Internal realism

The purpose of the book is to develop internal realism, the metaphysical-epistemological doctrine initiated by Hilary Putnam (Reason, Truth and History, Introduction , Many Faces). In doing so I shall rely - sometimes quite heavily - on the notion of conceptual scheme. I shall use the notion in a somewhat idiosyncratic way, which, however, has some affinities with the ways the notion has been used during its history. So I shall start by sketching the history of the notion. This will provide some background, and it will also give opportunity to raise some of the most important problems I will have to solve in the later chapters. 

The purpose of the book is to develop Putnam s internal realism. Even though I make few references to Putnam, and I do not undertake to comment on his views, my debt to him is huge. The most important ideas presented here have grown out of an attempt to understand what Putnam had in mind. Internal realism is characterized by three major commitments. First, the world is in a way dependent on the human mind. Second, truth is not completely independent of verification. Third, the world can be approached through many conceptual schemes. At first sight, this set of doctrines may look like a sort of idealism. I shall argue, however, that it accounts for our realist intuitions. Indeed, it accounts for our realist intuitions just as well as a very different version of realism, which - following Putnam - I shall call metaphysical realism. I shall also propose a way to understand the notion of conceptual scheme. It will take up many elements of the earlier notions. It will be Kantian in the sense that it will have a role in the constitution of the world as we know it. Conceptual schemes will be described as classificatory frameworks, which is similar to the positivist and the Kuhnian conception. I will also claim - as the advocates of the notion with the exception of Kant did - that there are several conceptual schemes. However, I shall also depart from the earlier notions, and, in... 

Internal realism will be developed in the following steps. In Chapter 2, Metaphysical Realism and Internal Realism, I describe the two diametrically opposed version of realism. Since metaphysical realism is a familiar sort of doctrine, I will devote more space to the exposition of internal realism. I will put all the central issues on the table and I indicate briefly how I plan to deal with them. The details will be left for the later chapters. 

Chapter 4 is about truth. The first section discusses how truth should be understood if we have a conceptual scheme in place. However, not all conceptual schemes are equally good. The second section spells out how conceptual schemes can be evaluated. The final section uses Putnam s brains in a vat argument to show that internal realism has a better to chance to avoid skepticism than internal realism. 

Chapter 5 deals with three rather different issues. First I explain in some detail what it means for different conceptual schemes to be concerned with the same domain. Then I take up Davidson s attack on the notion of conceptual scheme. I will not provide a full-scale evaluation of his argument. I shall merely try to show that it does not work against my account. In the concluding section I discuss how internal realism is related to physicalism, naturalism, and relativism. I shall argue that it is compatible with certain versions of physicalism and naturalism, and it is not committed to relativism. The issue of relativism will be addressed at several places in the book, so what I give here is just a summary of the points made earlier. 

The final position to be considered is physicalism. It has several versions, so let me discuss only two important ones. The first is physicalism as a supervenience claim, which holds that everything supervenes on the physical. If two things differ in some respect, they must be physically different as well. This sort of physicalism puts some constraint on the relationship between different conceptual schemes. If two things are described differently in the non-physical idiom, they should be described differently in the physical idiom as well. But this constraint is much weaker than (MR3). So physicalism as a supervenience claim does not involve commitment to (MR3) or to metaphysical realism. (In fact, I shall argue that supervenience physicalism is compatible with internal realism (5.3).)... 

Internal realism is best formulated in direct opposition to metaphysical realism ... 

At first sight, this poses a fatal dilemma for internal realism. On the first hom of the dilemma we face organizational metaphysical realism. It claims that there are numerous conceptual schemes and they do not simply copy the structure of reality. Such copying would not even be possible, since we do not have direct access to that inherent structure. Rather, the human mind actively projects structures into reality it introduces distinctions, sets up similarity relations, etc. However, there are external constraints on the construction of conceptual schemes, and these constraints are afforded by the inherent structure of reality. Some schemes cut at the joints more often than the others. Failures to cut at the joints are manifested in bad or inaccurate predictions, lack of explanatory power, repeated failures, etc. This view does provide the external constraints necessary for the objectivity of knowledge, and also makes room for the active organizing role of the intellect. But the price is... 

To recapitulate, the organization picture leads to a dilemma. What our conceptual schemes organize either has inherent structure, or has no inherent structure. The first hom - organizational metaphysical realism - provides external constraints but sacrifices internal realism. The second hom - blob realism - saves us from metaphysical realism, but has no defense against relativism. Perhaps, however, there is a way to break out of the dilemma to treat what we organize as something like the Kantian thing in itself. 

IR3) is the thesis which distinguishes internal realism from the doctrines it is most closely related to. Kant would have endorsed some version of (IR1). Peirce would have accepted (IR2) as well. But the sort of conceptual pluralism (IR3) represents has not traditionally been part of the picture that reality and truth are not independent of the human mind. We must start approaching this thesis from a distance. We already know that a conceptual scheme is a relatively self-contained group of words or concepts. The referents of the words that make up conceptual schemes are determined by the justification conditions of some simple sentences in which they occur. So we may also say that a conceptual scheme is the set of justification conditions for a set of sentences. The determination of reference is the same as the constitution of the structure of reality, because the entities - individuals, kinds, etc. - are carved out by justification conditions which provide criteria of identity for them. So the structure of reality is constituted by conceptual schemes. 

That is one reason why internal realism needs (IR3), the thesis that there can be more than one adequate conceptual schemes in the same domain which do not type-reduce to one another. Without it, much that was said in connection with (IR1) and (IR2) would turn out to have been said in an unnecessary and odd way. To put this... 

There is no reason why the internal realist could not help herself to the notion of supervenience. It requires no match between entities carved out in different conceptual schemes, as the first attempted reply. It does not call for stepping outside all conceptual schemes into the quasi-noumenal realm of stuff to be organized, as the second attempted solution. So the answer to the question is roughly this. Two conceptual schemes share the same domain if the entities described in one of them supervene on the entities described in the other one. There is only one thing that might be cause for concern. How do we know that the supervenience relation actually obtains The problem is exacerbated by the fact that supervenience claims are modal claims. (If there is a mental difference, there must be some physical difference.) This question has not received much attention. Fortunately, I will not have to attempt to solve it now, for it is not a special problem for internal realism. It is a problem for all positions which employ the notion of (modal) supervenience. I trust that if it is solved, the solution can be accepted by the internal realist as well. (The issue of sharing a domain will be discussed in more detail in 5.1.)... 

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