Showing papers on "Realism published in 1982"

Experimentation and Scientific Realism

Abstract: Experimental physics provides the strongest evidence for scientific realism. Entities that in principle cannot be observed are regularly manipulated to produce new phenomena and to investigate other aspects of nature. They are tools, instruments not for thinking but for doing.

The Charybdis of Realism: Epistemological Implications of Bell’s Inequality

Abstract: In scepticism and realism, empiricist epistemology has its Scylla and Charybdis. The main role of scepticism today is in reductio: if a position is shown to lead to scepticism, it is thereby refuted. But fleeing from that danger, we are hard put to steer clear of the metaphysical rocks and shoals of realism. I shall leave the first danger aside for now. 1 Concerning epistemic realism I shall argue that, given one plausible way to make it precise, it is refuted by Bell 's Inequali ty Argument. Realists will presumably wish to formulate their views on epistemology so as to avoid this refutation, and I shall end with some helpful suggestions.

Reasons for realism : selected essays of James J. Gibson

Abstract: James J. Gibson’s numerous theoretical and empirical contributions to the understanding of how people perceive were innovative, controversial, often radical, and always profound. Many of his ideas revolutionized the science of perception, and his influence continued to grow throughout the world. This book, originally published in 1982, is a collection of the most important of Gibson’s essays on the psychology of perception. Drawing from the entire corpus of Gibson’s papers, the editors have selected over thirty works dealing with such diverse topics as ecological optics, event perception, pictorial representation, and the conceptual foundations of psychology. The editors’ goals in preparing the volume were twofold: first to provide easy access to Gibson’s most outstanding papers and talks, including some that were previously unpublished; and second, to provide an intellectual biography of Gibson by including essays from the different periods of his career.

In defense of convergent realism

Abstract: Many realists have maintained that the success of scientific theories can be explained only if they may be regarded as approximately true. Laurens Laudan has in turn contended that a necessary condition for a theory's being approximately true is that its central terms refer, and since many successful theories of the past have employed central terms which we now understand to be non-referential, realism cannot explain their success. The present paper argues that a realist can adopt a view of reference according to which a theory might plausibly be said to be approximately true even though its central terms do not refer, or alternatively, he may construe reference in such a way as to assign reference to a range of successful older theories which includes Laudan's purported counterexamples.

The case for idealism

Abstract: Originally published in 1982, the aim of this book is a controversial one – to refute, by the most rigorous philosophical methods, physical realism and to develop and defend in its place a version of phenomenalism. Physical realism here refers to the thesis that the physical world (or some selected portion of it) is an ingredient of ultimate reality, where ultimate reality is the totality of those entities and facts which are not logically sustained by anything else. Thus, in arguing against physical realism, the author sets out to establish that ultimate reality is wholly non-physical. The crucial elements in this argument are the topic-neutrality of physical description and the relationship between physical geometry and natural law. The version of phenomenalism advanced by John Foster develops out of this refutation of physical realism. Its central claim is that the physical world is the logical creation of the natural (non-logical) constraints on human sense-experience. This phenomenalist perspective assumes that there is some form of time in which human experience occurs but which is logically prior to the physical world, and Foster explores in detail the nature of this pre-physical time and its relation to time as a framework for physical events. This book was a major contribution to contemporary philosophical thinking at the time.

The Currency of the Photograph

Abstract: On 6 October 1951 Berenice Abbott took part in a conference on photography at the Aspen Institute, Colorado. Here, she put forward her view that photography has a strong affinity to writing and that, in the USA, this is to ‘a glorious tradition of unsurpassed realist writers’.2 In the course of her argument she reminded her audience that: ‘Jack London in his powerful novel Martin Eden pleads not only for realism but impassioned realism, shot through with human aspirations and faith, life as it is, real characters in a real world — real conditions.’ She asked: ‘Is this not exactly what photography is meant to do with the sharp, realistic, image-forming lens?’ And a little later, as if in answer, she concluded: ‘Photography cannot ignore the great challenge to reveal and celebrate reality.’3

How to be an Anti-Realist

Abstract: The dispute between realism and anti-realism has been centerstage in Western philosophy ever since Kant's alleged Copernican Revolution. It is center stage now--both in Anglo-American philosophy, and on the continent, where anti-realism runs rife among the hermeneutical epigoni of Heidegger. It is therefore not surprising that the dispute has become a popular topic for APA presidential addresses. Lining up on the antirealist side we have Hilary Putnam, with his 1976 Eastern Division Address entitled "Realism and Reason" and Richard Rorty, who delivered "Pragmatism, Relativism and Irrationalism" to the Eastern Division in 1979. On the realist side we have my illustrious immedicate predecessor but two in this august chair, William P. Alston, whose 1979 presidential address was entitled "Yes, Virginia, there is a Real World". You will notice here a certain imbalance; so far it's been anti-realism two to one. You will also notice a certain flavor of interdivisional dissension: as you can see, it's been the Western Division-that sturdy and stalwart bastion of such traditional values as home, family and realism-against the more effete and epicene Eastern Division, with its old world tendency towards cynicism and world weariness. Of course the Pacific division is yet to be heard from; but it would be rash indeed to predict the behavior of anything containing southern California. Now I hope to mediate the dispute. I shall argue that anti-realism in its presently popular forms is wholly unacceptable; unbridled realism, however is also unlovely; and I shall suggest what I take to be the right way to be an anti-realist.

Three forms of realism

Abstract: The debate surrounding realism is hampered by an aversion to expli cit formulation of the doctrine The literature is certainly replete with resounding one-liners: There are objective facts', Truth is cor respondence with reality', 'Reality is mind-independent', 'Statements are determinately either true or false', Truth may transcend our capacity to recognize it' But such slogans are rarely elaborated upon All too often the arguments, for or against, will proceed as though the nature of realism were so well-understood that no careful statement of the position is required Consequently, several distinct and in dependent positions have at various times been identified with real ism, and the debate is marked by confusion, equivocation and arguments at cross-purposes to one another I think it is worth distinguishing the following three doctrines, each deserving to be regarded as a separate form of realism For the sake of definiteness I shall write mainly about theoretical entities in science But the points are intended to apply more generally to issues surrounding realism in other areas, concerning, for example, numbers, mental states, values, and ordinary material objects First, there is what might be called epistemological realism This consists in the commonplace claim concerning some specified class of postulated entities that they really do exist In this sense we are almost all realists about prime numbers and bacteria, but not about dragons and tachyons No particular conception of truth is involved, nor any commitment to what the existence of the supposed entities would have to consist in However, this brand of realism is not without philosophical interest Concerning material things and the entities proposed by established scientific theories, the view will be opposed only by the rare sceptic with the courage of his convictions, who denies that our beliefs may be justified and is able to confine his own convictions accordingly Thus, epistemological realists about X's are opposed to those who, for either philosophical or non-philoso phical reasons, deny that there are such things1 Secondly, there is what I'll call semantic realism By this I mean the

The Object of Art: The Theory of Illusion in Eighteenth-Century France

Abstract: Are works of art imitations? If so, what exactly do they imitate? Should an artist remind his audience that what it is perceiving is in fact artifice, or should he try above all to persuade it to accept the illusion as reality? Questions such as these, which have dominated aesthetic theory since the Greeks, were debated with extraordinary vigour and ingenuity in eighteenth-century France. In this book Dr Hobson analyses these debates, focusing in turn on painting, the novel, drama, poetry and music. In each case she relates theory to contemporary works of art by Watteau, Chardin, Diderot, Beaumarchais, Gluck and many others. She shows that disputes within the theory of each art centred upon the nature of the perceiver's attention. Dr Hobson provides a method of mapping the changes in artistic style which took place as the century advanced. In discussing such conceptual transformations Dr Hobson opens an important perspective for the study of Romanticism and Realism.

Science and Objectivity

Abstract: Habermas has not yet explicitly addressed himself to the detailed problems of philosophy of science as these are currently being discussed in the analytic tradition. That is to say, he has not participated directly in the post-Kuhn and post-Feyerabend debates on truth and meaning, instrumentalism, realism and relativism, that are primarily associated with Davidson, Kripke, Putnam and others who more or less indirectly owe their problem-situation to the work of Quine. On the other hand, in Habermas’s writings since Knowledge and Human Interests there is to be found a sufficiently systematic discussion of natural science to enable us to derive an account of his distinctive approach to these problems. My aim in this essay is to give a critical account of this approach.

An Ambiguity in Marx's and Engels's Account of Justice and Equality'

Abstract: of rich and poor. Marx is better understood as defending a version of moral objectivity or moral realism. The paper begins with an example from the recent debate about justice in the international distribution of wealth to highlight the implausibility of a relativist or reductionist account. It then describes alternative views of the status of justice and equality in Marx and Engels and explores the logical structure of Marx's critique of Proudhon. A fourth section examines the analogy between Marx's and Engels's realism in the philosophy of science and their realist arguments in ethics, focusing on Marx's and Engels's non-relativist and non-reductionist conception of moral progress. The conclusion sets Marx's use of concepts of exploitation in the context of his overall moral judgments and suggests that Marx's social or historical theory rather than his moral standards are the most controversial part of his ethical argument.

Hermeneutical Realism and Scientific Observation

Abstract: Using the methods of hermeneutic phenomenology, and against the background of the principle that the real is what is or can be given in a public way in perception as a state of the World, and of the thesis established elsewhere that acts of perception are always epistemic, contextual, and hermeneutical, the writer proposes that objects of scientific observation are perceptual objects, states of the World described by theoretical scientific terms and, therefore, real. This thesis of Hermeneutical Realism is proved by showing how the response of a standard instrument is 'read' as if it were a 'text'. Conclusions are then drawn about a number of topics, including Scientific Realism, Conventionalism, and Cultural Relativism.

Realism and logic

Abstract: Michael Dummet t may fairly be said to have given theory of meaning a new complexion by firmly identifying, as one of its foundational issues, the tension between what he labels realism and anti-realism. The former is the view that the meaning of a declarative sentence consists in its possibly unrecognisable or verification-transcendent truth condition; i.e., the view that a speaker 's multifarious semantic competences are all in the last analysis to be accounted for in terms of his implicitly associating, with each declarative sentence of his language, a state of affairs whose possibly unrecognisable obtaining is necessary and sufficient for its truth. The crux is the contention that the association is effected in the teeth of the fact that the question whether the state of affairs obtains or not is wholly independent of the speaker 's capacity, even in principle, to determine that it does. Anti-realists argue that we cannot be credited with a grasp of such t ranscendent truth conditions: they urge there is nothing in our verbal behaviour to warrant the attribution to us of an implicit association of sentences and t ranscendent states of affairs; nor is it possible to see how such an association could be taught and learned in the first place, l The thought is a natural one that this dispute must harbour metaphysical implications. In the case of nearly all kinds of sentence, most of us presumably feel a compulsive attraction towards the belief that those sentences deal with an objective or mind-independent reality, a reality, that is, that exists irrespective of any capacity on our part to attain knowledge about it. Surely, one wants to say, that intuitive b e l i e f call it ontological realism i s vindicated just in case a realist t reatment of those sentences can be sustained. Likewise, contraposing one half of that bi-implication, it seems evident that anti-realism or \"verif icationism\", in its insistence on an essential link between human intellectual capacity on the one hand and on the other the boundaries of what we can make intelligible to ourselves, i.e.,

Pagan and Christian: Sociological Euhemerism Versus American Sociology of Religion

Abstract: Human knowledge is such that understanding of religion is inevitably disconsolate and pagan--specifically , Euhemeristic. So it was with classical sociological interpretations of religion, for which sociological accounts were alternatives to realist accounts or religious self-images. In guise of briefs for "detente" or against "reductionism," American sociology of religion has converged upon a realist theory which reendorses religious self-images. Euhemeristic and realist accounts are compared in order to argue that realist theories of religion are not only bad general theories, they are actually anti-sociological theories. Realism has effectively impeded Euhemeristic accounts within American sociology of religion, although they are being given elsewhere.

I. A. Richards in Retrospect

Abstract: I. A. Richards ushered the spirit of Cambridge realism into semantics and literary criticism. When he arrived as an undergraduate in 1911, Cambridge was in the midst of its finest philosophical flowering since the Puritanism and Platonism of the seventeenth century. The revolution of G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell against Hegelian idealism had already occurred; the Age of Principia was under way. There was a reassertion of native empiricism and a new interest in philosophical psychology, and the whole discussion was marked increasingly by a preoccupation with language. Richards, too, would break with the past, with the history of criticism in the previous two generations, gather psychological ideas to establish an empirical semantics and aesthetics, and center his attention on language. Although Romantic and late-Victorian values inform his theories, Richards set down an original criticism on first principles, not on tradition. Many of his books' titles show this rationalist strain: The Foundations of Aesthetics (1921), The Meaning of Meaning (1923), Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), Basic Rules of Reason (1933), and The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936).1 The originality and influence of Richards' criticism can be shown by the number of terms he put into circulation, terms which became the currency of debate for almost half a century: close reading, tone, pseudostatement, stock response, tension, equilibrium, tenor and vehicle of metaphor, emotive and referential language.

The realism in perception

Abstract: The traditional metaphysical doctrine of realism holds that physical objects exist and are as they are independently of anyone's perceptions of them (or theories or beliefs about them). The traditional epistemological doctrine of realism-naive or direct realism-holds that we perceive physical objects directly, in that we do not perceive sense-data or appearances or ideas or whatever from which we then infer the existence and nature of physical objects themselves. I want to urge a certain analysis of perception as "acquaintance", or "intuition", an analysis which entails the epistemological doctrine. And on that basis I want to show how the content of everyday perception commits one to metaphysical realism.