Showing papers on "Realism published in 1987"

The many faces of realism

Abstract: "The first two lectures place the alternative I defend -- a kind of pragmatic realism -- in a historical and metaphysical context. Part of that context is provided by Husserl's remark that the history of modern philosophy begins with Galileo -- that is, modern philosophy has been hypnotized by the idea that scientific facts are all the facts there are. Another part is provided by the analysis of a very simple example of what I call 'contextual relativity'. The position I defend holds that truth depends on conceptual scheme and it is nonetheless 'real truth'. "In my third lecture I turn to the Kantian antecedents of this view, explaining what I think should be retained of the Kantian idea of autonomy as the central theme of morality, and extracting from Kant's work a 'moral image of the world' that connects the ideals of equality and intellectual liberty. In this lecture I defend the idea that moral images are an indispensible part of our moral and cultural heritage. "In the final lecture I defend the idea of moral objectivity. I compare our epistemological positions in ethics, history, analysis of human character, and science, and I argue that in no area can we hope for a 'foundation' which is more ultimate than the beliefs that actually, at a given time, function as foundational in the area, the beliefs concerning which one has to say 'this is where my spade is turned'. In ethics such beliefs are represented in moral images of the world".

New philosophies of social science: Realism, hermeneutics, and critical theory

Abstract: Introduction - Philosophies of Social Science: the Old and the New - Realist Philosophies of Science - Realism and Social Science - Hermeneutics - Critical Theory - Realism and the Sociological Tradition - Action, Structure and Realist Philosophy - Index

Reality and representation

Abstract: Realism and anti-realism an argument for anti-realism of belief belief and representation the teleological theory of representation the possibility of error universal rationality naturalized epistemology naturalized realism inferential processes relativism, history and scepticism.

Critical Theory and the Inter-paradigm Debate

Abstract: International Relations as an academic discipline is at a major crossroads. Since it was first constituted as an academic discipline in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, International Relations has moved through a series of ‘debates’ with the result that in the course of its development, and as a consequence of these debates, International Relations theory has been undergoing constant change and modification. After moving through the debate between Idealism and Realism in the inter–war period, between Realism and Behaviouralism in the Great Debate of the 1960s, through to the complementary impact of Kuhn’s development of the idea of ‘paradigms’ and the post-Behavioural revolution of the early 1970s and on to the rise of International Political Economy and neo-Marxist, Structuralist dependency theory in the late 1970s and early 1980s, International Relations has arrived at a point that Banks has termed the ‘inter-paradigm debate’.1 The effect of this evolutionary process is contradictory. On the one hand, it makes the discipline exciting and alive because of the diversity of approaches, issues and questions within it, creating opportunities for research which would previously have been deemed to be outside the boundaries of the discipline. On the other hand, the lack of an agreed core to the subject has lead to confusion and a degree of intellectual insecurity.

A Realistic Theory of Science

Abstract: It is the main contention of Cliff Hooker's new book that a realistic theory of science, a theory which gives a good account of what actually goes on in science, should be based on realism. Many readers of this journal may disagree. They may be inclined to the view that a realistic theory of science must attribute a significant social component to scientific knowledge, and would see such a theory as incompatible with realism. I do not, however, believe that these positions are necessarily opposed, for some types of realism are compatible with some sociologies of scientific knowledge. I hope to show that Hooker's brand of realism could be acceptable to some who hold that scientific knowledge has a social component, although it will evidently not be congenial to those who go all the way with Woolgar and Latour and deny that the world 'out there' has anything to do with scientific facts. I A Realistic Theory of Science comprises six chapters reprinted with some minor changes from journals and collections dating from 1974, together with a short introduction and a substantial concluding chapter. For the most part the book is about realism. Five of the six reprinted chapters are more or less directly concerned with realism, while the concluding chapter describes the state of play in 1985 for the evolutionary naturalistic realist this being the sort of realist Hooker is. While Hooker's book is the main subject of this Review, I have also been asked to comment on two other books: John Wisdom's Challengeability in Modern Science and Scientific Controversies, edited by H. Tristram Engelhardt and

Realism, meaning, and truth

Abstract: Part 1 The negative programme: truth-conditions and criteria Strawson on anti-realism realism, truth-value links, other minds and the past strict finitism anti-realism, timeless truth and 1984 theories of meaning and speakers' knowledge scientific realism, observation and the verification principle misunderstandings made manifest. Part 2 The positive programme: anti-realist semantics - the role of criteria second thoughts about criteria can Davidsonian meaning-theory be construed in terms of assertibility? anti-realism and revisionism realism, bivalence and classical logic.

Realism, Change, and International Political Theory

Abstract: Much recent commentary on the theory of international politics has focused on the analysis of change and the continuing vitality of political realism. This paper argues that the philosophical dilemmas posed by the concern with change and by the claim to political realism are intimately related. The argument is pursued in the context of contrasting traditions of political realism, of the antithesis between structuralism and historicism in contemporary social and political theory, and of recent tendencies and controversies in the literature on neorealist theories of international politics. The paper concludes that political realism ought to be understood less as a coherent theoretical position in its own right than as the site of a great many interesting claims and metaphysical disputes. As there is no single tradition of political realism, but rather a knot of historically constituted tensions and contradictions, these tensions and contradictions might be reconstituted in a more critical and creative manner. This involves an examination of the way the core categories of international political theory depend upon a particular formulation of the relationship between identity and difference—a formulation which must be refused.

Reality and Its Shadow

Abstract: It is generally, dogmatically, admitted that the function of art is expression, and that artistic expression rests on cognition. An artist — even a painter, even a musician — tells. He tells of the ineffable. An artwork prolongs, and goes beyond, common perception. What common perception trivializes and misses, an artwork apprehends in its irreducible essence. It thus coincides with metaphysical intuition. Where common language abdicates, a poem or a painting speaks. Thus an artwork is more real than reality and attests to the dignity of the artistic imagination, which sets itself up as knowledge of the absolute. Though it be disparaged as an aesthetic canon, realism nevertheless retains all its prestige. In fact it is repudiated only in the name of a higher realism. Surrealism is a superlative.

Explanation, independence and realism in mathematics

Abstract: This elegant little identity connects a fundamental constant of analysis, e, with equally fundamental constants of arithmetic, algebra and geometry. It would be hard for a philosopher to pass it by. Steiner distinguishes mere existence (in Quine's sense of being the value of a variable) from two types of reality—ontic and epistemic reality. We will concern ourselves here with the epistemic reality of mathematical objects, for Steiner not only appeals to Euler's equation in connection with their epistemic reality, he also devotes most of his discussion to that topic. Steiner [1983] proposes that an object is real in the epistemic sense in case it has independent descriptions. In mathematics this means that there are two different descriptions of the object and a proof that they are coreferential, but no explanatory proof'that they are. On Steiner's view, pi is real in the epistemic sense because Euler's identity shows that pi, first described geometrically as the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, answers to the analytic description of arg{— 1), where

State and Society in International Relations: A Second Agenda

Abstract: For the last two decades much of the theoretical debate within International Relations has focused on the question of the state. Some discussion has been around the analytic primacy of the state as the constitutive actor in international relations, while some has focussed on normative questions, of the degree to which the state can be regarded as the primary guarantor of what is good, within and between states. ‘State-centric’ realism has reasserted traditional positions on the state and has, through the emergence of Neorealism, asserted new ones, especially in the field of international economic relations. Other paradigms have challenged the primacy of the state, either by asserting the role of non-state actors, as in theories of interdependence and transnationalism, or by asserting the primacy of global systems and structures over specific actors, state or non-state. All three of these approaches have been influenced by broader trends within political science: Realism by orthodox political theory; Transnationalism by the Pluralist and Behavioural rejection of the state in favour of studying actions; Structuralism by theories of socioeconomic determination.

Janus And Minerva: Essays In The Theory And Practice Of International Politics

Abstract: In these essays, one of the most eminent political scientists of our time examines international relations from a variety of perspectives connected by timeless and common themes: the conflict between die ever-present risk of violence and the quest for international order, the tensions between the imperatives of power and those of morality, the ties that bind domestic and foreign policy, the ambiguities of the nuclear revolution, the break between prenuclear and post-1945 politics, and the dangers created by the competition between the nuclear superpowers Assessing the development of the discipline of international relations, the author presents both a summary of the field's significant findings and a critical discussion of its most representative traditions of realism and liberalism Written between 1960 and 1985, many of these essays have not been previously published in English They reflect the author's own intellectual evolution and represent a complete picture of his approach to the study of world politics

Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane

Abstract: "A highly original and gripping account of the works of Eakins and Crane. That remarkable combination of close reading and close viewing which Fried uniquely commands is brought to bear on the problematic nature of the making of images, of texts, and of the self in nineteenth-century America." Svetlana Alpers, University of California, Berkeley "An extraordinary achievement of scholarship and critical analysis. It is a book distinguished not only for its brilliance but for its courage, its grace and wit, its readiness to test its arguments in tough-minded ways, and its capacity to meet the challenge superbly. . . . This is a landmark in American cultural and intellectual studies." Sacvan Bercovitch, Harvard University"

Anti-Realism and Logic: Truth as Eternal

Abstract: Anti-realism is a doctrine about logic, language, and meaning with roots in the work of Wittgenstein and Frege. In this book, the author clarifies Dummett's case for anti-realism and develops his arguments further. He concludes by advocating a radical reform of our logical practices.

Pictures of Romance: Form against Context in Painting and Literature

Abstract: How do pictures tell stories? Why does the literary romance so often refer to paintings and other visual art objects? Beginning with these two seemingly unrelated questions, Wendy Steiner reveals an intricate exchange between the visual arts and the literary romance. Romances violate the casual, temporal, and logical cohesiveness of realist novels, and they do so in part by depicting love as a state of suspension, a condition outside of time. Steiner argues that because Renaissance and post-Renaissance painting also represents a suspended moment of perception with "unnatural" clarity and compression of meaning, it readily serves the romance as a symbol of antirealism. Yet the atemporality of stopped-action painting was actually an attempt to achieve pictorial realism the way things "really" look. It is this paradox that interests Steiner: to signal their departure from realism, romances evoke the symbol of "realistic" visual artwork. Steiner explores this problem through analyses of Keats, Hawthorne, Joyce, and Picasso. She then examines a return to narrative conventions in visual art in the twentieth century, in the work of Lichtenstein and Warhol, and speculates on the fate of pictorial storytelling and the romance in postmodern art. An aesthetic fantasia of sorts, this study combines theory and analysis to illuminate an unexpected interconnection between literature and the visual arts."

Questions concerning Dialogical Anthropology

Abstract: During the present decade there has been increasing discussion of the role of dialogue in anthropology and of the consequences of thinking and doing anthropology as dialogue, not only during fieldwork, but in publication as well. Among the main issues are those of translation, representation, realism, evocation, narration, metanarration, interpretation, authorial control, and power relationships, all of which are reexamined here.

Edmund Burke's Gothic Romance: The Portrayal of Warren Hastings in Burke's Writings and Speeches on India

Abstract: When the protagonists of Jane Austen's resolutely unsentimental novel, Northanger Abbey, finally set out on their long-awaited outing to Beechen Cliff outside Bath, the conversation chastely avoids the usual fond expressions of love and turns instead, appropriately enough for a novel that is part literary burlesque and part literary criticism, to the state of contemporary fiction. This subject, though seemingly uncontroversial, is fraught with perils for the unsuspecting lovers, as Catherine Morland quickly discovers that she and Henry Tilney differ markedly in their literary tastes. She finds she cannot reciprocate his fondness for history, which she reads solely out of a sense of duty: "It tells me nothing," she confesses, "that does not either vex or weary me." But she acknowledges a close generic kin ship between histories and novels and pertinently questions the con sistency of her own taste, given her avowed love of fiction: "and yet I often think it odd that [history] should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention. The speeches that are put into the heroes' mouths, their thoughts and designs—the chief of all this must be in vention, and invention is what delights me in other books."1 Catherine's insightful remark reflects the important recognition of eighteenth-century historians and novelists alike that history-writing is fundamentally a narrative art. Indeed, the stated aims of historians and novelists often converged remarkably in the period. Both groups of writers sought to dissociate their narratives from those of their more fanciful predecessors by asserting the factual character of their works, which portrayed the interaction of individuals in a plausible social milieu, and by insisting on the moral truth and efficacy of their narratives.2 Jane Austen clearly belongs to this tradition of "histori cal" novel-writing, though the extravagant fancies against which she defines her realism are those of contemporary gothic and sentimental novelists rather than the French romanciers or the ecclesiastical and

Two concepts of modality: Modal realism and modal reductionism

Abstract: Necessary and contingent propositions, objects with accidental and essential properties, possible worlds, individual essences-these are the phenomena of modality. I shall contrast two opposed conceptions of modal phenomena1; one of them, as I see it, is properly thought of as modal realism; the other is modal reductionism. 'Modal realism', as I use the term, has nothing to do with whether certain sentences or propositions have truth values; it has equally little to do with the question whether it is possible that our most cherished theories should in fact be false. I speak rather of existential realism and antirealism.2 The existential realist with respect to universals, for example, holds that there really are such things as universals; the antirealist holds that there are no such things, and may add that the role said by some to be played by them is in fact played by entities of some other sort. The existential realist with respect to socalled theoretical entities in science-quarks or chromosomes, sayclaims that there really are things with at least roughly the properties scientists say such things have; the antirealist denies this. In the first part of this paper, I shall sketch a version of modal realism; in the second I shall outline and briefly explain modal reductionism. My chief example of reductionism will be the important modal theory of David Lewis: I shall argue that Lewis is a modal realist and/or a realist about possible worlds in approximately the sense in which William of Ockham is a realist about universals: namely, not at all.

Teaching Art to Young Children 4-9

Abstract: Blending practical ideas with sound principles, Rob Barnes covers essential topics such as 'how children draw', 'design and problem-solving' and 'developing ideas', with realism and imagination.

German Conservatism in America: Morgenthau's Political Realism

Abstract: Hans J. Morgenthau's “political realism” was shaped by Bismarck's Realpolitik and Weber's Führerdemokratie, but developed within the historical context of Weimar political science: between the authoritarian anti-liberalism of Carl Schmitt and the democratic socialism of Hermann Heller. In Germany Morgenthau adopted neither Schmitt's reduction of the concept of sovereignty to the state of exception, nor reformist legal optimism, but attempted to find his way between the two with what might be called a labile equilibrium of an incomplete political realism. In America, he found his own ground. In Morgenthau's Frankfurt dissertation, “The International Judicial Function: Its Nature and its Limits,”

Husserlian Phenomenology and Scientific Realism

Abstract: Husserl's (1970) discussion of "Galilean science" is often dismissed as naively instrumentalist and hostile to science. He has been explicitly criticized for misunderstanding idealization in science, for treating the lifeworld as a privileged conceptual framework, and for denying that science can in principle completely describe the world (because ordinary prescientific concepts are irreplaceable). I clarify Husserl's position concerning realism, and use this to show that the first two criticisms depend upon misinterpretations. The third criticism is well taken. Nevertheless, this is consistent with Husserl's fundamental claim that the manifestations of things are important to discuss, but are inaccessible to empirical science.

Berkeley: An Introduction

Abstract: Introduction 1. The Background 2. Realism and Representative Realism 3. Abstraction 4. God 5. Real Things 6. Perception and Knowledge 7. Science 8. The Language of God 9. Spirits 10. Conclusions Further Reading

Middle Grounds: Studies in Contemporary American Fiction

Abstract: Alan Wilde identifies and defends what he calls "midfiction," which rejects both the extremes of realism and experimental, self-reflexive fiction. He offers as examples the best works of Apple, Berger, Barthelme, Pynchon, and Paley.

American realism and American drama, 1880-1940

Abstract: Preface Acknowledgments 1. The state of the art: the American theatrical scene in the 1880s 2. Realistic dramatic theory 3. The literary realists as playwrights 4. The transition: American realistic drama in the commercial theater, 1890-1915 5. The cutting edge: Eugene O'Neill's realism, 1913-1933 6. Place and personality: innovations in realistic setting and character, 1916-1940 7. The final integration: innovations in realistic thought and structure, 1916-1940 Notes Selected bibliography Index.

Three Forms of Political Realism

Abstract: In the recent study of international relations, political realism has, apparently, had as many supporters as detractors. Nonetheless, there seems to be a growing tendency to treat the categories of...