A Naturalistic Defense of Realism - Thesis | PHIL 420, Papers of Philosophy

Download A Naturalistic Defense of Realism - Thesis | PHIL 420 and more Papers Philosophy in PDF only on Docsity! Phil 420: Metaphysics Spring 2008 [Handout 6] Michael Devitt: A Naturalistic Defense of Realism Professor JeeLoo Liu § Summary of Main Theses • His defense is of commonsense realism and scientific realism. • His main claim is that realism does not entail, and does not involve the correspondence theory of truth. • His main position is that of “naturalism” – experience is our only teacher. Devitt: “Anti-realism about the physical world is an occupational hazard of philosophy.” § Realism Realism usually has two elements: 1. semantic claim about truth and reference 2. metaphysical claim about (i) existence; (ii) mind-independence. ( the existence dimension and the independence dimension) Realism as a metaphysical thesis (the semantic element should be disassociated from Realism): ___ Tokens of most commonsense, and scientific, physical types objectively exist independently of the mental. § Idealism ___ Mostly deny only the independence dimension, not the existence dimension, of the metaphysical claim of realists. [A] According to some traditional idealists, the entities identified by the first dimension are made up of mental items, “ideas” or “sense data,” and so are not external to the mind. Devitt 2 [B] According to recent idealists, the entities are not, in a certain respect, “objective”: they depend for their existence and nature on the cognitive activities and capacities of our minds. § Realist’s claim about the objectivity of the world: ____ The world is not constituted by our knowledge, by our epistemic values, by our capacity to refer to it, by the synthesizing power of the mind, nor by our imposition of concepts, theories, or languages; it is not limited by what we can believe or discover. However, it is not necessarily unknowable. § Realism and the Correspondence Theory of Truth Devitt: ___ The correspondence theory is distant from Realism, because it is silent on the existence dimension. It tells us what it is for a sentence to be true or false, but it does not tell us which ones are true and so could not tell us which particular entities exist. ___ The correspondence theory claims that a sentence or a thought is true in virtue of its structure, its relation to reality, usually reference relations, and the nature of reality. This is compatible with any metaphysics. Contemporary Realism: ____ Most scientific statements about unobservables are (approximately) correspondence-true. Devitt suggests that they actually combine the following two theses: 1. Strong Scientific Realism: Tokens of most unobservable scientific types objectively exist independently of the mental and (approximately) obey the laws of science. 2. Correspondence Truth: Sentences have correspondence-truth conditions. § Devitt’s Claim: Both Strong Scientific Realism and his Scientific Realism are metaphysical, concerned with the underlying nature of the world in general. They do not have to be linked with the correspondence theory of truth. Q: Is Devitt successful in disassociating scientific realism from the correspondence theory of truth?