[Fis] Realism

[Fis] Realism

From: John Collier <[email protected]>
Date: Sat 01 Jul 2006 - 19:08:51 CEST

Dear fisers,

I have been grading almost full time the last week, so I did not
get a chance to respond to Arne, or comment on the other interesting
recent posts on this topic. I will just make a short realist
statement, though. It is based on the Realism of C.S. Peirce. He
distinguished between imaginary doubt and real doubt. Real doubt is
that which gives us evidence that appears to be contrary to our
beliefs. Imaginary doubt is based on possbilities that we have no
evidence for, but we believe are at least possible. The problem with
imaginary doubt is that it is based on abstract reasoning, void of
ties to evidence by and large, and it is thus very fallible.

Here is what I think:

I just don't think that we can base epistemology on some consensual
agreement about there being an external world, or about some world we
have socially constructed. I think that we can know the world in
terms of its features, and that we know many features of the world. I
think that the world is an information structure along the lines of a
distributed system in the line of Barwise and Seligman. The logic of
such systems is that we cannot infer backwards to the source in
general. We need a special sort of channel to do that. However,
science and evolution tend to make such channels. Obviously I would
have to get into more detail. Of course this all assumes there is
something "out there". My best evidence for that is that there are
things I do not create in my mind. Perhaps they come from other parts
of my mind, but that is still "out there" relative to my
consciousness. Basically, I think that the evidence that there is
something "out there" is very strong, and the evidence that there is
not is negligible. That we can't know the "out there" is based on a
huge string of inference about the possibility of error in special
cases extended to the possibility for all cases. I reject the last
part of the argument. I don't think it is possible that everything we
believe about the external world is false. My argument again is
fairly simple: whatever the structure of the information that we
experience, that which we don't consciously cause comes from "out
there", so we know "out there" has at least that much structure. And
from there we bootstrap. Part of what we bootstrap to is a consensual
world (though I am constantly surprised that my neighbours see so
little of what I see, so I am not sure how much is consensual -- I
find myself often faking that the world is more like what people
around me seem to think it is like -- this dishonesty bugs me, but it
saves fights over things like Zulus are much more like
Scots-Canadians than they are different from each other -- if I have
a Zulu student who wants to think that Zulus are fundamentally
different, then I usually let it go.)

I see no need of any consensual proof of such an abstract entity as a
consensually agreed on world in order to have knowledge of an
external world, nor do I see that the proof would be very convincing
compared to direct experience of things I do not cause myself, and
which can surprise me. I think that the evidence for a consensual
world must be weaker than the evidence for a world beyond our
conscious experience, and any argument in favour of doubting that
world must have even weaker evidence. Lacking such evidence, I doubt
when I am surprised, and have a reason to doubt. Otherwise, I think
both sceptical arguments and anti-realist arguments are all very
fallible abstract thinking, which I don't much trust.

That said, I think that the evidence is that we construct our
understanding of the world out of materials from both our mind and
the world, so I fall into the category that is usually called
constructive realist.

Regards,
John

----------
Professor John Collier collierj@ukzn.ac.za
Philosophy and Ethics, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban 4041 South Africa
T: +27 (31) 260 3248 / 260 2292 F: +27 (31) 260 3031
http://www.nu.ac.za/undphil/collier/index.html

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Received on Sat Jul 1 19:10:17 2006


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