[MD] Realism and anti-realism

[Ham Priday]

Hi Steve and DMB --


Steve said to Ham (full text):
> [Anti-realism] isn't meant as a pejorative term for idealism so much
> as a broader term for positions (including idealism) that deny the
> existence of an objective reality. Pragmatists and MOQers don't
> affirm the existence of objective reality. But the anti-realist's denials
> sound like a _realistic_ denial to us. (Would anti-realists have us
> think that it is objectively true that objectivity is an illusion?)
> So 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.
>
> Behaving as though there is an objective reality has born much fruit for
> scientists, and therefore it is good to believe that there is a world that
> is not mind-dependent for certain purposes such as predicting and
> controlling things, but we don't hold the existence of objective reality
> as a metaphysical certainty that must be regarded as true for ALL
> possible purposes. (That belief seems to have reached its limit even
> for scientific purposes.)  And we don't take objective reality as a 
> _basis_
> for developing a system of thought or as an axiom to which all our ideas
> must adhere.
>
> Our descriptions of reality are always descriptions made for a purpose.
> When the realist or anti-realist asks, do you affirm or deny the existence
> of objective reality?, what is desired is not a description made in 
> relation
> to particular purposes but a practice-transcending description. 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 of
> descriptions of reality that are objective in the sense of being true 
> without
> regard to human practice when we take the meaning for words like "true"
> and all others words as having meaning only in relation to practice.

Thanks for that explanation, Steve.  With the exception of your first 
paragraph, it's a clear presentation of an "anti-realist" position.  I do 
have some trouble making sense of the double-negative "anti-anti-realism" to 
which you subscribe, however.  For me it seems to be a way of avoiding the 
metaphysical issue of whether objective reality exists or not.  But that's 
because I define "objective reality" as existence.

A couple of comments on the remaining paragraphs:

First, aren't you slighting objective reality by crediting only its 
scientific benefits?  Scientific pragmatism is not a true philosophy, but we 
DO take objective reality as a basis for our systems of thoughts and 
actions.  Certainly we do things on purpose; in that sense we are all 
pragmatists.  If we couldn't exercise some measure of control in our world, 
it would be impossible to plan or predict the actions required in any 
endeavor.  That would make knowledge (the "axioms we adhere to") useless for 
human progress.

Secondly, when you say we "can't make any sense of the notion of 
descriptions of reality that are objective in the sense of being true 
without regard to human practice," aren't you comfirming the fact that 
existence is relative?  And if human understanding is based on our 
experience of existence, the truths we derive from this experience must be 
relative as well.  (One of them is that we live in a relational world, which 
neither proves nor disproves an ultimate, non-relational Reality.)

In the same vein, the concluding statements in David's Wiki quote on 
Antirealism add nothing to what we already know without the "anti-realism" 
label:

> "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."

I submit that, whether you are an anti-realist or not, "mathematical 
objects" are no more than "physical objects" expressed in a mathematical 
context.  It's unclear why the author characterized platonists as 
"realists", inasmuch as Plato is regarded as the father of Idealism.  In any 
case, what appears at first reading to be a paradoxical statement is simply 
common sense.  Mathematics was developed to quantify objective reality.  So 
the "truth" of a numerical quantity is its correspondence to physical 
objects, just as the "truth" of a mathematical equation relates to the 
objective units that the equation represents.  In other words, we learn 
pragmatically, and Truth is what can be proven objectively.  So what was the 
author's point?

Thanks to you both for helping me understand the meaning of "anti-realism". 
I hope it won't offend you to hear my opinion, that it is ingenuous to be 
"anti-" anything unless you know what its reality is.  And judging by the 
posts on this topic, there is no more agreement on what Reality is today 
than when I signed up for the MD nine years ago.

Essentially speaking,
Ham