael Williams is right, I think, in saying that philosophers have adopted without argument "epistemic realism"-the view that there is a natural kind called "knowledge" to be studied. See his Unnatural Doubts (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), for arguments against this view. 2. This dilemma is a version of what John Searle, in his paper, calls the "Ding an Sich argument." Another version is put forward in Donald Davidson, "The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme," in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 183-98. 3. Here I should admit that I too once made much of the distinction between objects and states. See my "Cartesian Epistemology and Changes in Ontology," in Contemporary American Philosophy, ed. John E. Smith (New York: Humanities Press, 1970),273-92. That paper was criticized by people who said that you could not solve any ontological problems by calling something a state rather than an object and that attempts to do so by Ryle and others (who talked of category mistakes and of the true logical form of sentences) were vain. I now think they were right. 4. This point that describability and being are coextensive and that sameness and difference are relative to descriptions is central to Wittgenstein's later thought. For a discussion of the importance of giving up the notion that sameness and difference may sometimes be "objective" and sometimes "subjective," see Barry Allen, Truth in Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), esp. chap. 7 (on Wittgenstein).


169

5. Aristotle defined primary substance as what could get along without any relations to anything else. A familiar line of antisubstantialist thinking (common to Peirce, Whitehead, Nietzsche, and Heidegger) diagnoses the attempt to discover what Chisholm calls "ultimate constituents of reality" as the lingering residue of this unfortunate Aristotelian admiration for self-sufficiency. These antisubstantialists think Spinoza was right: if you define substance in terms of nonrelationality, there will turn out to be only one substance. This strikes them as a good reason to shrug off the notion of substance and to be suspicious of attempts to split up the universe along the lines of the two parts of subject-predicate sentences (e.g., by distinguishing objects from states). Substantialists who yearn for the start purity and self-sufficiency of the nonrelational and who are not satisfied by Spinoza's pantheism typically resort to ineffability. For, once you have defined God as existence a se, the only plausible path for theology other than pantheism is the via negativa. This was Hegel's point when he said that the concepts of Pure Being and Pure Nothing were pretty well indistinguishable. He went on to argue that, since Spinoza's atemporal One Substance was nothing without its temporal finite modes, and since in the dark night of Schelling's Absolute all cows were black, only a temporalized, dynamic, technicolor pantheism could do justice to God's plenitude. 6. This is just a way of rephrasing the challenge to the skeptic I sketched above: if you think something isn't knowable or isn't describable, either tell us more about it, so that we can see whether you are right (thereby refuting yourself) or don't (thereby appealing to ineffability and making it unnecessary to refute you). Nagel, who commands what he calls "the ambition of transcendence," thinks that an appeal to ineffability is not a concession that one has lost the dialectical game. Rather, it is a way of pointing out that Berkeley, James, Ayer, and Davidson are all playing the same unambitious, "sour grapes" sort of game. For a discussion of Nagel's view, see my "Holism, Intentionality, and the Ambition of Transcendence," in Dennett and His Critics: Demystifying Mind, ed. Bo Dahlbom (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 184-202. 7. I followed Chomsky'S lead in my "Indeterminacy of Translation and of Truth," Synthese 23 (March 1972): 443-62. This paper is now out of date, superseded by twenty-odd years of further discussion. But I still think I was right to argue that Quine's insistence on a "double" indeterminacy is puritanical physicalist prejudice. 8. For some advice from Davidson about how to do this, see W. V. Quine, The Pursuit of Truth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992),97-98. 9. Thomas Kuhn's Copernican Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957) explains why Osiander's pragmatic ecumenicism could not succeed and tells the story of how heliocentrism required changes over the whole face of science and culture. 10. Note that this way does not require reduction, in the sense of discovering necessary and sufficient conditions for the truth of higher-level statements, phrased in lower-level vocabularies. 11. Consider, e.g., the reason Quine (Pursuit of Truth, 42) gives for refusing to "place the stimulus out where Davidson does"-to forget about impacts on nerve

170


endings and just talk about, e.g., tables and stars. He is, he says, "put off by the vagueness of the shared situations." I think that being put off by vagueness should be regarded as a residue of the old Aristotelian obsession with self-sufficiency. Davidson, it seems to me, can take vagueness in his stride. 12. I argue this point at some length in the concluding section of "Holism, Intentionality, and the Ambition of Transcendence." 13. See the exchange between Haack and myself in Rorty and the Pragmatists, ed. Herman Saatkamp (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995), esp. 136-37; 148-49. 14. In chap. 9 of The Social Construction of Reality (New York: Free Press, 1995), Searle offers a defense of the correspondence theory of truth. This defense depends entirely on such claims as "We need a noun or noun phrase to name all those conditions that make the sentence true" and "We need a verb to name the variety of ways in which sentences, when true, relate to facts in a way that makes them true" (202-3). By presupposing that the right-hand side of T-sentences specifies "truth-makers," Searle begs all the questions that Davidson raises about the correspondence theory. Like Sellars, Davidson does not think that 'is true iff' relates linguistic to nonlinguistic items. Searle (along with Alston, Haack, and many others) assumes that it does do this. So he sees "realistic" implications in Tsentences that Davidson does not. The same standoff between Searle and Davidson is evident when, in an appendix to chap. 9, Searle argues against Davidson's assumption that all logically equivalent sentences name the same fact by saying that that assumption "violates our intuitions." The intuition that it violates is that we individuate facts according to which statements they make true (Social Construction of Reality, 224). Davidson, obviously, has no such intuition. 15. Hilary Putnam, Realism with a Human Face (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990),28. 16. Donald Davidson, "The Structure and Content of Truth," Journal of Philosophy 87, no. 6 (June 1990): 305. 17. Davidson, but not Putnam, would refuse to accept the description of a language as a "system of representation"-but this difference is not important for present purposes. 18. My own view is that the important change brought about by modern physiological optics was to suggest that we could safely give up on the notion of "intrinsic property"-safely drop bad questions like "Are colors in things or in us?" "Are color properties intrinsic or relational" and "Is beauty in the eye of the beholder?" But Searle agrees with Locke and Berkeley in thinking the intrinsicrelational distinction of great philosophical importance. 19. I discuss the relation between Darwin, Dewey, and Davidson in "Dewey between Hegel and Darwin," in Rorty and the Pragmatists, 1-15. 20. See the concluding pages of my "Is Truth a Goal of Inquiry?: Davidson vs. Wright," Philosophical Quarterly 45, no. 180 (July 1995): 281-300. 21. DaedeIus 122 (1993): 55-83. 22. Academe 80 (1994): 52-63. 23. The best discussion of this interpretative question that I have come across


171

is Maudemarie Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 24. Davidson has, in the past, put forward a theory of categories. See "The Method of Truth in Metaphysics," a 1977 essay reprinted in his Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 199-215. But that essay answers the question, What kinds of things do we need to talk about in order to have a theory that explains how our language works? Davidson says that such questions are "the old questions of metaphysics in new dress" (Inquiries into Truth, 215). I am not sure that they are. Those old questions had many different motives. 25. I develop this point in "Religious Belief, Intellectual Responsibility, and Romance," in The Cambridge Companion to William James, ed. Ruth-Anna Putnam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 26. See Rorty, "Is Truth a Goal of Inquiry?" 27. For a nice example of such deference, see Quine, Pursuit of Truth, 36. 28. I develop this last, Deweyan, point in "Philosophy and the Future," in

Rorty and the Pragmatists, 197-205.

Index

Alston, William P., 4-5, 7, 8-9, 11, 151, 156-59, 166, 167 anomalous monism, 112, 155 antirealism, 1-8, 10, 11, 12, 21-23, 95, 105-06, 109, 110, 123, 149, 160, 164 Aristotle, 165, 166 autopoetic system, 22 Ayer, A. J., 153 Bain, Alexander, 164-65 behaviorism, 6, 109 Bennett, Jonathan, 125 Berkeley, George, 21, 29, 30, 38, 45, 153, 160, 162 Blanshard, Brand, 61, 62 Bonjour, Laurence, 82-83, 85 Bradley, F. H., 61, 62 Brandom, Robert, 158 Carnap, Rudolf, 25, 99, 114, 126-27, 156 categories, 4, 12, 96, 163. See also ontology Chisholm, Roderick M., 4, 7, 9-10,12, 73-74,76,85,149,163,167-68 Chomsky, Noam, 115, 153 Cicero, 98 conditionalization, rule of, 10, 135-37, 139-40, 142 consciousness, 20-21 convergence, in science, 37-38 Copernicans, 154 Copernicus, 155 correspondence to facts, 15, 16, 58-59, 75, 158. See also truth

Darwin, Charles, 162 Davidson, Donald, 6-7, 10, 11, 149, 150,151-56,158-68 passim deconstruction, 22 Dennett, Daniel, 112-13, 119-22, 162 Derrida, Jacques, 21, 23, 160 Descartes, Rene, 97, 106, 128 Dewey, John, 61, 62, 162 Ding an sich argument (against realism), 8, 23, 33-35 doxastic entailment, 99 dualisms, 149, 166 Dummett, Michael, 4, 21, 95-96, 114, 160, 163, 164 Dutch Book, 10, 134-35. See also Temporal Dutch Book empiricism, 6, 104, 109 entrenchment, 138-39 epistemic conditions, ideal, 89-91 epistemic hierarchy, 98-100 explanation: inference to best, 137-38, 143, 144; and simplicity, 139, 142, 143-44, 165 externalism. See justification Feyerabend, Paul, 21, 160 Fodor, Jerry, 112 Foley, Richard, 74, 85 Galileo, 165, 166 Gilbert, W. S., 152 Ginet, Carl, 76, 77, 79, 81-82, 83,157

173

174

Index

Goldman, Alvin, 71, 80 Goodman, Nelson, 21, 25, 27, 28, 138-39,160, 164,166;theoryof entrenchment, 138-39 lIaack,Susan, 159 lIarman, Gilbert, 5-6, 7, 10-11, 12, 164-67 lIorwich, Paul, 58 lIume, David, 60, 104 idealism, 6, 20, 29, 35, 45, 50, 60, 109, 149, 150, 160; phenomenalist, 8, 40, 45 indeterminacy of translation or interpretation, 10, 11, 110, 112-22, 153, 155, 156 inscrutability of reference, 117-18 intentional acts, 103, 105, 111 intentional phenomena, 104, 109 intentional states, 5,120 intentionality, 16, 18, 39 internalism. See justification intersubjectivity, 152, 155 James, William, 61, 62, 153 justification: conditions of, 76-77, 82; deontological conception of, 72-73; epistemic, 69-74, 75, 85-91, 101, 156, 157, 158; and externalism, 71, 75, 78, 84-85; and internalism, 71-76, 78, 85; prudential, 158; and reliabilism, 71; and truth-conducivity, 81, 157; truth-free, 76, 78-83 Kant, Immanuel, 19,29,34,36,40, 164 knowledge: and antirealism, 105-8; having, 16-17; scientific, 17; theory of, 95, 97-108,149-50; and truth (see truth) Kuhn, Thomas, 21, 160, 166-67 Lesniewski, Stanislaw, 25 Levine, George, 23 Lewis, David, 161, 162 Locke, John, 162

materialism, 6, 109 Maturana, lIumberto, 21, 22-23, 160 McGinn, Colin, 7, 60, 150, 151 Mill, John Stuart, 1-2, 30 Moore, G. E., 36, 38-39, 41, 126, 127 Moser, Paul K., 85 Nagel, Thomas, 150 Neurath, Otto, 101 Newton, Isaac, 62 Newtonian mechanics, 88 Newtonian physics, 28, 89 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 9, 105-6, 164 normal understanding, 41---42, 45-50, 162 objectivity, 16, 17,35,151,152 ontology, 1---4,6,7,11,18,95-98,114, 149, 151, 163, 167 Parmenides, 109 Peirce, Charles S., 61, 62, 102 phenomenalism, 1-3, 6, 30, 60. See also idealism Plato, 35, 109 Platonists, 126 Pollock, John, 76, 77, 79, 82, 83 poststructuralism, 22 pragmatism, 5-6, 10, 11,61, 109, 123---44, 149-51, 156-58, 163, 164-66 probability, as rational degree of belief, 132; subjective, 10, 133-144, 167 Ptolemians, 154 Ptolemy, 155 Putnam, lIilary, 9,19,21,24,25,26,27, 51,52,61-67,74,84,85,87-9, 158-62 passim questions, internal vs. external, 126-27. See also Carnap Quine, W. v., 110-19, 127-28, 151-56, 163, 165, 167 rationality, proof of, 36 realism, 1-8, 12; alethic, 5, 8, 53-94; departmental, 60; and ethics, 2, 3;

Index

external, 3-4, 11, 15-52, 159-63; and mathematics, 2, 6, 123; metaphysical, 61; naive, 1-2,26,27,31; and philosophy of mind, 2 reality, brute vs. socially constructed, 45-49 reasons for belief: epistemic, 10, 11, 12, 123-26, 128, 129, 130-32, 140-41, 144,165,166; evidential, 128; nonepistemic, 10, 11, 123-26, 143, 166; practical, 10, 12, 165, 166; pragmatic,142 Reid, Thomas, 60, 107 relativity: argument from conceptual (against realism), 8, 23-29, 33; conceptual, 16, 17 representations, 4, 15-23,33-36,39, 43-49, 127-28, 149, 158, 160, 161 Rorty, Richard, 7, 9,11-12,21,67-69, 74, 160

Strawson, Peter, 164 subjectivity, 16, 17

Saussure, Ferdinand de, 153 scheme-content distinction, 11, 149, 150, 151, 154 scientific world view, 15-17 Searle, John R., 3-4, 7, 8, 11-12, 159-63, 167 Sellars, Wilfrid, 153, 158 sense data, 19,30,32 skepticism, 29, 32, 78, 106, 150, 157-58; Cartesian, 33, 164; Greek, 98 social constructionism, 8, 40, 45-49 Socratic inquiry, 9, 97, 103 solipsism, 49

universals, 5, 95-96

175

Tarski, Alfred, 58 Temporal Dutch Book, 10, 135-37, 140-43,144, 146-47n27. See also Dutch Book truth, 2, 5, 9, 10, 11, 35, 150, 156, 158, 165; bearers, 5, 7, 54-55, 58, 110, 159; coherence, 62; correspondence theory of, 16, 17, 18-19,58-59,62, 68, 110, 158, 160; epistemic account of, 62-67, 83-91, 158; and epistemic justification, 69-73; and epistemic reasons, 129-30; and knowledge, 75,86; turning one's back on, 9, 67-69,75-83,86,158. See also Tschema T-schema, 9, 11, 57-58, 63-66, 75, 87, 158-59

van Fraassen, Bas, 137-38 Varela, Francesco, 21, 160 verificationism, 6, 109, 149, 150 verificationist argument (against realism), 8, 23, 29-33 Wheeler, J. R., 21 Williams, Bernard, 161, 162 Winograd, Terry, 21, 22-23, 160 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 35, 39, 50, 121, 163

Realism Antirealism and Epistemology

Epistemology, Realism and Truth

Evolutionary Epistemology and Scientific Realism

Evolutionary Epistemology and Scientific Realism

Modal Realism and Modal Epistemology

The Realism-Antirealism Debate in the Philosophy of Science

The Realism-Antirealism Debate in the Age of Alternative Logics (Logic, Epistemology, and the Unity of Science)

The Realism-Antirealism Debate in the Age of Alternative Logics (Logic, Epistemology, and the Unity of Science, volume 23)

Beyond Realism and Antirealism: John Dewey and the Neopragmatists (The Vanderbilt Library of American Philosophy)

Realism

Starmaking: Realism, Anti-Realism, and Irrealism

Critical Realism and Marxism (Critical Realism: Interventions)

Epistemology and Developmental Psychology

Mainstream and Formal Epistemology

Epistemology and the Social

Realism, Mathematics, and Modality

Philosophy and Scientific Realism

Truth, Reference and Realism

Realism and Truth

Realism and Social Science

Philosophy and Scientific Realism

REALISM, MEANING AND TRUTH

Realism and Subjectivism

Philosophy and Scientific Realism

Realism and Social Science

Pure Pragmatics and Epistemology

Argumentation and Social Epistemology

Mainstream and Formal Epistemology

Kant and Contemporary Epistemology

Representation and Realism

Realism, Mathematics, and Modality

Realism Antirealism and Epistemology

Epistemology, Realism and Truth

Evolutionary Epistemology and Scientific Realism

Evolutionary Epistemology and Scientific Realism

Modal Realism and Modal Epistemology

The Realism-Antirealism Debate in the Philosophy of Science

The Realism-Antirealism Debate in the Age of Alternative Logics (Logic, Epistemology, and the Unity of Science)

The Realism-Antirealism Debate in the Age of Alternative Logics (Logic, Epistemology, and the Unity of Science, volume 23)

Beyond Realism and Antirealism: John Dewey and the Neopragmatists (The Vanderbilt Library of American Philosophy)

Realism

Starmaking: Realism, Anti-Realism, and Irrealism

Critical Realism and Marxism (Critical Realism: Interventions)

Epistemology and Developmental Psychology

Mainstream and Formal Epistemology

Epistemology and the Social

Realism, Mathematics, and Modality

Philosophy and Scientific Realism

Truth, Reference and Realism

Realism and Truth

Realism and Social Science

Philosophy and Scientific Realism

REALISM, MEANING AND TRUTH

Realism and Subjectivism

Philosophy and Scientific Realism

Realism and Social Science

Pure Pragmatics and Epistemology

Argumentation and Social Epistemology

Mainstream and Formal Epistemology

Kant and Contemporary Epistemology

Representation and Realism

Realism, Mathematics, and Modality

Recommend Documents