Empiricism, Solipsism and the Realistic

Abstract

The realistic spirit has been partially described through a discussion of the ways in which someone pursuing philosophy in that spirit might respond to a range of realist theories. Readers will have recognised in the description some continuities with tenets of empiricism. In this chapter, I seek to further characterise the realistic by bringing out some differences (and similarities) between it and certain empiricist theories, and I do so by considering what is unrealistic in (some of) Berkeley and (some of) Russell. Doing so reveals two structural similarities between those empiricist views and a view which constitutes a plausible understanding of the solipsism of TLP, namely a connection between the meaning of our expressions and a perspective on the world which no human speaker can occupy. I hypothesise that it is this solipsism that Ramsey considers to be ‘mystical’, and so unrealistic, and that he seeks to eliminate from his deflationary, proto-realistic ‘Critical Notice’ reading of TLP, discussed in Chapter 4.