Abstract
This paper has a very modest objective. The recent discussion of realism contains expressions and metaphors which I find difficult to understand, and I shall try to translate some of these expressions into a more comprehensible idiom. The arguments about realism — or about different ‘realisms’1 — often involve claims about the dependence (or independence) of the world on our theories and concepts. What is the nature of this dependence or independence? Some philosophers make a distinction between our conceptualizations of the world and “the way of the world really is” (italics mine), or at least attribute such a distinction to other philosophers.2 I assume that this distinction is not meant to be the same as the familiar distinction between a representation and its object.3 Do scientists not try to represent the world the way it really is? (The representation of the world as something other than what it really is would seem to be misrepresentation.) The metaphors of ‘carving’ and ‘cutting’ are common in this context: Hartry Field speaks about the “carving up of the noumenal dough” by means of various “cookie cutters”,4 whereas Hilary Putnam has argued that this metaphor is a misleading characterization of scientific representation, that is, a misleading summary of what he regards as the correct account, his “internal” or “pragmatic” realism.5
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Notes
Cf. Susan Haack (1987). ‘“Realisms”’, Synthese 73, pp. 275–299.
Mark Heller (1988). ‘Putnam, Reference, and Realism’, in Midwest Studies in Philosophy XII: Realism and Antirealism, ed. by A. P. French et al., University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, pp. 113–127; see p. 115.
The distinction between the world as it really is and as it is represented by our theories resembles Charles Peirce’s distinction between the immediate and the dynamical object of a sign: The immediate object of a sign is the object “as the sign itself represents it”, whereas the dynamical object is the “reality which by some means contrives to determine the sign to its representation”; see Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. 4, ed. by C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss (1933). Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., paragraph 4.436. According to Peirce, the immediate object of a sign is a representation rather than the reality represented by a sign.
Hartry Field (1982). ‘Realism and Relativism’, The Journal of Philosophy 79, pp. 553–567; see p. 561.
Hilary Putnam (1987). The Many Faces of Realism, Open Court, La Salle, III. p. 19, and Representation and Reality (1988). MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. pp. 113–114. According to Putnam, the cookie-cutter metaphor founders on the question, “What are the parts of the dough?” I don’t think this is a convincing objection.
Hilary Putnam (1981). Reason, Truth and History, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p. 49.
Ibid., p. 49.
Hilary Putnam, The Many Faces of Realism, p. 32.
Ibid., p. 32.
See Robert Nola, ‘Introduction: Some Issues Concerning Relativism and Realism in Science’, in Relativism and Realism in Science, ed. by R. Nola (1988). Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, pp. 1–35; see p. 5.
See John Carroll (ed.) (1956). Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., p. 221.
Hilary Putnam. Representation and Reality, pp. 110–112.
See E. J. Lowe (1989). Kinds of Being, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 9–10.
Gottlob Frege (1950). The Foundations of Arithmetic, transl. by J.L. Austin, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, p. 66.
See also Nicholas Griffin (1977). Relative Identity, Clarendon Press, Oxford, p. 40
and Peter Geach (1968). Reference and Generality, Emended Edition, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, pp. 38–39.
Representation and Reality, pp. 113–114.
In his discussion of sortal predicates Geach discusses the problem of counting the red things in a room, but he does not conclude from the impossibility of this task that the expression ‘red thing’ is ambiguous or can be used in different ways; according to Geach, the example shows only that ‘red thing’ is not what he calls a “substantival” (that is, a sortal) expression. See Reference and Generality, p. 39.
Reason, Truth and History, p. 49.
This is even more obvious in the case of dinosaurs and (say) galaxies, since in such cases we need not worry about the causal and indirect effects of our conceptual activities. (In this context “the F-objects in the world” should be taken to include all F-objects which have existed or will exist in the world.)
According to the possible worlds semantics of conditionals, (P9) and (P10) can be formulated as follows: (P9*) In the nearby alternative worlds where our conceptual scheme differs from that adopted in the actual world, the number of alligators differs from the actual number of alligators. (P10*) In the nearby alternative worlds where our conceptual scheme differs from that adopted in the actual world, n(Ext(‘Alligator’)) differs from n(Extactual(‘Alligator’)).
I am indebted to Professor Alan Musgrave for this observation.
C.S. Peirce’s well-known definition of ‘reality’ is based on this distinction. According to Peirce, that is real which has such and such characters, whether anybody thinks it to have those characters or not. (Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (1934). vol. 5, ed. by C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., paragraph 5.430.)
Mark Heller, ‘Putnam, Reference, and Realism’, pp. 113–114.
See also Robert Nola, op. cit., pp. 1–35; see pp. 4–5; the definitions given by Nola also entail that one can be a realist about swans but an anti-realist about black swans.
See Michael Devitt (1984). Realism and Truth, Princeton University Press, Princeton, p. 22. Devitt’s reference to physical (as opposed to, for example, psychological) types here may be based on the confusion between the two senses of ‘mind’ and ‘mental’ mentioned in section II, viz., mind as a system of concepts and mind as the psychological.
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Hilpinen, R. (1996). On Some Formulations of Realism, or How Many Objects are There in the World?. In: Cohen, R.S., Hilpinen, R., Renzong, Q. (eds) Realism and Anti-Realism in the Philosophy of Science. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 169. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8638-2_1
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