Metaphysical realism

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. 

As a first approximation to metaphysical realism, let us imagine that we are watching a painter painting a waterfall. We see both the waterfall and the painting. We can contrast the two and judge how faithful the painting is. We know well... 

Metaphysical realism is the view that assumes a position similar to the external observer watching the waterfall and the painting about it. On the one hand, there is the world. On the other hand, there are our representations and descriptions of it. These may be thoughts, sentences, mental pictures - for our purposes it does not matter. The world is independent of the representations. It would have existed and would have had the same characteristics even if no representations had ever been prepared. A representation is true if it matches the segment of the world it is a representation of. Whether a representation is true is completely independent of what its maker believes about it. It is also independent of the techniques the maker of the representation uses to check how good the representation is, i. e. it is independent of the verification procedures. The verification procedures are useful, but they are linked to truth only contingently. So truth is one thing, verification is another. 

However, this intuitive characterization of metaphysical realism is not enough. Stated more formally, the doctrine comprises three theses ... 

I take it that the notion of conceptual scheme, as just described, is not biased against metaphysical realism in any way. In fact, it is a very weak notion, which does not carry any of the implications which make it suspicious for many people. First, it does not imply anything about the relation between the structure of the world and conceptual structures. In particular, it does not imply that the former is constituted by the latter. Second, it is left open what sort of control conceptual schemes have over our thoughts. A conceptual scheme does not have to be conceived as a conceptual prison of which there is no escape. It may be easy to get rid of conceptual schemes and acquire new ones. Third, conceptual schemes are not all-encompassing global world-views. They are smaller units. It makes no sense to... 

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. 

Nevertheless, the commitments behind the two accounts are different. The advocates of the teleological view are devout naturalists. Their rhetoric seems to suggest that they endorse the sort of naturalism which is at odds internal realism. They are also committed to metaphysical realism. In fact, the principal advocate of this approach, Ruth Millikan has actually argued against Putnam s internal realism ( Metaphysical Antirealism ). I understand the motivation behind this commitment, even though I do not think it is justified. The theory presupposes that... 

Besides, metaphysical realism does not fare any better in practice. In real life, the question concerns the adequacy of particular conceptual schemes. Suppose there are two competing conceptual schemes in a given domain. Which one is right The idea of a mind-independent structure is of little help here. The advocates of the two schemes claim that it is their own scheme that captures that structure. But they have only epistemic criteria to substantiate their claims. Adequacy - in the metaphysical realist view - is completely non-epistemic, so there might be no way of knowing which scheme is adequate. To say that one of the schemes is adequate but we do not know which one leaves the situation completely symmetrical. To put it differently,... 

This last point suggests that internal realism might have better defenses against some skeptical arguments than metaphysical realism. The following section will argue that this is indeed so. 

Once we accept that the plausibility of (A) derives from (B), it becomes clear that the assumption is very much in the spirit of internal realism. Internal realism regards reference is an epistemically loaded notion, since it argues that it is fixed by justification conditions. Metaphysical realism, on the other hand, treats reference as non-epistemic. If it did not, it would have to deny (MR2), the thesis that truth is radically non-epistemic. Since truth is determined by reference, were reference epistemic, truth would become epistemically tainted. 

Metaphysical realism grants the possibility of an external, inaccessible and privileged perspective. Indeed, metaphysical realism is the position which grants this possibility. According to metaphysical realism, the world is ontologically independent of the human mind, and truth is the description of the world as it is in itself. If you wish, truth is the description of the world from the world s own perspective, from a perspective which is not tied to any particular subject. In Nagel s... 

Each conceptual scheme deals with a particular segment of the world. The segments they deal with may be completely different, but they may also partly or completely coincide. In the latter case they may be said to be concerned with the same domain. Even though the idea is intuitively clear, and it is easy to give examples, it needs to be explained what it means. For metaphysical realism it is not a problem. The world has a certain structure, which is ontologically independent of... 

This criterion works well for adequate conceptual schemes. But inadequate conceptual schemes seem to pose a special problem. The inadequacy of a conceptual scheme may consist in its leading us to false sentences. Remember the zebralopes. The deficient scheme makes us assert that certain animals belong to the same species, whereas, as a matter of fact, they belong to different species. Or, for a better example, consider what Aristotle says about motion. Many things he says are false. Yet, his theory of motion shares a domain with mechanics. But false sentences do not describe facts. So how can the criterion be applied when one conceptual scheme does not describe facts (This is a problem for metaphysical realism as well. Metaphysical realism holds that sharing a domain means capturing the same mind-independent structures. But inadequacy is just a failure to capture the real structures. So how can two conceptual schemes capture the same structures, if one of them does not capture these structures )... 

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