Jack comments on How to deal with non-realism? - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (168)
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:
That's a good way to put it. And Nagel's footnote is hilarious and on target.
Also:
I just want to point out to people in this thread how not bad philosophically sophisticated metaphysical anti-realism is. The right set of epistemic principles is isomorphic to "correspondence with reality". What matters is which beliefs we endorse not what we mean by "belief". Similarly, a deflated concept of "reality" takes you to more or less the same place as the anti-realists. The problem is the anti-realists who endorse poor strategies of belief formation.