OBJECTIONS TO REALISM
Introduction:
There are a bewildering array of arguments associated with critiques of realism.
After
distinguishing realism about truth from various forms of metaphysical realism, we must be
careful to determine which, if either, form of realism a given argument addresses. A great many
"anti-realist" theses will actually turn out to be completely compatible with a hard-core
correspondence realism about truth. It is particularly the case that so-called anti-realism driven
by epistemological considerations is often best seen as a specific (usually implausible) suggestion
for how to understand what a given proposition asserts.
Even such paradigmatic anti-realisms
as the coherence theory of truth may simply be confused suggestions concerning the content of
propositions, suggestions that, however strange they might be, are compatible with truth as
correspondence to a reality that exists independently of its representations.
While spurious anti-realisms abound, there are, nevertheless, serious philosophers who
clearly are trying to undermine the fundamental idea behind a realist theory of truth, who are
trying to undermine the idea that there is a meaningful sense in which truth depends, in part, on a
reality that exists as it does independently of anyone's representations of it. The general theme
of these objections goes back to Kant, of course, who wanted to argue that in some sense the
mind "constructs" through the imposition of concepts the very reality that is the subject matter of
our thought.
The seeds of more contemporary anti-realism can be found in the writings of such
influential philosophers of science as Thomas Kuhn. Paradigm shifts (shifts in the way we
think of the world), Kuhn sometimes seems to argue, result in our actually living in a different
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world.
There is no sense to be made of the one way the world really is--there is only the world
as structured by epistemic subjects trying to understand it. In a far less serious vein, European
philosophers preoccupied with "deconstruction" have made popular in certain circles the idea that
there is no correct "interpretation" of art or literature. There are as many different meanings to a
poem or a novel as there are people to assign meanings. It is perhaps a short dialectic step
(though a step which takes one over a cliff) to move from the claim that there is no correct
interpretation of art to the claim that there is no correct interpretation of the world.
It's
interesting that Goodman, one of the more sophisticated anti-realists, often tries to illustrate his
ways of "world making" by discussing artists and the different (equally correct ways) in which
they "see" reality.
Rorty and Putnam are, of course, among the most well-known of contemporary
anti-realists. Rorty is more enigmatic than Putnam but both seem to reject the idea that there is
a differentiated reality to which truth either does or fails to correspond, a reality whose
characteristics are conceptually independent of their representations.
In this paper I’lll try to
sort through some of these objections to realism.
A Silly Argument for Anti-Realism:
I'm not suggesting that any serious philosopher would advance the following argument
but I have heard versions of it in pseudo-philosophical circles so it might be worth mentioning it,
if only to dismiss it.
One might reject realistic truth-makers, facts that are conceptually
independent of their representations, by claiming that we couldn't possibly have reason to think
such facts exist. After all, to have reason to think that there exists a fact which exists
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independently of our representing it, we would need to think of such a fact.
But if we are
thinking of such a fact, we are representing it, and thus we have no reason to believe that fact
exists independently of our representing it.1
Go ahead, this anti-realist challenges, give me an
example of a fact that exists independently of someone's thinking of it. You won't be able to, of
course, but that just goes to show you can't even point to the sort of thing to which your theory
commits you. The argument is, of course, directly analogous to an argument for human
omniscience. There is nothing that is true that we don't already know. If you think otherwise,
try to give an example of something that is true that you don't know to be true. You can't.
Your choice of a truth to use as an example is restricted to what you know.
Because every fact we have thought of is thought of, it does not follow, of course, that
such a fact had to be thought of in order to exist. Given the foundationalist epistemology I
accept, we do have, in fact, acquaintance with facts where such acquaintance involves no
representation of the facts with which we are acquainted. Of course as soon as we think about
this act of acquaintance, we will have thought of the fact, and its status as unrepresented fact will
have changed. But surely it is obvious to everyone that this observation is irrelevant to the
modal claim of whether the fact had to have been represented in order for it to have existed.
Although it is a necessary truth that all represented facts are represented, it is not a necessary
truth that all facts are represented.
1
Respectable philosophers do rhetorically flirt with the above argument. In explaining
his "internal" realism Putnam (1987) argues that "What we cannot say--because it makes no
sense--is what the facts are independent of all conceptual choices." p. 33. And again "--the view
from which absolutely all languages are equally part of the totality being scrutinized--is forever
inaccessible" (1990), p. 17. Of course, we can't say what the facts are without employing
concepts. But then we can't say what exists without using language. Does that really mean
that the existence of things is parasitic upon the existence of language?
3
Kuhn, Goodman, Putnam and Alternative "Realities":
I argue earlier in the work of which this is a part that full-blooded realism will involve the
claim that there cannot be alternative incompatible true representations of the world. It is
crucial that the "incompatible" be emphasized. I argued that there was no reason at all for the
realist to deny the existence of conceptual relativity if that refers only to the fact that different
people can "picture" the world differently, where these different pictures can all correspond to a
single representation-independent reality. Although apparently based on a myth, it is certainly a
priori possible that Eskimos do "divide up" snow into many more kinds than we do. Given their
environment, it wouldn't be particularly surprising if they noticed similarities and differences to
which we paid no heed. The realist, however, is intent on holding that the similarities and
differences exist independently of whether we take note of them, independently of whether we
categorize the world in such a way that we use these similarities and differences to make
distinctions.
The locution "make distinctions" is the phrase that invites confusion. On one
natural interpretation, if we make distinctions the distinctions are a product of something we do.
But there is an equally natural interpretation of the phrase upon which to make distinctions is to
make something of the distinctions we find, to take note of the distinctions we find. On this
interpretation the distinctions should not be thought of as creations of conscious minds.
Rather,
they are building blocks which we can use in any number of different ways to construct any
number of different edifices.
Is there any reason to believe that we change the world in which we live through changes
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in our conceptual schemes?
There is, of course, one sense in which the answer to that question
can be trivially "Yes." If we form thoughts today that we didn't have yesterday, the world will
be different just in so far as today it contains thoughts that didn't exist yesterday. I Even though
I’m a realist about truth, I have no qualms about admitting even that there is a sense in which the
world might contain truths today that it didn't contain yesterday. We might as realists take
thoughts to be the primary bearers of truth value. If we take thoughts to be properties (rather
than conscious beings exemplifying those properties), properties to be universals, and also
maintain that it is these universals that are the primary bearers of truth value, one may be able to
embrace an ontology in which the bearers of truth value are necessarily existing "Platonic"
thoughts existing outside of space and time. But one may deny that there are universals, hold
that universals exist only as instantiated, or hold that the thoughts that have truth value are
individuals' exemplifying intentional states (states of affairs). If one holds any of these views
then in taking thought to be the primary bearer of truth value, one may be committed to the view
that a change in the thoughts people have might result in new truth-bearers coming into existence.
All of this is perfectly compatible with the kind of hard-core realism captured by the
correspondence theory of truth.
There are doubtless indefinitely many features of the world that
exist independently of their representations "waiting" to be pictured by conscious beings. So
the question we pose must be formulated more carefully. Is there any reason to suppose that a
change in the way we represent the world will literally constitute a change in any aspect of the
world that does not consist in those representations?
Kuhn:
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In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Kuhn talked about changes in world view and
his rhetoric sometimes seemed to imply that, on his view, changes in world view result in
changes in the world that exists independently of the "view".
On p. 110, Kuhn describes the
student and the physicist looking at a bubble-chamber photograph. The student, Kuhn says,
sees confused and broken lines--the physicist sees a record of familiar subnuclear events.
Citing the results of familiar psychological experiments, Kuhn notes that the perceived size, color,
and so on, of experimentally displayed objects varies with the subject's training and experience:
What a person sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what his
previous visual-conceptual experience has taught him to see. In the absence of
such training there can only be, in William James's phrase, "a bloomin' buzzin'
confusion." (p. 112)
What a person sees the world as depends on interpretation, Kuhn says, but he hastens to
emphasize that when it comes to "paradigm" shifts no ordinary sense of interpretation captures
the "flashes of intuition" which allow one to "see" the world in a different way. We can easily
multiply examples of the kind of phenomena to which Kuhn points--the ways in which what we
see the world as depends on experience and the concepts we possess. The aborigine sees a
pin-prick of light in the night sky;
the astronomer sees a sun. The visitor on the submarine
sees flashing lights on a screen; the sonar operator sees the blips as submarines. The tenderfoot
sees indentations in the soil; the hunter sees the footprints of a deer. Does any of this have the
slightest bearing on realism/anti-realism controversies about the nature of truth?
Interestingly enough, I'm inclined to think that Kuhn himself probably didn't think that his
observations call into question the existence of truth-makers that exist independently of their
representations.
He raises one of the critical questions himself when he asks:
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Did these men really see different things when looking at the same sorts of objects?
Is there any legitimate sense in which we can say that they pursued their research
in different worlds? (p. 119)
And he answers the question by suggesting that none of his paradigm shifts has yet produced a
viable alternative to the traditional epistemological paradigm (p. 120). Even more explicitly, he
seems to agree that the scientist after one of these paradigm shifts is still "looking at the same
world" (p. 128). But if Kuhn wasn't ready to draw extravagant metaphysical conclusions from
his views about the way in which science evolves so as to produce radically different ways of
looking at the world, some of his followers were.
As I indicated earlier, one can see in
Goodman the fruition of seeds planted by Kuhn. So it is worth pausing to discuss precisely how
"revolutions" in thought can and cannot change the world we see.
To discuss these matters clearly it is unfortunately necessary to remind ourselves of some
distinctions concerning the way in which we use perceptual verbs. These distinctions are old
hat, but are quite indispensable to rational thought about these matters. The distinctions were
made most clearly in connection with traditional problems of perception. Let's make them
using the verb "see", recognizing that they apply mutatis mutandis to other forms of perception.
In ordinary and philosophical discourse we describe "seeing" in all of the following ways:
1) S sees the (an) F.
2) S sees that there is an F (or that the F exists).
3) S sees the F as a G.
4) S seems to see an F.
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For reasons that in retrospect seem quite odd to me, philosophers engaged in heated debate over
such issues as whether "seeing an F" entails that there is an F. Did Macbeth really see a bloody
dagger in the air before him or just seem to see a bloody dagger?
There is, of course, no fact of
the matter concerning the correct use of these expressions in English. It seems almost certain
that sometimes when we describe someone as seeing an F we do not mean to imply that there
really is an F there. On the other hand, when we try to reassure the drunk suffering DT's that he
doesn't really see rats crawling over his body, we are using "see" in such a way that one can see
rats only if the rats exist. For the sake of artificial precision, let's stipulate that S sees an F only
if there is an F. More precisely we can say that S sees an F when there is an F which is causally
responsible in the appropriate way for S's visual experience.
However we analyze what it is to see an F, it is important to realize that seeing an F is
compatible with any number of phenomenologically different experiences and judgments. One
can see a hat rack and in an alcoholic stupor take it to be an advancing thief. Indeed the visual
experience might be quite like the experience one would have under other conditions were one
faced with an advancing thief.
In this perfectly ordinary sense of "see" discussed above, we can see an F without seeing
that it is an F, without believing that there is an F, without entertaining the proposition that there
is an F, without even possessing the concept of an F.
People saw planets believing that they
were stars. Without straining ordinary usage too much, we can even say that someone
unfamiliar with sonar sees submarines on the screen without realizing it. Indeed, nowhere in his
book does Kuhn give us the slightest reason to suppose that the objects seen by people before
scientific revolutions are any different from the objects seen after, at least in the sense of "see"
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we have just been discussing. Radical changes in beliefs or conceptual frameworks do not
change the representation-independent world that we observe and which constitute truth-makers
on a realist's conception of truth.
We have noted that one can see an F without believing or judging that there is an F. But
as we ordinarily use the locution "see that", one cannot see that there is an F before one without
believing that there is an F before one. "Seeing that" involves judgment. As a first stab, one
might suggest that S sees that there is an F there if on the basis of visual experience S concludes
that there is an F there. We'll undoubtedly need to tighten this up. When one reads in a book
that Washington crossed the Delaware, one doesn't see that Washington crossed the Delaware.
The visual experience on which we rely to reach conclusions about what the book states is not of
the right sort to give us perceptual awareness that the crossing took place.
It may be that to see
that F exists our judgment must be based on visual experience that counts as seeing the F, but I
have no doubt that one can describe extended uses which stretch what we will count as seeing
that.
In any event, how does "seeing that" relate to Kuhn, paradigm shifts and changing worlds.
Since paradigm shifts trivially involve applying concepts that we did not apply before, we will
no doubt see, as a result of our experiences, that certain things exist and occur which we didn't
see before. But this is utterly trivial and has no bearing whatsoever on whether we can continue
to be realists who believe that truth and falsehood depends on a world that is conceptually
independent of anyone's representations of it. When judgments change, the world will be
different with respect to judgments! When paradigms shift, the world will be different with
respect to paradigms! When conceptual frameworks change, the world will be different with
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respect to conceptual frameworks! If you find a realist willing to deny these tautologies, stop
talking to that realist and stop thinking about that realism--it's not a view that any sane person
would embrace.
"Seeing as" is a kind of hybrid between seeing and seeing that. Like seeing that, seeing
as clearly involves something judgment-like. But one can see a drawing as a picture of Lincoln
without believing that it is a picture of Lincoln. The classic example discussed to illustrate this
notion of seeing, one invoked by Kuhn himself (p.113), is Wittgenstein's famous duck/rabbit
drawing. The very same lines can "strike one" as a picture of a rabbit or as a picture of a duck.
There are many much more fascinating examples of drawings which one sees one way and with
no apparent change in the visual experience, suddenly sees another. The picture of the old
woman's face suddenly changes into a picture of a young woman reclining. If one starts by
seeing the old woman, one can actually search long and hard before one "sees" the young woman.
In various places, Kuhn seems to warn us against construing paradigm shifts as simply radical
shifts in judgment about the way things are, even if the shifts in judgment involve a radical
change in conceptual framework. He seems to suggest that the revolutions he discusses involve
seeing things as having certain characteristics one never saw them as having before--very much
the way in which one first sees the picture as being of a rabbit and then, without drawing
inferences or reaching conclusions, suddenly sees it as a picture of a duck.
Does "seeing as" point us to a phenomenon that might be of use to the anti-realist in
trying to describe a way in which the world in which we "live" depends on the input of
consciousness?
Again I don't see how.
Changes in what we see things as really do seem to
be essentially the same as changes in judgments. I've admitted that "seeing as" doesn't entail
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"judging to be".
But I do think it involves something very similar. When we see the picture
as a duck, our visual experience causes us to think of a duck. We don't infer that the picture is
of a duck--we don't infer anything at all.
Conscious inference from premises to conclusion is a
relatively rare phenomenon. Certainly with respect to the world about which we ordinarily
think, it is usually best to think of ourselves as simply taking certain things for granted as a result
of the experiences we have. That there is an implicit judgement at all might only become
apparent when we are surprised by something we weren't expecting.
In the case of the
duck/rabbit, there isn't even any fact of the matter as to what the lines on paper represent.
There
are only facts about what they represent to us. The very same thing can represent one thing to
you and a quite different thing to me, or one thing to me at one time and a quite different thing to
me at a different time. What experience brings to mind no doubt does depend on a host of
factors including, but certainly not restricted to, prior experience. But again it should be clear
that there is no hint of evidence for a rejection of truth as correspondence to
representation-independent reality in any of these commonplace observations.
Realists can be
relativists with respect to various concepts. Whether someone is tall or short is,
uncontroversially, something that is relative to some reference class of people. Tall pygmies
can be very short NBA basketball players. On the relative frequency conception of probability
claims about what characteristic something is likely to have always make implicit reference to
some class of individuals to which the thing in question belongs. On this view of probability
there is no fact concerning how likely it is that I'll live to be ninety. There are only facts about
how likely it is that I'll live to be ninety relative to my being a member of some class (fifty-two
year old, fairly healthy, non-smokers with no history of heart disease or cancer, for example).
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As we'll see in a moment, some senses of "meaning" are prime candidates for relative concepts.
In some senses of "meaning", claims about what something means are intelligible only when
relativized to some person or group. I take it that it is simply obvious that hard-core realists can
embrace the view that the concepts of height, probability, and meaning can be relative concepts.
We've been mainly discussing the ways in which revolutions in thought can allow us to
see that certain things are the case that we couldn't see previously, and see certain things as
having properties that we couldn't see them as having before. It is undoubtedly also true that
changes in the way we think of the world, conceptual changes, can also literally cause a change
in phenomenal experience (the experience which gives rise to judgment). The extent of this
phenomenon was perhaps underestimated by early sense-datum theorists, but it should have been
a relatively unproblematic philosophical datum all along. We don't need complex psychological
experiments involving subjects exposed to various patterns of sounds or lights.
We need only
reflect on the way in which our auditory experience quite literally changes as we learn more
about the structure of a piece of music, or as we learn a language.
Goodman and Putnam on "Making" Reality:
If Kuhn might be misinterpreted as endorsing some version of anti-realism, there is no
doubt that in Ways of World Making, Goodman is rejecting the fundamental idea behind a realist
conception of truth. Goodman is attempting to strike at the heart of realism, the idea that there
are facts which exist independently of our representations of them. Goodman explicitly claims
that the realist is someone who holds that facts are found, not made (p. 92) and makes clear that
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this is the idea he rejects.
But why?
When the smoke clears, Goodman appears to rely
primarily on a plethora of examples, examples of different ways in which we can "make" or
"construct" reality through the ways in which we represent it.
Before assessing these examples, we should remind ourselves again that the realist need
not deny that there may be truths relative to one conceptual scheme which are not expressible in
another. If you possess the concept of an electron and I do not, then, trivially, you can form the
thought that there are electrons and I cannot.
In a sense, a perfectly trivial sense, your
conceptual framework allows you to construct truths which my conceptual framework does not
allow me to construct.2
The question that concerns us here, however, is not the construction of
truths but the construction of facts.
Unless we become convinced that facts are "constructed"
through the imposition of concepts (a doctrine which I shall argue its proponents don't really
believe), we will have no reason to question the tenets of a realist correspondence conception of
truth.
The inability of people entrenched in one conceptual framework to understand the
"truths" expressed from within an alternative conceptual framework is worth discussing in a bit
more detail.
The phenomenon occasionally gets the impressive label of "incommensurability",
where incommensurability is supposed to be something that a realist should fear. But what,
precisely, does it mean to say that the one conceptual framework is incommensurable with
another?
In one perfectly clear sense, to say that your concepts and mine are incommensurable
2
Again, if we embrace the view that it is thoughts construed as universals that are the
primary bearers of truth value, we should understand reference to your possessing concepts
which I fail to possess in terms of your exemplifying thought-universals that I fail to exemplify.
Our different conceptual frameworks would only prevent us from contemplating the same truths.
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is just to say that neither of us can understand the claims of the other given our respective
conceptual resources. This concept of incommensuability, however, is utterly innocuous with
respect to the plausibility of realism.
I do not, in fact, possess a conceptual framework rich
enough to understand all of the claims made by physicists.3
I am, nevertheless, perfectly
capable of acquiring such concepts, and, once I do, I can entertain the same truths (made true by
a representation-independent world) that are entertained by the physicist.
That's just the point, the anti-realist may retort. The more interesting sort of
incommensurability that poses problems for realists occurs when two parties occupy alternative
conceptual frameworks which preclude the possibility of either one from understanding truths
that can be asserted by the other. But what sort of possibility are we talking about here. If it is
merely causal possibility, then the point is again completely irrelevant to the plausibility of
realism.
Suppose that the world is divided into two groups of people who have developed
separately and who possess their own languages and concepts.
Suppose, further, that one group
is sighted while the other is blind. The two groups eventually come into contact.
It's clear to
both that each possesses a language and, naturally enough, they try to understand each other.
Again, direct and causal theories of reference aside, I'm confident that the unsighted will never
understand the claims about color made by the sighted. I suspect it may even be causally
impossible for the congenitally blind to understand color terms.
If ever there were such a thing
as incommensurability, surely this would be it. But what possible relevance could this have to
3
If certain extreme versions of causal theories of reference were correct, I suppose I
don't need to know very much in order to possess the concepts of quark or charm, or other exotic
objects and properties postulated by the theoretical physicist. At least I don't need to know
much in order to "borrow" these terms from the specialists and thereby successfully refer.
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the plausibility of realism?
For reasons which may be philosophically controversial, we may
conclude that the sighted people possess concepts and are able to contemplate truths which the
unsighted will never be able to understand. But for all that the truths about color can obviously
be made true by a world of facts that exist independently of their representations.
The
unsighted will never have epistemic access to those facts, but this is an observation that is
philosophically insignificant.
One might, of course, claim that there are still stronger forms of incommensurability
between conceptual frameworks. It might be the case that my conceptual framework logically
precludes me from appreciating truths which can be entertained only from within your conceptual
framework. But what could this possibly mean?
If one conscious being can possess a concept,
then so can another. You might try to understand the movement of light employing the concept
of waves, and I might try to understand the movement of light employing the concept of particles.
Have we incommensurable conceptual frameworks for thinking about light?
Well, we might
have incompatible beliefs about light, but there is nothing in your way of thinking about light
which precludes me from entertaining precisely the same thoughts which you assert.
And even
if I lack the conceptual resources to think of light in terms of waves, it is surely logically possible
for me to acquire such concepts where such acquisition will allow you and I to engage in debate
over the nature of light.
Of course, if the anti-realist is advancing the suggesting that
characterizations of light as waves and characterizations of light as particles are simultaneously
incompatible and equally true or correct, then finally we may have arrived at a claim that at least
seems to contradict the fundamental tenets of realism.
One does successfully refute realism about truth if one can show that relative to
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conceptual frameworks there are different and incompatible truths.
It may be that many of
Goodman's examples are designed to establish that thesis. But do they?
One of Goodman's
favorite examples of reality being manufactured rather than discovered concerns facts about
motion.
Whether something is at rest or in motion is always relative to some reference point.
Relative to the earth's surface I might be more or less at rest, despite the fact that the earth with
me on it is hurtling through space (so they say) at unbelievable speeds relative to distant objects
travelling in other directions. Such stuff can be the subject of good jokes. On a Monty Python
episode, the hijacker of a plane first warns the pilot not to move. Being of a somewhat
philosophical nature, the hijacker quickly begins modifying his command to make it more
realistic for the pilot to obey. They agree that they won't count the blinking of eyes and the
pumping of the heart as movement. And the pilot quickly adds that they are after all travelling
several hundred miles an hour relative to the surface of the earth and will continue to do so no
matter how still he remains relative to the cockpit.
Acknowledging his debt to Goodman, Putnam in Realism with a Human Face,
Representation and Reality, and The Many Faces of Realism also relies on examples to convince
us that realists are victims of a kind of illusion when they suppose that the world contains facts
that are independent of the imposition of concepts.
His favorite example, judging by the
number of times he repeats it in various works, involves number. Putnam wants the realist to
tell us how many objects there are in a world with three individuals. A pretty easy question, one
might be tempted to think.
The world in which there are just three individuals is a world in
which there are three individuals. But we know what Putnam's point is supposed to be. Let's
label the three individuals A, B, and C. In addition to A, B, and C, don't we have the complex
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objects, A and B, B and C, A and C, and A together with B and C?
And if we have sets in our
ontology, our world's population is going to increase dramatically. We'll have the set that
contains A, as well as A, the set that contains A and B as well as A and B, the set that contains
the set that contains A as well as the set that contains A, and A, and so on ad infinitum. So
what's the truth?
Like many of Goodman's examples, Putnam's is clever. One is surely
inclined to shrug one's shoulders and allow that there is no way of adjudicating between equally
correct, perfectly intelligible, but apparently incompatible answers to this question.
One can understand how a philosopher frustrated with philosophical progress might get
the idea that philosophical problems and their solutions are philosophical creations, not
discoveries, but are we really getting any examples of equally correct, but incompatible versions
of a world?
And again the emphasis must be on incompatibility. If different people with
different conceptual frameworks merely mean different things, then the world which exists
independently of its representations can unproblematically make true, in a realist sense, the
different (but not incompatible) claims made about it.
Before we answer this question, perhaps
we need to step back and look more closely at what it might mean. What on earth could one
possibly mean by asserting that there can be equally correct (true?) but incompatible pictures of
the world. If I were asked what it meant to say that two claims were genuinely incompatible, I
would simply respond that they can't both be true. Since that's what I mean by "incompatible",
it is true by definition that there cannot be two true but incompatible claims about the world.
If
it looks as if we have two true incompatible descriptions of the world and we want to explain the
appearance, we'll have to do it in a way which makes the incompatiblity disappear.
And in the final analysis, I think this must be the correct response to Putnam, Goodman,
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Rorty and all who talk as if they allow for incompatible true assertions.
could approximate sense is a version of the coherence theory of truth.
The closest view that
A coherence theorist
insists that there is no truth simpliciter. There is only truth relative to belief systems.
We've
all had our patience tested by undergraduates concerned to reject imperialism about truth. We
are discussing some controversial assertion, the claim that God exists, say, and we are told that
the sensible position to take is that it is in the end true for the theist but false for the atheist.
It is
almost always the case that further discussion will make clear that the undergraduate means only
to repeat what we already knew: the theist believes that there is a God, while the atheist denies
it. The colloquial use of "true for" simply means "believed by". But the coherence theorist is
offering us another of way of making sense of "relativized" truth. P's truth is to be understood
in terms of P's cohering with some set of propositions. What propositions?
propositions believed. But by whom?
Some set of
Once one attempts to understand truth in terms of
coherence with beliefs, it is perfectly natural to allow that the expression "is true" is simply
incomplete. The logically perspicuous form of truth attribution involves relativizing the truth of
a proposition to a community of believers (where the limiting case is a community of one). On
such a view, P can be true for some person or group S in virtue of P's cohering with what S
believes, while it is not true for R (because it fails to cohere with what R believes).
Even with a coherence theory this crude we still haven't arrived at a conception of truth
which would allow for equally correct (true) descriptions of the world.
We must absorb the
lesson we learned earlier concerning the irrelevance of various forms of relativism for realism
about truth. Relativism about height, value, probability, and the like are perfectly compatible
with a realist's conception of truth. And ironically (and in a sense misleadingly), we can say the
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same thing about "relativized" truth. If P is true for S (meaning P coheres with S's belief system)
but false for R (meaning it fails to cohere with R's belief system) then it is TRUE that it is both
true for S and false for R. The relativized truth claims are not incompatible. Of course this
claim I just made is a claim made about "coherence truth" from within the framework of a
correspondence theory of truth.
Obviously a coherence theorist isn't going to (can't consistently)
let me make observations about what is true simpliciter about what is true for S and not true for
R. The problem is that there is no way of preventing us from describing relativized truth claims
as true or false simpliciter. That's the only coherent way to think of relativized truth. And that
just goes to show, of course, that there is a realist conception of truth that the coherence theorist
will never get at through attempts to analyze truth as coherence.
What about the specific examples Goodman and Putnam give us to convince us that there
are no facts independently of a choice of conceptual scheme?
It is particularly clever,
rhetorically, to focus on philosophical controversies where their solutions have seemed to defy
for millennia any kind of consensus.
In one sense, to successfully convince you that there are
answers to difficult philosophical questions that are straightforwardly true or false, as the realist
understands truth and falsehood, I'd have to convince you, one by one, that each problem had a
solution.
problems.
And to do this, I might have to convince you of particular solutions to particular
I trust it won't come as too much of a disappointment when I tell you that I have no
intention of providing definitive answers to all philosophical questions as part of my defense of
realism.
Some of what I am about to say with respect to the anti-realists' more commonplace
examples will apply to philosophical issues as well. But there is a special problem that attends
many philosophical disputes, and that is that one is often arguing not so much that one's
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opponent's view is false as that it is unintelligible. I don't mean unintelligible in the way that
Derrida is often unintelligible. Rather, one is often simply unable to understand critical
concepts invoked in the answer to a philosophical question. A great many phiosophers objected
to Moore’s claim that good is a simple, nonnatural property by complaining that they simply had
no idea what he was talking about.
When one's objection to a position is of this sort, argument
does tend to break down, and where argument breaks down, there is a sense in which one does
shrug one's shoulders and agree to go separate ways. But this "shrugging of the shoulders" is
not a reflection of tolerance towards "equally correct" views.
It's rather an acknowledgement
that we may have no arguments left to offer--we are, after all, not going to come to blows over
our philosophical differences.
What about some of the other examples given to convince us that there can be equally
correct, but in some sense incompatible truths that are relative to conceptual schemes?
Goodman's protestations to the contrary, it seems obvious to me that the best way to understand
relativism about motion is to understand it as perfectly analogous to that relativism about height
which we found entirely compatible with hard-core realism.
It is true (true in the realist sense)
that we can't speak of motion unless we relativize motion to some fixed point. But so what?
As long as we are clear about what we are claiming something is in motion relative to, we will be
making an assertion that has a truth value--a non-relativized truth value about relative motion.
Should we define lines in terms of points or points in terms of lines?
sense to suppose that there is a correct answer to this question?
Does it make
There are, of course, a number
of possibilities. It may be that we can successfully argue that one (or both) of these definitions
is unintelligible. Goodman takes a shotgun approach to giving examples meant to undermine
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realism, and he doesn't pause long enough on any given example to explore the issues, sometimes
very complex philosophical issues, that arise. If we define line in terms of points, we still need
some way of understanding point, and if we define points in terms of intersecting lines, we need
some independent way of understanding the concept of a line. Frankly, I'm sympathetic to those
empiricists who question the intelligibility of some of the mathematical definitions we were
given in high school.
I'm not at all convinced that it does make sense to suppose that a line is
composed of an infinite number of points each of which has no width and no length.
I'm also
not convinced that it makes much sense to talk of lines which have length but no width.
These
are difficult issues in the philosophy of mathematics (geometry). To assess the relevance of
such issues to realism we would probably need to solve fundamental questions concerning space,
something which is clearly beyond the scope of this paper.
In addition to finding one or both definitions of lines and points philosophically
problematic, we may also decide that there are different, but equally correct, ways of defining the
respective terms.
We hear a great deal about so-called alternative geometries and anti-realists
sometimes make vague references to these alternative (but equally correct) geometries as
showing us that there is no fact of the matter with respect to geometry. It is trivially true,
however, that "alternative" geometries are completely irrelevant to the issue we are discussing if
the common terms of these geometries ("straight line", for example) are defined differently. In
Euclidean geometry parallel straight lines never meet.
sense are these alternative geometries?
In other geometries they do. In what
Are they simply offering us alternative definitions of
familiar terms like "straight line" or are these alternative geometries advancing incompatible
theorems expressed using identical concepts?
From what I've been able to learn, it seems to me
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that it is the former. I have no quarrel with someone who argues that Euclidean geometry is
useless with respect to describing the paths bodies actually travel.
Perhaps we should define a
straight line between two points as the path an object can travel in the least amount of time to get
from the one point to the other. Or perhaps we should define a straight line as the path that light
travels.
If we were to do either, it would be an empirical question as to whether these "straight
lines" are Euclidean "straight lines", but that's only because Euclid didn't mean either of those
two things by "straight line".
It shouldn't be necessary to say it, but two sentences which appear to be incompatible may
not be if the linguistic tokens comprising the one don't have the same meaning as the linguistic
tokens comprising the other. Goodman and Putnam are hardly naive philosophers. They
know perfectly well that this is the line that the realist will try to take. Putnam explicitly
anticipates the realist who will argue that his example of counting objects points only to the fact
that we can mean quite different things by "counting", or by "object". Although he anticipates
this realist reply, I can't figure out what his counter is.
It's true that when one is asked the
question "How many objects are there in the room?", one would be ill-advised to answer without
knowing what the questioner had in mind.
Are we counting artifacts, things bigger than a
breadbox, things for which we have names, visible objects, subatomic particles, combinations of
subatomic particles?
The expression "object" is paradigmatically vague. There are any
number of different things one might have in mind, and some philosophers might have in mind
bearers of truth value that other philosophers have never entertained. This, the realist should be
happy to accept.
Consider the example of sorting books on a shelf. Books have indefinitely many
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similarities and differences. Many we would probably never take note of in sorting the books;
others we might take note of and actually use in choosing where to put the books. If we are
asked how many different kinds of books we have, we would encounter precisely the same
problem raised by Putnam. It depends what you have in mind by "kind". Only one, someone
might answer. They are all philosophy books. Two, another philosopher might insist, analytic
and continental. Four, a third says. Good and bad and analytic and continental. And there is
no end to the possible answers. There are literally indefinitely many kinds of books ready to be
sorted (by kind) on the shelves.
The anti-realist, of course, isn't going to like our analogy of sorting books. We are going
to be accused of failing to appreciate the depth of the problem. We want to allow relativity of
conceptual frameworks which can sort objects in the world differently, and we think we can still
make sense of the world containing differentiated objects ready to be sorted. But the
similarities and differences between objects are themselves the result of sorting, a sorting that
involves imposition of concepts which may differ from one person to another, from one linguistic
community to another. Goodman raises this very point in his discussion of the way in which he
thinks we "carve" such entities as galaxies out of stars. He expects the realist to complain that
the carving out of the galaxies is only possible because there exist the stars "waiting" to be sorted
by conscious beings. What the realist fails to understand, however, is that the stars are
"constructed" just as surely as are the galaxies. How many particles we lump together to label
"star" reflects a decision just as much as our decision to label some collection of stars "galaxy".
And the input of conscious decision-making will always reappear at whatever more fundamental
level we search for the "unconceptualized" building blocks of the world we create. Putnam
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poetically puts the anti-realist's claim this way:
What I am saying, then, is that elements of what we call "language" or "mind"
penetrate so deeply into what we call "reality" that the very project of representing
ourselves as being "mappers" of something "language-independent" is fatally
compromised from the very start.
(Putnam, 1990, p. 28)
These anti-realists are clearly going to reject the analogy of sorting books by rejecting the
unproblematic existence of the differentiated books. This should come as no surprise. Putnam
doesn't even like the metaphor of the mind as a cookie-cutter making shapes in an
undifferentiated dough. The dough's existence with its spatial properties is itself considered
problematic!
So are we simply being misled by our book analogy?
In our realist
account of truth,
we want thought to correspond to the methods of sorting books, methods which are relative to
interests and choices. But the whole point of the analogy was to suggest that the ability to make
such choices presupposes that the books have similarities and differences which are there to be
noticed or ignored. What corresponds to the similarities and the differences in the books in our
realist account of conceptual frameworks imposing "structure" on a world of facts which exist
independently of their representations?
The answer one gives to this question depends crucially on one's ontological conclusions.
One pivotal metaphysical question again concerns the existence of universals, and particularly,
generic universals.
A great many philosophers, from ancient times to the present, are convinced
that this afterimage and that afterimage can both share precisely the same blueness.
Furthermore, they are convinced that in addition to the images being some particular shade of
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blue (with its particular hue and brightness), the images share generic blueness, and generic color,
where generic blueness is that universal which is present in all blue things whatever their
particular shade of blue, and generic color is that which is present in all blue things, red things,
purple things, etc. in virtue of which these things are colored.
This realist about universals,
determinate and generic, is a realist with a vengeance about facts.
The world, on this view,
really does come to us neatly "carved up" ready to be served to consciousness.
There are no
decisions to be made with respect to what we will count as a property. There are only
discoveries to be made with respect to the properties that things actually exemplify. This realist
about universals can still allow that we may notice the presence of some universals and ignore
others.
If one is liberal in one's account of what counts as a generic universal and one includes
relational properties as universals, every thing exemplifies an infinite number of universals and
our poor consciousness would suffer extreme overload if we took note of all of them.
And even
among the universals we notice, there are, of course, decisions to be made at the level of
language. We do not have, and do not want, words to mark all the distinctions in the world we
notice (though we have cleverly given ourselves demonstratives as an all-purpose device to point
to that which has no label of its own).
If one's ontology is populated by generic universals of all stripes and one holds that one
can be acquainted in thought with such universals, the simplest account of thought would
probably involve construing thought as genuinely relational with the universals exemplified by
objects also literally constituents (as one of the relata) of thought.
When one thinks that
something x is red, one has redness itself (the universal, the Platonic form) "in" one's mind
(though not, of course, in it by way of being exemplified--one probably doesn't want one's mind
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red any more than one wants it read). It is this sort of view that underlay some of the logical
atomists' goal of constructing an ideal language in which each term in the ideal language was a
genuine name, a mere label, for some existing entity. On the side of the mind, one understands
the ideal language by having before the mind both the label and the mind-independent entity,
where the entities that do the most work in the ideal language are universals.
I'm not going to argue against this kind of realism about universals here. The view is
dialectically attractive, but I can't quite get myself to believe that I am acquainted with the kinds
of things I would need to be acquainted with in order for the view to make sense. Sometimes I
have the sense that the realist's critics are conflating this sort of realism about universals with
realism about truth. It is telling that for Rorty Plato is his favorite representative of the realism
he is attacking, Plato with his forms organizing the world which participates in them.
But does
the realist need representation-independent facts as rich as those offered to us by realists about
generic universals?
I think not.
There is room for a theory of intentionality which allows,
indeed insists, that the mind has a critical role to play in making sense of, in structuring, the
world that exists independently of its representations.
But again, what are these
representation-independent building blocks ready to be structured by the mind?
There is no choice here but to retreat to phenomenology. And perhaps this is where
epistemology and metaphysics again intersect.
Rorty and others explicitly reject the
foundationalist's doctrine of the given, and as I have argued elsewhere,4 without direct
acquaintance one cannot even make sense of phenomenological evidence. If I literally thought I
couldn't be phenomenologically acquainted with anything, not even what I believed or what I
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thought, or how I represented the world, I really wouldn't know how to begin doing philosophy.
I'd either have to stop or join Rorty in a quasi-literary mode of waxing poetic about the human
predicament (without awareness, a predicament about which I'm not sure I could "feel" enough to
wax poetic).
If we set aside our philosophical prejudices for a moment, and pay attention to what is
before consciousness, we will surely find ourselves presented with (yes, acquainted with)
phenomenal properties--colors, shapes, smells, and sounds.
Perhaps we are not acquainted with
generic colors--redness, for example. I'm talking about particular patches of color--that redness,
that triangularity, that sweet taste. I am, of course, using language in trying to point to what I
want you to concentrate on, and the use of language does tend to frustrate the goal.
Even when
we preface "redness" with "that" we are still using a word having as its root the generic predicate
expression "red". But even if we inevitably bring in concepts in attempting to describe what we
are phenomenologically aware of, it makes it no less the object of our awareness.
As a visual
image changes from some specific shade of blue to some specific shade of red, something
changes. The change occurs whether it is noticed or not, whether we bother to mark it or not.
The visual experience is simply not the same. This access to sameness and difference of
particular phenomenal properties is our access to the world that exists independently of any
thought or representations, even if the access is virtually always overlaid by thought.
If one rejects universals, one might argue that it is thought, and with it correspondence,
that does, in a manner of speaking, create generic properties of objects.
Once one has the
thought of something being red, then it is the correspondence, the "match" between the thought
4
Fumerton (1987) and (1995).
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and some perfectly determinate aspect of the world that makes it true that the object in question
is red. I repeat for emphasis what I said earlier. A realist about truth can consistently argue
that there is no truth without thought. And it is not just in the trivial sense in which there are no
truth-bearers without thought.
Thought might structure the world, by introducing the possibility
of correspondence, a concept through which we can understand the ascription of generic
properties to objects.
It is only because an object can correspond or fail to correspond to some
thought of triagularity that it is true that the object is a triangle. Without thought, one might
concede, there are only particular shapes, particular colors, particular sounds, particular smells.
There is a real sense in which there is only generality in the world because there are thoughts, a
kind of thing that can simultaneously correspond to quite different particular features of the
world.
I view this form of realism as incorporating an important concession to the anti-realists
knowing full well that they will reject the concession as far too little. But we have gone as far
as we can go. We can't even make sense of their alternative to this picture. While we can
acknowledge the contribution made by mind to truth, we can't allow that the activity of the mind
produces truth if there is no world upon which the activity can leave its effects.
Richard Fumerton
University of Iowa
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