[MD] Realism and anti-realism

[david buchanan]

Steve said to Ham:
It [Anti-realism] isn't meant as a pejorative term for idealism so much as a broader term for positions that deny the existence of an objective reality. Pragmatists and MOQers don't affirm the existence of objective reality. ... pragmatists are neither realists in affirming the existence of objective reality nor anti-realists in denying the existence of objective reality. We are anti-anti-realists. ...we don't hold the existence of objective reality as a metaphysical certainty  .. And we don't take objective reality as a _basis_ for developing a system...  ...Our descriptions of reality are always descriptions made for a purpose. ..We have no practice-transcending descriptions to offer. We aren't denying that reality is objectively real. We just can't make any sense of the notion ...


dmb says:

The term "anti-realism" was coined recently by Michael Dummett, an analytic philosopher who was dealing with issues in analytic philosophy. Putnam and Rorty famously debated realism and anti-realism but, if Hildebrand is right, they were rehashing issues that James and Dewey had already dispatched. This is the same book wherein Hildebrand says that Rorty "eviscerates" pragmatism. What's my point?

You're pretending to speak for pragmatism but what you're saying is just analytic philosophy with some strains of pragmatism in it.

I know, there are Jamesian-sounding thoughts and slogans mixed into what you say, but it's oddly stripped of James's pragmatism. 


Here's a little bit of Wiki on ANTIREALISM;


In analytic philosophy, the term anti-realism is used to describe any position involving either the denial of an objective reality of entities of a certain type or the denial that verification-transcendent statements about a type of entity are either true or false. This latter construal is sometimes expressed by saying "there is no fact of the matter as to whether or not P." Thus, we may speak of anti-realism with respect to other minds, the past, the future, universals, mathematical entities (such as natural numbers), moral categories, the material world, or even thought. The two construals are clearly distinct and often confused. For example, an "anti-realist" who denies that other minds exist (i. e., a solipsist) is quite different from an "anti-realist" who claims that there is no fact of the matter as to whether or not there are unobservable other minds (i. e., a logical behaviorist).The term was coined by Michael Dummett, who introduced it in his paper Realism to re-examine a number of classical philosophical disputes involving such doctrines as nominalism, conceptual realism, idealism and phenomenalism. The novelty of Dummett's approach consisted in seeing these disputes as analogous to the dispute between intuitionism and Platonism in the philosophy of mathematics.According to intuitionists (anti-realists with respect to mathematical objects), the truth of a mathematical statement consists in our ability to prove it. According to platonists (realists), the truth of a statement consists in its correspondence to objective reality.