Showing papers on "Realism published in 1981"

A Confutation of Convergent Realism

Abstract: This essay contains a partial exploration of some key concepts associated with the epistemology of realist philosophies of science. It shows that neither reference nor approximate truth will do the explanatory jobs that realists expect of them. Equally, several widely-held realist theses about the nature of inter-theoretic relations and scientific progress are scrutinized and found wanting. Finally, it is argued that the history of science, far from confirming scientific realism, decisively confutes several extant versions of avowedly 'naturalistic' forms of scientific realism.

The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual

Abstract: Introduction: the Distinctive role of Socialist Realism in Soviet Culture I. Socialist Realism before 1932 1. What Socialist Realism Is and What Led to Its Adoption as the Official Method of Soviet Literature 2. The Positive Hero in Prevolutionary Fiction 3. Socialist Realist Classics of the Twenties II. High Stalinist Culture 4. The Machine and the Garden: Literature and the Metaphors for the New Society 5. The Stalinist Myth of the "Great Family" 6. The Sense of Reality in the Heroic Age III. An Analysis of the Conventional Soviet Novel 7. The Prototypical Plot 8. Three Auxiliary Patterns of Ritual Sacrifice IV. Soviet Fiction since World War II 9. The Post-war Stalin Period (1944-53) 10. The Khrushchev Years 11. Paradise Lost or Paradise Regained? Conclusion Appendix A: The Master Plot as Exemplified in the Production Novel and Other Basic Types of Novel of the Stalin Period Appendix B: The Official Short List of Model Novels as Inferred from Speeches to Writers' Union Congresses Afterword Notes Select Bibliography Index

Political Realism and Human Interests

Abstract: Although political realism is often understood as a more or less homogeneous tradition fixed on certain essential concepts, John Herz's provocative piece prompts an attempt to examine realist scholarship in a way that reveals some deep antinomies: some internal tensions that make realist scholarship, at least potentially, an evolving, open-ended “dialogue.” Specifically, Jurgen Habermas's categories of knowledge-constitutive interests—practical, technical, and emancipatory—are employed to distinguish two opposed aspects of the realist dialogue: practical realism and technical realism. Practical realism is guided by a practical cognitive interest in sustaining intersubjective understanding within the context of tradition. Its corresponding approach to inquiry and grounding is hermeneutic. Technical realism is guided by a technical cognitive interest in coming to grips with objective laws so as to expand powers of technical control over an objectified reality. Its approach to inquiry and grounding is essentially positivistic. Against this background, Herz's contribution to the realist dialogue is that, unique among realists, he brings a strong commitment to an emancipatory cognitive interest—an interest in self-reflection as the basis for the autonomous expression of will and consciousness in the human species' “self-formative process.” Interpreted in this light, Herz is seen to employ a two-sided discursive strategy, each side addressed to one of realism's two aspects, the practical and the technical. However, though brilliant in conception, Herz's argument is unlikely to be persuasive if realist scholars are at base positivist scientists oriented by a technical interest in control. In this sense, Herz's piece represents a critical “test” of realism, its essence, and its developmental potential.

Realism, rationalism and scientific method

Abstract: Introduction to volumes 1 and 2 Part I. On The Interpretation of Scientific Theories: 1. Introduction: scientific realism and philosophical realism 3. An attempt at a realistic interpretation of scientific theories 4. Explanation, reduction and empiricism 5. On the 'meaning' of scientific terms 6. Reply to criticism: comments on Smart, Sellars and Putnam 7. Science without experience Part II. Applications and Criticisms: 8. Introduction: proliferation and realism as methodological principles 9. Linguistic arguments and scientific method 10. Materialism and the mind-body problem 11. Realism and instrumentalism: comments on the logic of factual support 12. A note on the problem of induction 13. On the quantum theory of measurement 14. Professor Bohm's philosophy of nature 15. Reichenbach's interpretation of quantum mechanics 16. Niels Bohr's world view 17. Hidden variables and the argument of Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen Sources Name index Subject index.

The road of inquiry, Charles Peirce's pragmatic realism

Abstract: Scientist, mathematician, thinker, the father of pragmatism, the inspiration for William James and John Dewey, Charles Peirce has remained until recently a philosopher's philosopher. Peirce trod a fine line between the extremes of nominalism and realism, tough-minded pragmatism and metaphysical speculation. As Peter Skagestad makes clear, Peirce's system of thought was fragmented, incomplete, and sometimes inconsistent. But one overriding concern gives unity to the whole: the road of inquiry must never be blocked.

Political Realism Revisited

Abstract: Originating in a debate on political realism with the late Hans Morgenthau, this article purports to reanalyze some basic concepts underlying traditional realism (such as power, security, national interest, international systems) in the light of the fundamental changes in international relations that are indicated by the terms population pressure, resources depletion, environmental destruction, and, last but not least, armament races and nuclear superarmament. In suggesting solutions (an attitude and policy of universalism replacing national and other group parochialism, for instance), I have tried to keep my approach equidistant from a utopianism that would substitute world authority for the nation-state system and from a superrealism that denies the feasibility of any more internationalist policy altogether.

The Logic of Realism: A Hegelian Approach

Abstract: The many facets of the realism debate reflect the complexity of the subject. Realism was an accepted standard of value only during the romantic period; it became more prominent later as it became more problematic. Major senses of “real” in the nineteenth century are (1) universal essence, (2) irregular minute particular, and (3) causal regularity. Realist plotting typically juxtaposes background tableau and foreground coup de theatre; realist style typically consists of multiple silhouettings. Realism is a semiosis by silhouetting. Hegel's analysis of reality in the Science of Logic explains the association of realism with silhouetting, shows the systematic and historical relationships among the various critical positions and the nineteenth-century senses of “real,” and finally locates them with respect to the trope of inversion. The realist or silhouetting style falls between the relational style of the eighteenth century and the dispersive style of the twentieth.

Rebels and precursors: The revolutionary years of Australian art

Abstract: Introductionindissolubly linked with the character of their art. As artists they werenThe claim is often made that Australians have a unique capacity fornturning their backs upon that which is richest in their heritage. A morenaccurate assessment is that they have an even greater capacity for distortingnthat heritage to make for themselves a more comforting mirror.nNowhere is this more apparent than in the period spanned by thisnbook, the two decades between the Great Depression and the beginningsnof the Cold War. These were years of unparalleled intellectualnand artistic ferment; they were also years that afforded scant comfortnto most Australians, least of all the artists and writers who are the subjectnof this study. This book is about the development of a core of Australiannartists: Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker, Arthur Boyd, JohnnPerceval, Yosl Bergner, Noel Counihan, Russell Drysdale andnothers - artists central to contemporary Australian art. It is also aboutntheir friends, patrons, allies and enemies - a portrait of a period, a generationnand its art. What characterized that art above all else was a deepnand pervasive concern for realism, the reality of human social andnpsychological experience at a time of unremitting crisis and intensenintellectual struggle. This preoccupation, filtered and given formnthrough surrealist, expressionist or social realist modes of art producednimages that are amongst the most uncompromising and authoritativenrecords of the Australian experience.Such records were not a product of either social or intellectual isolation.nThe artists and the circumstances in which their works werenproduced are as remarkable as the images themselves. Artists andnwriters lived together, talked, argued, and exchanged ideas on levelsnand in ways that have few parallels. In part this communalism wasnnecessitated by the actively hostile or uncomprehendingly indifferentnworld in which radicals found themselves in the 1930s and 1940s. Itnwas also, however, a part of the new social values that seemednindissolubly linked with the character of their art. As artists they werenalso highly articulate. It was this degree of political and intellectualnself-awareness and ability to communicate with force and insight innboth words and paint that ultimately produced a revolution innAustralia's cultural life.This book about painting and the politics of painting aims to tracenthe course of a distinctly liberal and liberalizing cultural tradition, onenof the least recognized of seminal traditions in this country. Such a traditionnwas forged at a time of almost unbroken political crisis. Then1930s and 1940s, as the era of Hitler and Stalin, were intensely politicalnyears marked by ideological crusades and cynical opportunism, thenconflicting claims of nationalism and internationalism, and thenexperience of economic depression and total war. The impact of thisnclimate on Australian artists was profound; these events made it possiblento anticipate imminent revolution - nothing less than a violentnand total overthrow of established order - and Australian radical artnreflected in full measure the intensity of that climate. The transitionnfrom the radical left-wing certainties of the 1930s to a more complexnand shifting set of values and moral imperatives in the 1940s helpedncondition the emergence of a radical and innovative modernism. Onnone level the consequence was a revivification of Australian art, onnanother a rediscovery of Australia and a sense of being Australian.nThough they did not know it at the time, the artists of the 1940s hadnestablished an informed and many-levelled heritage to which Australiansncould return in the continuing quest for identity and sense ofnplace. n n

Prelude to Galileo. Essays on Medieval and Sixteenth-Century sources of Galileo's thought.

Abstract: Can it be true that Galilean studies will be without end, without conclusion, that each interpreter will find his own Galileo? William A. Wallace seems to have a historical grasp which will have to be matched by any further workers: he sees directly into Galileo's primary epoch of intellectual formation, the sixteenth century. In this volume, Wallace provides the companion to his splendid annotated translation of CaWeo's Early Notebooks: The Physical Questions (University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), pointing to the 'realist' sources, mainly unearthed by the author himself during the past two decades. Explicit controversy arises, for the issues are serious: nominalism and realism, two early rivals for the foundation of knowledge, contend at the birth of modem science, or better yet, contend in our modem efforts to understand that birth. Related to this, continuity and discontinuity, so opposed to each other, are interwoven in the interpretive writings ever since those striking works of Duhem in the first years of this century, and the later studies of Annaliese Maier, Alexandre Koyre and E. A. Moody. Historio grapher as well as philosopher, Wallace has critically supported the continuity of scientific development without abandoning the revolutionary transforma tive achievement of Galileo's labors. That continuity had its contemporary as well as developmental quality; and we note that William Wallace's Prelude studies are complementary to Maurice A. Finocchiaro's sensitive study of CaWeo and the Art of Reasoning (Boston Studies 61, 1980), wherein the actuality of rhetoric and logic comes to the fore."

Realism and the progress of science

Abstract: Preface Introduction 1. A realist account of scientific progress 2. The scrutability of reference 3. A theory of interpretation 4. Cluster theories of reference 5. The account in perspective Conclusion Bibliography Index.

Realism, marxism and human geography

Abstract: For a long time one school of players favoured the technique of stating side by side, developing in counterpoint, and finally harmoniously combining two hostile themes or ideas, such as…individual and community. In such a Game the goal was to develop both themes or theses with impartiality, to evolve out of thesis and antithesis the purest possible synthesis. (Herman Hesse, The Glass Bead Game)

Realism and Reason: Convention: a theme in philosophy

Abstract: entities. But his construction (which is a masterpiece of ingenuity and careful argument) requires that we accept absolute space-time points and arbitrary sets of spacetime points as "concrete"; most philosophers (including me) would regard this as "cheating." See Field's Science Without Numbers (Oxford, 1980). 6 "Versions" and "world" and the perplexing problem of their identity or nonidentity are brilliantly discussed in Nelson Goodman's Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis, 1978). 7 Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (New York, 1977). 8 "Carnap and Logical Truth," in Schilpp, The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, pp. 385-406. 9 Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, pp. 116-20. 10 "Is Modern Architecture Dead?" New York Review of Books, 16 July 1981, pp. 17-22. 14 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.28 on Tue, 30 Aug 2016 04:38:12 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

The Discipline International Relations: a Multi-National Perspective

Abstract: A SHOCKING BUT WONDERFULLY IRONIC aspect of the history of the discipline international relations as typically portrayed in American professional literature is that it is as American as apple pie. The typical account gives the birthday of the discipline as either just before or immediately after World War I. The story may specify that the creator scholars were American, or it may not mention their nationality. In any case, a succession of scholars is pictured as taking the discipline on safari from idealism to realism and from there to behavioralism and post-behavioralism. At first our heroes were seduced by international law, diplomatic history and international organization, all of which were used to underpine the discipline. The position of the idealists deteriorated with the coming of World War II, and the realists, behavioralists, and neo-behavioralists in order came to the fore. The story ends with traditionalism retreating in disorder and with a self-confident new establishment in control.' This new group, which is usually referred to here as the

Probabilistic thinking, thermodynamics and the interaction of the history and philosophy of science

Abstract: Why Do We Find the Origin of a Calculus of Probabilities in the Seventeenth Century?.- Some Remarks on the Calculus of Probability in the Eighteenth Century.- Probability and the Problem of Induction.- Probabilities and Causes: On Life Tables, Causes of Death, and Etiological Diagnoses.- From the Emergence of Probability to the Erosion of Determinism.- John Venn's Logic of Chance.- Robert Leslie Ellis and the Frequency Theory.- Reduction as a Problem: Some Remarks on the History of Statistical Mechanics from a Philosophical Point of View.- Boltzmann's Conception of Theory Construction: The Promotion of Pluralism, Provisionalism, and Pragmatic Realism.- The Mach-Boltzmann Controversy and Maxwell's Views on Physical Reality.- Boltzmann, Mach and Russian Physicists of the Late Nineteenth Century.- An Example of a Theory-Frame: Equilibrium Thermodynamics.- What Have the History and Philosophy of Science to Do for One Another?.- A Comment on E. Agazzi, 'What Have the History and Philosophy of Science to Do for One Another?'.- Methodology and the Functional Identity of Science and Philosophy.- On Making History.- A Comment on J.D. North, 'On Making History'.- Reply to J.D. North, 'On Making History'.- Influences of Some Concepts of Biology on Progress in Philosophy.- Philosophy of Science, History of Science, and Science of Science.- Interrelations between History of Science and Philosophy of Science in Research in the Development of Technical Sciences.- From History of Science to Theory of Science: An Essay on V.I. Vernadsky's Work (1863-1945).- Utility versus Truth: At Least One Reflection on the Importance of the Philosophy of Science for the History of Science.- Index of Names.- Index of Subjects.

Realism, rationalism and scientific method: Introduction: scientific realism and philosophical realism

Abstract: HISTORICAL BACKGROUND Scientific realism is a general theory of (scientific) knowledge. In one of its forms it assumes that the world is independent of our knowledge-gathering activities and that science is the best way to explore it. Science not only produces predictions, it is also about the nature of things; it is metaphysics and engineering theory in one. As will be shown in vol. 2, ch. 1.1 scientific realism owes its existence and its concepts to an ancient antagonism between commonsense and comprehensive theories. It arose when Greek intellectuals, guided by a love for abstractions, new kinds of stories (now called ‘arguments’) and new values for life, denied the traditional views and tried to replace them by their own accounts. It was the fight between tradition and these accounts, ‘the ancient battle between philosophy and poetry’, that led to a consideration of traditions as a whole and introduced general notions of existence and reality. Scientific realism has had a considerable influence on the development of science. It was not only a way of describing results after they had been obtained by other means, it also provided strategies for research and suggestions for the solution of special problems. Thus Copernicus ' claim that his new astronomy reflected the true arrangement of the spheres raised dynamical, methodological as well as exegetic problems ( SFS , 40ff). His ideas were in conflict with physics, epistemology and theological doctrine, all of which were important boundary conditions of research.

Realism and drug refusal: a reply to Appelbaum and Gutheil.

Abstract: Appelbaum and Gutheil recently published in the Bulletin an appropriate call for research relevant to issues raised by the dispute over the legal right of committed mental patients to decline treatment. I In support of their call, they described their own limited study of refusers and discussed the right to refuse medication dispute in light of what they regarded as the \"clinical realities\" of the situation. Certainly, empirical information would be of immense value in addressing the morass presented by the refusal issue, but I believe that Appelbaum and Gutheil have, in their effort to emphasize the clinical perspective, done injustice to other concerns and that further research should not proceed in the absence of greater sensitivity to these concerns.

Realism, Perspective, and the Novel

Abstract: This discussion focuses primarily on the realistic novel, but it extends beyond the nineteenth century, the period in which the realistic novel flourished, and even beyond the scope of purely literary considerations. To establish the premises of realism, I resort to analogies with painting and to illustrations from geometry because the space intuitions evident in these arts provide suggestive new approaches to realism in literature, a temporal medium. When quattrocento painters began to use the single vanishing point to organize their pictures, they made their chief formal principle the point of view of a single, fixed spectator: a graphic illustration long before Descartes of that primacy of individual experience over received truths which characterizes realism and which has its philosophical analogues in Cartesian epistemology. I intend, by contrasting realistic with typological forms of art and by comparing different forms of realism, to locate the premises that are implied by realistic conventions. In making such comparisons, I necessarily leap over centuries. I assume that premise and convention can best be illustrated by contrast and that changes in premise and convention involve homeostatic cultural shifts which cannot be perceived except on a large scale. So while there are important differences between quattrocento painting and nineteenth-century literature, they are less significant for my purposes than what unites them. The really interesting contrast lies between medieval and post-Renaissance art rather than between two forms of realism, however widely separated in time. By looking at literary realism in such a context and by using necessarily generalized terms, I wish to locate the realistic novel in relation to a wider historical and intellectual tradition.

Sets and Numbers

Abstract: Various positions in the philosophy of mathematics have been grouped together under the heading "realism" or "Platonism".' The central tenets of these views are that mathematical statements are either true or false, that they are so by virtue of the properties of independently existing mathematical objects (not the makeup of the human mind, the idiosyncracies of human language, etc.), and that their possessing these truth values is independent of our ability (or inability) to determine which truth values they possess. (Dummett [4], p. 147, Putnam [ 19], pp. 69-70) Views of this sort allow a standard Tarskian semantics for mathematical discourse, square with the pre-philosophical views of many mathematicians, and simplify our account of applied mathematics. (Putnam [19], pp. 337-341) Still, mathematical realisms seem susceptible to popular challenges of two types. Those of the first type are basically epistemological: for example, given that mathematics is about objects of a curious sort, how are human beings able to interact with these objects in ways appropriate for referring to or knowing about them? (Benacerraf [1], Lear [13], Jubien [10]) Those of the second type, the ontological challenges, apply to mathematical realisms with logicist, or more accurately, set-theory-ist tendencies; for example, if numbers are sets, which sets are they?2 (Benacerraf [2], Kitcher [11]) My goal here is to indicate how one particular form of mathematical realism with set-theory-ist tendencies might begin to meet these challenges. This particular view, which I will call set theoretic realism, derives from the writings of G6del ([8] and [9]), though some deviations and extrapolations from the texts have been necessary. I hope that set theoretic realism will seem attractive, or at least interesting, in its own right, because I won't argue for it directly. To repeat, my limited objective is to meet some forms of the above-mentioned popular challenges. Even this is a fairly large task, so it is fortunate that my defense of set theoretic realism against some recent versions of the epistemological challenge is contained elsewhere ([14]).3 Here I will

Shadworth Hodgson and William James's formulation of space perception: Phenomenology and perceptual realism

Abstract: This paper has two related goals. First, it seeks to show that the theory of perception found in William James's Principles of Psychology is thoroughly consistent if it is approached through the framework of perceptual realism versus constructionism rather than the nativism versus empiricism debate. As such, this paper offers an alternative to Nicholas Pastore's claim that there are two contradictory theories of perception in the Principles. James's commitment of perceptual realism is articulated within the contexts of his (1) critique of constructionist perception theories, (2) notion of the spatial quale, and (3) formulation of the role of knowledge in adult perception. The second goal of this paper deals with the historical development of James's perceptual realism. Here it is argued that Shadworth Hodgson's method of reflection-an anticipation of Husserl's phenomenological reduction-served as the basis of James's commitment of perceptual realism.

A Theory of Genre: Romance, Realism, and Moral Reality

Abstract: strongly advised authors "to live in the presence of reality." Since "philosophic words, if one has not been educated at a university, are apt to play one false," Woolf could not define precisely what she meant by "reality." It was, she said, "something very erratic, very undependable-now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now in a daffodil in the sun." She could describe reality only by noting that whatever it "touches, it fixes and makes permanent"; reality is what appears when the world is "bared of its covering and given an intenser life." Reality is "invigorating." The writer's business, Woolf concluded, was to find this reality, to "collect it and communicate it to the rest of us." 1 Woolf's concept of "reality" is complex, and its implications are worth examination. It differs considerably from the idea of reality which is prevalent among literary historians, and which is exemplified by Rene Wellek's definition of realism as "the objective representation of contemporary social reality." For Wellek reality is not, as for Woolf, a normative concept. It is instead a collection of facts which exist independently in the world and await reproduction by the writer. This same concept of reality underlies Jose Ortega y Gasset's distinction between realist and modernist art: comparing the work of art to a window pane, he said that works of realism look through the glass and make it invisible, whereas modernist works focus instead on the glass itself and see only a confused blur of color and form.2 That sophisticated literary historians should hold this view of reality is somewhat startling, since philosophy long ago rejected the belief that

The transformation of invention in nineteenth century American rhetoric

Abstract: The virtual disappearance of an inventio of discovery in American rhetoric during the nineteenth century has been extensively chronicled. This discussion attempts to explain the development, starting with the truism that rhetorical systems are cultural products arising in response to the needs of an age. The shift in the nature of invention was the direct result of the supremacy of Campbell, Blair, and Whately in rhetorical discussions of the last century, the three thinkers proving compatible with the dominant American views in philosophy, science, and art—the philosophy being Scottish Common Sense Realism, the science practical rather than theoretical, and the aesthetic conservative socially and politically.