How to deal with non-realism?

loup-vaillant

From Being a Realist (even if you believe in God):

theists and untheists can and should meet half way and at least agree on the logical necessity of being a realist.

My mother, who doesn't call herself a theist (I think she's agnostic), doesn't even accept realism. She doesn't even agree with this:

There is something. All that there is, we generally call "reality". Note that by this definition, reality is unique. The corollary is, we all live in the same reality. We do not percieve it in the same way, but our perceptions and reality itself aren't the same thing.

Every description of reality that matches it is true. Every description of reality that doesn't match it is false. In this sense, truth is unique and universal.

(We can nuance the truth/falsehood dichotomy with probability distributions. Some probability distributions are closer to reality than others, and so on.)

That's little more than tautologies here. Yet it elicited an impression of being forced to believe. I know because she told me about the totalitarian dangers from such narrow thinking.

I'm happy to have finally found the root cause of our ongoing disagreement, but now, how can I deal with that? It looks pretty hopeless, but just in case, does someone have a suggestion, or should I just leave it at that? (My ego doesn't like it, but giving up is an option.)

Now I'm relieved to know that in near mode, she's a complete realist. This craziness only shows up in far mode.

From Being a Realist (even if you believe in God):

theists and untheists can and should meet half way and at least agree on the logical necessity of being a realist.

My mother, who doesn't call herself a theist (I think she's agnostic), doesn't even accept realism. She doesn't even agree with this:

There is something. All that there is, we generally call "reality". Note that by this definition, reality is unique. The corollary is, we all live in the same reality. We do not percieve it in the same way, but our perceptions and reality itself aren't the same thing.

Every description of reality that matches it is true. Every description of reality that doesn't match it is false. In this sense, truth is unique and universal.

(We can nuance the truth/falsehood dichotomy with probability distributions. Some probability distributions are closer to reality than others, and so on.)

That's little more than tautologies here. Yet it elicited an impression of being forced to believe. I know because she told me about the totalitarian dangers from such narrow thinking.

Now I'm relieved to know that in near mode, she's a complete realist. This craziness only shows up in far mode.

Yikes. "X" anti-realism is the position that there are no objective (mind-independent) facts about X. So moral anti-realism, for instance, does not deny that there are universally shared values in humans, it simply denies that those values are anything more then attitudes. When an anti-realist hears "murder is wrong" she either thinks "That's not a proposition and therefore, neither true nor false." (non-cognitivism), "That's true because we both hold a very low opinion of murder" (subjectivism) or "That's false because it implies the existence of objective moral laws which don't exist" (error theory).

"Physical" anti-realism isn't really a term but presumably you mean metaphysical anti-realism or scientific anti-realism. Scientific anti-realism denies the mind-independent existence of scientific theories. For instance an anti-realist might claim that scientific facts are determined by the prevailing Kuhnian paradigm or are socially constructed and therefore, in some way contingent on the minds of the scientists who created them. Metaphysical anti-realism denies that objects and properties in the world exist independently of our conception of them. Thus, realism is consistent with both skepticism and belief in our senses. Realism is a position regarding the question "what exists?" not "what can we know?". Plenty of anti-realists believe that the physical world can be predicted and that scientific explanations "work". What they would doubt is whether they correspond exactly to anything external to our minds.

You are right that my pithy summary was misleading. This may be a terminological point, but I am confused about how a hard-core scientific anti-realist can believe in predictions. At the very least, someone who thinks there is no objective physical reality has a hard time explaining why science seems like a one-way ratchet, with predictions always getting better and never getting worse.

I agree that science, like all facts, are socially-mediated. I think the case for incommensurability between certain scientific theories is overwhelming. But it seems li... (read more)

0Alejandro114y

I like your explanation of the distinction between (metaphysical) skepticism and anti-realism. Another way of putting it would be that the for the skeptic, the standard to evaluate beliefs/theories is correspondence with objective reality, but they also believe that there is no reliable way to compare map and territory and therefore all our beliefs are unreliable. The anti-realist denies objective reality is a meaningful concept, judges beliefs by some other standard like consistency or pragmatic usefulness, and if happy to endorse them if they satisfy it. Or as Thomas Nagel memorably put it in this passage from The View From Nowhere, epistemological theories can be classified as skeptic, reductive (meaning not "reductionist" but "anti-realist"), or heroic: [...]

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How to deal with non-realism?

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How to deal with non-realism?

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