It's time to leave anti-realist, idealist, and phenomenalist philosophy behind. I've decided on empiricism/positivism/verificationism, whatever you want to call it, but have to abandon the association I've had with such doctrines and anti-realism of various stripes. George Berkeley was one of the British empiricists and also an idealist and John Stuart Mill, Ernst Mach and Richard Avenarius in the 19th century adapted empiricism to a secular version of subjective idealism, phenomenalism. The empiricism I subscribe to is about the criterion of meaning not just epistemology and definitely not ontology. A statement about the existence of something is meaningful if it can be verified but that doesn’t make its existence constituted by verification itself. This is Russell’s distinction between idea of a thing and a thing being an idea, Berkeley’s error was not making this distinction.
The philosophy of realism holds that the world exists independently of our knowledge of it. To perceive is not to be (per Berkeley), it is to discover what already exists. Though we know things by perception, it is another matter to argue that perception constitutes the objects which we perceive (which is idealism). Consciousness is of something, something which exists. That I perceive means I exist, but only because I perceive what I call myself, not that my perception constitutes my existence. Universals are what make facts true, it isn’t that facts themselves constitute the world (which is positivism). Relations between facts are themselves true, like that the capitol of California is Sacramento. This is true regardless of whether one is acquainted with Sacramento or California. That the present king of France is bald (Russel’s example) isn’t just false as a matter of fact but because the relation isn’t true. These relations aren’t factual things, they presuppose them, but are real. So there must be something which makes them real. The past exists even though I haven’t been to it, though it’s a more difficult question whether the future exists as well.
There are then two assumptions to realism then: 1) existence exists independently of perception 2) perception is of something that exists.
I have to be a realist because of my perspective of scientific naturalism, in particular the Neo-Darwinian paradigm, so fruitful in my study of human nature. The problem with anti-realism is that if there is no God and living/conscious things didn’t always or have to exist, then how did the world exist? This was I think a criticism by Vladimir Lenin in his Materialism and Empiriocriticm against Mach and Avenarius. Mach I think tried to relate the evolution of the organism with psychological development to explain this, as if the notion of natural history depends on psychological development.
I am also a realist because of my intense dislike of social constructivism, postmodernism, post-structuralism whatever the name theories which the current political left and purveyors of victim politics like to employ. Any disparity has to do with power and never with physical realities like scarcity, lack of knowledge, or biology. Gender and race having nothing to do with biological development, thousands of years of evolution have nothing to do with the way societies have tended to be.
It’s also important to me that Marxism and socialism be based on realist grounds so they can be criticized as well as maybe improved. The current left lives in a fantasy land of their own making.
It is tempting that grounding thought in radical subjectivity can save some precious beliefs in individuality and safeguard free will and dualism. But this opens up the possibility of reality being inter-subjective, thus being a collective construction by language which is the worst kind of philosophy one can arrive at.
The implicit doctrine behind anti-realism and at least some forms of idealism is the doctrine of internal relations. This doctrine states that all relations between things are necessary, and nothing can be understood in isolation but only as a totality. This is the philosophy of Hegel which is at the foundation of so-called continental philosophy, as well as for analytic philosophy which criticized the doctrine. The doctrine is meaningless as what explains everything holds true for any possible configuration of facts and can never be disproven, and so never proven. If everything is a social construction, then nothing is a social construction.
The way to deny external relations, which are essentially causal relations, is to argue that causality is purely phenomenal, conditioned by the mind into reality to make individual things understandable. It is true that space and time don’t operate in the Euclidean/Newtonian way we were accustomed to, but that doesn’t mean those ordinary perceptual aspects aren’t real aspects of the world. And further space and time are physical phenomena. Neil Degrasse Tyson said something to the effect that if the scientific conception of the universe doesn’t fit your religion, then your religion is too small. That Newton’s laws don’t apply to everything means that more laws or changes are needed.
My realism is indirect realism, the type of Descartes and Bertrand Russell. That the world we perceive is qualitatively different from the actual world, and the actual world is possibly independent of sense data. This view owed itself to working through philosophical problems like illusion, hallucination, dreams, evil demons etc as the way things appear is different person to person and location to location. John Locke gave us primary and secondary qualities to matter, those which reflect the nature of the object and those which exist in our minds as a result of causal interaction with the object. For this reason indirect realism is also called causal realism.
For as to how we have access to the objective world, I hold onto what Epicurus said in his principal doctrines. How can the senses lie to us? From where did you get that idea? If you distrust all your senses you won’t have any knowledge. Using instruments doesn’t replace the senses but allows them to see new things they’re capable of seeing.
22. “We must consider both the ultimate end and all clear sensory evidence, to which we refer our opinions; for otherwise everything will be full of uncertainty and confusion.
23. “If you fight against all your sensations, you will have no standard to which to refer, and thus no means of judging even those sensations which you claim are false.
24. “If you reject absolutely any single sensation without stopping to distinguish between opinion about things awaiting confirmation and that which is already confirmed to be present, whether in sensation or in feelings or in any application of intellect to the presentations, you will confuse the rest of your sensations by your groundless opinion and so you will reject every standard of truth. If in your ideas based upon opinion you hastily affirm as true all that awaits confirmation as well as that which does not, you will not avoid error, as you will be maintaining the entire basis for doubt in every judgment between correct and incorrect opinion.
I hold that because we perceive the world, we know that it exists, but the existence or nature of the objects is not constituted by the experience. They exist independently of our experience of them.
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