Realism and Anti-Realism

257 Pages·2009·0.98 MB·English

Realism and Anti-Realism
Central Problems of Philosophy
Series Editor: John Shand
This series of books presents concise, clear, and rigorous analy-
ses of the core problems that preoccupy philosophers across all
approaches to the discipline. Each book encapsulates the essen-
tial arguments and debates, providing an authoritative guide to
the subject while also introducing original perspectives. This series
of books by an international team of authors aims to cover those
fundamental topics that, taken together, constitute the full breadth
of philosophy.
Published titles
Action Ontology
Rowland Stout Dale Jacquette
Causation and Explanation Paradox
Stathis Psillos Doris Olin
Death Perception
Geoffrey Scarre Barry Maund
Free Will Realism and Anti-Realism
Graham McFee Stuart Brock & Edwin Mares
Knowledge Relativism
Michael Welbourne Paul O’Grady
Meaning Scepticism
David E. Cooper Neil Gascoigne
Mind and Body Truth
Robert Kirk Pascal Engel
Modality Universals
Joseph Melia J. P. Moreland
Forthcoming titles
God The Self
Jay Wood Stephen Burwood
Rights Value
Duncan Ivison Derek Matravers
Realism and Anti-Realism

Stuart Brock and Edwin Mares
acumen
© Stuart Brock and Edwin Mares, 2007
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
All rights reserved.
First published in 2007 by Acumen
Reprinted 2010
Acumen Publishing Limited
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www.acumenpublishing.co.uk
ISBN: 978-1-84465-024-8 (hardcover)
ISBN: 978-1-84465-025-5 (paperback)
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from
the British Library.
Printed and bound in the UK by MPG Books Group.
Contents
Acknowledgements vi
1. Introduction 1
Part I
2. Local realism and anti-realism: the existence axis 11
3. Local realism and anti-realism: the independence axis 34
4. Idealism 48
5. Kantianism 60
6. Verificationism 78
Part II
7. Colour 95
8. Morality 113
9. Science 135
10. Mathematics 150
11. Possible worlds 174
12. Fictional characters 199
Notes 221
Bibliography 236
Index 247
Acknowledgements
In writing this book we have benefited from the comments of oth-
ers. In particular, we should like to thank Nicholas Agar, Jean-Paul
van Bendegem, John Brock, Ramon Das, Joshua Glasgow, Rob
Goldblatt, Seahwa Kim, Neil Leslie, Alex Miller, Cei Maslen, Zoe
Prebble, Kate Williams and two referees for Acumen. Special thanks
are due to our editor, Steven Gerrard. Without his help, patience
and encouragement this book would never have been real. It would
have existed in our minds only.
In writing this book, we have also tested the patience of many.
And so we should like to give special thanks to our loved ones:
Nalayini, Julian, Jonathan, Emma and Sue. We dedicate this book
to them.
Some material from Stuart Brock, “Fictionalism about Fictional
Characters”, Noûs 36 (2002), 1–21, appears in Chapter 12 with
the kind permission of Blackwell Publishers.
1 Introduction
Questions about the ultimate reality of things sometimes seem like
silly questions to non-philosophers, but to philosophers they are
questions of the utmost importance and deepest significance. It is
not easy or straightforward to know when some contentious realm
of entities is real, or to understand and appreciate what is at issue
between those on each side of the dispute. Thus, the questions
posed by those who originally framed the realist–anti-realist debate
centuries ago – most notably, the nominalists and idealists – have
dominated the attention of philosophers ever since. Indeed, ques-
tions about the plausibility and character of realism and its alterna-
tives are at the heart of all metaphysical disputes today.
Our aim in this book is to make clear to any intelligent reader
what is really at stake in the contemporary realism debate. As far as
we know, no other work has really succeeded in doing that. This is
unfortunate, because the primary literature is notoriously difficult
to grapple with. Consequently, anyone confronting this literature
for the first time is likely to be deterred by the abundance of jargon
and the almost universal presupposition that the reader has sig-
nificant background knowledge of the main issues. The uninitiated
could be forgiven for giving up quickly after forming the impres-
sion that they are somehow uninvited guests at an exclusive club.
It is hoped this book might succeed in making the club a little more
ecumenical. This book is for those who want to direct their atten-
tion squarely towards questions of realism and anti-realism for the
first time. It is meant as a substantial introduction to the realism
debate, and a good springboard to the most important technical
2 REALISM AND ANTI-REALISM
papers on the topic. With this goal in mind, let us move directly to
our main question.
1.1 What is realism?
Perhaps the most striking feature of the realism literature is its lack
of agreement over what the basic terms “realism” and “anti-realism”
mean. Let us start therefore by stipulating what we mean by “real-
ism”. Realism about a particular domain is the conjunction of the
following two theses: (i) there are facts or entities distinctive of that
domain, and (ii) their existence and nature is in some important sense
objective and mind-independent. Let us call the first thesis the “exist-
ence thesis” and the second thesis the “independence thesis”.
Some further elaboration is necessary. Notice that our characteri-
zation of the existence thesis involves quantification over entities
and facts. (There is a difference: entities are the referents of the
singular terms in a language, while facts are aspects of the world
represented by whole declarative sentences in a language.) This
is awkward, to say the least. And this awkwardness explains why
many who have attempted to explain the existence thesis – and dis-
tinguish it from the independence thesis – have quantified only over
individuals. But to ignore the realist’s commitment to facts is to
miss something very important about the realist’s distinctive claim.
For it is possible to be a realist about some domain without think-
ing that there are any special entities distinctive of that domain.
And the facts in question are not just trivial negative facts to the
effect that such things do not exist. One might believe it is a fact
that everything that goes up must come down without believing in
gravitational fields; one might believe it is a fact that, in the novel
Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff is haunted by a ghost on the windy
moors without believing in Heathcliff or ghosts; one might believe
it is a fact that Senator John Kerry could have won the US presi-
dential election without believing there is a possible world in which
(something appropriately related to) Kerry does win; one might
believe it is a fact that one ought to assist people in need without
believing that such actions have the property of being morally good.
In our view, those who believe such things (without believing that
such facts depend on us) count as realists about the relevant domain
– scientific realists, realists about fiction, modal realists and moral
INTRODUCTION 3
realists – but they do not count as realists about scientific entities,
fictional objects, possible worlds or moral properties.
Notice also that our brief description of the independence the-
sis alludes to an important sense in which a domain is objective
and mind-independent. But what sense is the important sense? The
sense-data of the phenomenalists, the ideas of the idealists, the mon-
ads of the Leibnizian, the phenomenal world of the Kantian and the
verifiable world of the logical positivists have all been alleged to
exist. But such entities are all, to a greater or lesser extent, subjec-
tive and mind-dependent, and so lack reality in our fundamental
sense. For a domain to be objective and mind-independent in our
sense it must not exist in any of these ways. Facts about the domain
must be out there to be discovered rather than constructed; entities
within the domain will be detected rather than constituted by our
mental states. This is, very roughly, what it means for a realm of
facts and things to exist objectively and mind independently.
We started this section by noting that there is a lack of consen-
sus about the right characterization of realism. Consequently, the
reader should be unsurprised to discover that many philosophers
have qualms about our particular account. Nonetheless, our under-
standing of the notion has a fine pedigree, and we think every phi-
losopher working in the field would agree that ours is at least one
way legitimately to unpack the notion, even if they disagree about
whether it is the best way. To be sure, consider what others have
said about the issue.
Realism [is] a claim about what entities exist and a claim about
their independent nature. (Devitt [1984] 1991: 14)
To assert that something is somehow mind-independent is to
move in the realist direction; to deny it is to move in the oppo-
site direction … Many philosophical questions have the fol-
lowing general form: Is such-and-such mind-independent in
so-and-so way? Given specifications of such-and-such and so-
and-so, one may call someone who answers “Yes” a realist.
(Williamson 1995: 746)
There are two general aspects to realism, illustrated by look-
ing at realism about the everyday world of macroscopic objects