Reality and realism

Let’s have a new topic, preferably one that is not Christian apologetics.

This is mostly intended as a response to a comment by KN, but I think it deserves its own thread.

There’s a recent blog post elsewhere that is related:

Personally, I think of myself as a realist. But I agree with some of Dan Kaufman’s criticisms of traditional views of reality.

Now my response to KN. The quotes will all be from KN’s comment (linked above).

I think I’m more inclined towards realism about objects than you are. I find this curious because you and I both appreciate Gibson’s work on affordances, and I am a realist about affordances — affordances are real features of the organism-environment relationship But perhaps you are more inclined to think of affordances as “projections” from the organism onto the environment?

I’m not sure I am understanding the point there.  Affordances are not objects.  Moreover, what counts as an affordance will depend on the knowledge and interests of the person (the perceiver).

“Objects” are that which pushes back against us, thwarts us, offers resistance to our actions.

I’m not sure that’s completely satisfactory.  But, ignoring that for the moment, even that conception of objects makes them pragmatic things rather than logical things.  And it makes what counts as an object depend on our interactions with the world.

If Nature had no joints at which to be carved, then any criteria for successful action would be equally arbitrary as all other criteria.

I’m not sure that makes sense.  The world is not homogeneous, so even arbitrary choices are  not equally arbitrary.

I live in Illinois.  The border of Illinois and Iowa is the Mississippi river.  That could perhaps be considered a seam.  But if I look at the border of Illinois and Wisconsin, part of the border is a river, and part of it isn’t (the river was not followed as far as it could be).  The part that is not along a river doesn’t seem to fit the idea of seam.  Even if there are seams, we are not bound to follow them and often don’t.  And where there are no seams, we still carve up the world.  So whether or not there are seams isn’t all that important (in my opinion).

If we were trying to define the boundary of Illinois and Iowa today, we would probably do that in terms of GPS coordinates, rather than using the river.  The way that we divide the world depends on our abilities.

And here’s where I largely disagree:

So while we should always be on guard against the assumption that any theory correctly describes the structure of reality, we really cannot do away with the assumption that reality does indeed have an intelligible structure, and indeed one that is knowable by us because our cognitive capacities are a part of that structure and informed by its history.

If I climb a rock, I look for footholds.  I don’t doubt that the footholds are real enough to support my weight.  But the footholds are not part of the structure of the rock, they are just accidental inhomogeneities.  That they are footholds derives from my pragmatic choices, from my temporizing.  If the rock were completely smooth, I would not be able to climb it (or maybe I could find some glue pads, and then climb with those).

I see nature as like that, in that it is not homogeneous.  So we can find something like footholds that we can use to anchor our descriptions.  But that does not make those anchor points part of the structure of reality.

Here’s where I disagree with Gibson.  According to Gibson, we pickup information from the immediate environment.  I used to think that way, but it doesn’t work.  The better view is that the environment is devoid of information.  We create information.  Part of what the brain does is creating information.  We (or our perceptual systems) use whatever “footholds” or “anchor points” that we can find to anchor some sort of practical coordinate system to reality.  And then the mathematics that we see in science comes from the very mathematical way that we have used those coordinate systems to systematically divide up the world.

When I look at scientific laws, a large part of these laws have to do with anchoring our coordinate systems and using those anchored systems to allow us to make measurements (making a measurement creates Shannon information).

When I look at Maxwell’s equations, they allow one to derive the wave equation.  From that, we can conclude that our measurements of electromagnetic phenomena satisfy the wave equation.  I don’t think it means anything to say that light itself satisfies the wave equation.

So now think of water waves.  If I’m right about information, then perception works by virtue of our brains doing something similar to measurement.  So when we see water waves, we are really seeing waves in our measurements.  And, indeed, it is known that the water molecules just go up and down, or in small approximately circular motions.  The molecules don’t advance in the wave (except when the wave is breaking near the shore).  So perception is really looking at something like measurements that our brain is making.

So here’s my objection to phenomenology.  As I see it, the phenomena are created by the brain (I think some folk would agree with that), and so it isn’t that we are seeing phenomena.  Rather, it is that we (or our brains) are creating phenomena as part of what seeing is.  The basic underlying idea of measurement (which is really a kind of categorization) is something that can be studied when it is done publicly by scientists.  So, at least in principle, we can understand how phenomena arise, and need not just take phenomena as a starting point.

When I go through all of that, I cannot find a standard whereby we can judge the correctness (or truth) of a scientific theory.  We can judge how well it works, but pragmatism is a guide, not a standard.  That’s why I disagree with talk about whether theories are correct.  We should limit ourselves to talk about how well they work.  We can then talk of the truth of the data, if it conforms to the standards set by the theory.

264 thoughts on “Reality and realism

  1. Affordances are not objects. Moreover, what counts as an affordance will depend on the knowledge and interests of the person (the perceiver).

    I think of affordances as depending on both the sensorimotor abilities of the organism and the features of the organism’s environment.

    But, ignoring that for the moment, even that conception of objects makes them pragmatic things rather than logical things. And it makes what counts as an object depend on our interactions with the world.

    I have no problems with that, and would even stress that the pragmatic conception of objects is not only the one that matters for science (which I assume you would agree with) but also the one that matters for epistemology and metaphysics. The major divide I would stipulate is not between science and epistemology/metaphysics, but between a pragmatist approach to metaphysics and epistemology and a traditional (rationalist?) approach to metaphysics and epistemology. That’s why I share the suspicion that rationalism is mistaken in thinking that is a route from logic to metaphysics.

    (For interesting historical reasons, the dominant conception in contemporary analytic metaphysics is that there is a route from logic (or more generally semantics) to metaphysics — one sees this in David Lewis, Kripke, David Armstrong, David Chalmers (somewhat), and many others. This sits uneasily with the dominant conception in analytic epistemology, which is largely (but inconsistently) naturalistic. The lack of integration between epistemology and metaphysics is largely due to the hyper-specialization of contemporary analytic philosophy, and one that I utterly lament.)

    I see nature as like that, in that it is not homogeneous. So we can find something like footholds that we can use to anchor our descriptions. But that does not make those anchor points part of the structure of reality.

    This may be a difference in tone or emphasis between us, because I am merely underscoring that objects and relations — the “footholds” in the analogy — do depend on the underlying real patterns in nature as well as on our sensorimotor abilities, social practices, and epistemic goals. It’s not one or the other!

    The better view is that the environment is devoid of information. We create information. Part of what the brain does is creating information. We (or our perceptual systems) use whatever “footholds” or “anchor points” that we can find to anchor some sort of practical coordinate system to reality. And then the mathematics that we see in science comes from the very mathematical way that we have used those coordinate systems to systematically divide up the world.

    Here is where I think we genuinely disagree. I think that information is really intrinsic to the structure of nature. Brains detect that information which is biologically salient to the kind of organism of which the brain is a part, and doesn’t detect information which is irrelevant to the needs of the organism. Though brains do interpret information and (in some sense) construct an organism-relative order, they do so by acting on an underlying real order that is there anyway.

    If there were no cognitive organisms, there will still be a first-level ordered reality; there just wouldn’t be any second-level ordered reality built into the interpreted/interpreting perspectives of any organisms, and without that, no third-level ordered reality of rational discourse.

    So here’s my objection to phenomenology. As I see it, the phenomena are created by the brain (I think some folk would agree with that), and so it isn’t that we are seeing phenomena. Rather, it is that we (or our brains) are creating phenomena as part of what seeing is. The basic underlying idea of measurement (which is really a kind of categorization) is something that can be studied when it is done publicly by scientists. So, at least in principle, we can understand how phenomena arise, and need not just take phenomena as a starting point.

    One part of this objection is right — that successful inquiry examines how phenomena arise, and not just take them “on faith”. However, as a matter of epistemology, we do have to begin with the phenomena — we just can’t stop there, as phenomenologists do. For me, the really interesting question is about whether, and to what degree, phenomenology can be naturalized (see here).

    When I go through all of that, I cannot find a standard whereby we can judge the correctness (or truth) of a scientific theory. We can judge how well it works, but pragmatism is a guide, not a standard. That’s why I disagree with talk about whether theories are correct. We should limit ourselves to talk about how well they work. We can then talk of the truth of the data, if it conforms to the standards set by the theory.

    I think that I want to side with pragmatic realism, rather than pragmatism as an alternative to realism — how well a theory works (over the long run!) is constrained (though not determined) by how correct it is, or what I take to be the same thing, how well it models the domain it purports to be about.

  2. Interesting post, Neil. And I enjoyed the Kaufman piece too, which I thought was very well written.

    I have to admit that I don’t know what to think about “footholds” though. You write,

    I don’t doubt that the footholds are real enough to support my weight. But the footholds are not part of the structure of the rock, they are just accidental inhomogeneities. That they are footholds derives from my pragmatic choices, from my temporizing. If the rock were completely smooth, I would not be able to climb it (or maybe I could find some glue pads, and then climb with those).

    I see nature as like that, in that it is not homogeneous. So we can find something like footholds that we can use to anchor our descriptions. But that does not make those anchor points part of the structure of reality.

    It seems to me that reality is such that either there are footholds or there are no footholds. We may not call them “footholes” and we may not use them to hold feet, but they’re either there or they aren’t there, whether or not one calls them “inhomogenieties.”

    Again, when you talk about water waves, you seem to me to cheat a bit here:

    And, indeed, it is known that the water molecules just go up and down, or in small approximately circular motions.

    If that is something that we “know” about water molecules, then I’d think that is something we know about the world.

  3. I don’t expect this adds top the discussion, but I see perceiving as an action rather than as a reaction. Perceiving is something we do rather than something done to us.

  4. If perception were a wholly active process, it couldn’t tell us anything about how the world is independent of our beliefs about it; we wouldn’t be able to distinguish between creating and discovering. But yes, perceiving also has an active dimension to it — which is why I’ve been using Alva Noe’s term “sensorimotor abilities”.

    The hard part is to distinguish between the kind of activity that one finds in perception from the kind of activity that one finds in thought and talk. That’s why I found it necessary to distinguish ‘somatic intentionality’ from ‘discursive intentionality’ in my book. But there I didn’t do enough credit to the passive moment of perception, or sensing. I’ve come to the view that it is in sensing per se that the world gets any vote at all in what we say about it. And science is actually very difficult because of the discipline required to attend what is sensed, as distinct from what one wants to sense, expects, imagines, and so forth. (Even then we do not get a ‘pure’ sensing — that’s impossible, and the underdetermination of theory by evidence is one consequence of that impossibility.)

  5. Kantian Naturalist: Here is where I think we genuinely disagree. I think that information is really intrinsic to the structure of nature. Brains detect that information which is biologically salient to the kind of organism of which the brain is a part, and doesn’t detect information which is irrelevant to the needs of the organism.

    That was my original view. But I could never make it work.

    The world is full of signals. But signals are not information.

    The important things that we take to be information include speech. And that fits with Shannon information. So do measurements. I take Shannon information to involve some sort of “encoding” — I use scare quotes because the word doesn’t completely fit.

    Look at some examples:

    We get time by making an oscillator, and counting oscillations. There isn’t an easy to recognize signal that provides time. We could use the day/night alternation, which gives us Solar time. But Newton’s laws are false if we use Solar time. Newton avoided that problem by using mean solar time. That was pretty much sidereal time rescaled to 24 hours per solar day on average. But the natural signals that provide sidereal time are very weak and noticed only by astronomers.

    Likewise, there is no easily observable signal that provides temperature. On a hot day, metal will feel hotter than wood even though they are at the same temperature. So our bodies are not directly sensitive to temperature. Expansion is a natural signal, but natural expansion is too subtle to be easily observed. Traditional thermometers are designed to mechanically amplify that expansion so as to make it observable.

    It is widely understood that color is not the same as wavelength, and it is not easy to scientifically characterize what it is.

    Or take distance — say the distance from Chicago the New York. We don’t use the straight line distance. Typically, a wheel (about the size of a bicycle wheel) is attached to a car, and we count the number of rotations. If, instead, we used an ant-size wheel, we would get a longer distance because of going up and down all of those small ant-sized bumps.

    If information is just natural signals, then it is hard to know where to start to find the meanings. If information is what we create (by our “encoding” of something of value to us), then meaning comes from how we go about doing that “encoding”.

    Let me put this a little differently. We ascribe properties such as length, mass, force, time, etc. The information comes from our ascribing. The meaning comes from how we do that ascribing. Whether or not the properties are real does not seem to matter at all. It is the ascribing and the use of a consistent and repeatable way of doing that ascribing, that matters.

  6. walto: It seems to me that reality is such that either there are footholds or there are no footholds.

    I am not questioning that there are footholds. I’m questioning whether they count as part of the structure of reality.

    If I see a dent on my automobile, I don’t think of that as part of the structure. Rather, I think of it as a blemish. Aren’t footholds just blemishes that we happen to be able to use?

  7. Neil Rickert, I don’t see the significance of something being a ‘blemish.’ Dent or front bumper, it’s there or not there. And if I think it’s there, but it isn’t, I’m wrong.

  8. A few months ago, a friend of mine and I were hashing out Ladyman and Ross’ Every Thing Must Go, together with some reflections on Danielle Macbeth’s Realizing Reason and some Continental texts, on real patterns and absolute knowledge. The conclusion we reached is pertinent here: the more depersonalized the conception of the world, the less relevance it has to anything we actually care about.

    I reached a similar conclusion with Macbeth last week: yes, there is absolute knowledge in the sense that we can know things that are the same for all rational beings. But the only absolute knowledge we can have pertains to pure mathematics and fundamental physics, which means that it is not very interesting and is not going to help us solve any practical problems. (“Absolute” here means only “the same for all rational beings” and not “immune to revision”.)

  9. I suspect there is another dimension to this discussion – specifically an evolutionary dimension – that can unify these points of view.

    That our visual systems “grip” pertinent affordances of reflected light (detection of edges and angles, regularities of angles subtended by distance and size, binocular differences in the light gathered, etc.), and thereby assemble the experience of an object, reflects a long evolutionary history that transcends the cognitive operations of any one individual. In that sense the perceptual qualities to which they give rise are “objective,” in that their origin lies outside of one’s history, even while also “subjective.”

    When I open my eyes and privately/subjectively assemble an experienced object, the experienced object (both its affordances and what I do with them) is nevertheless in a very real sense objective, in that what I am experiencing is an ancient nexus of cognition and light that emerged through a long history of selection over millions of centuries that preceded my arrival. It is that history of selection that enables me to be sensitive to affordances and to utilize those affordances to assemble an object characterized by survival-significant characteristics. That history of selection is itself a set of objective facts that characterized the histories of countless ancestors, even as the object is privately assembled by my perceptual capacities. In a very derived sense, that objective history is what I encounter when I open my eyes.

    It seems to me that for selection to shape the ability to grip the relevant affordances and build these perceptual capacities, those affordances must in some sense have been present as regularities of the environments of evolutionary origin.

  10. Reciprocating Bill: It seems to me that for selection to shape the ability to grip the relevant affordances and build these perceptual capacities, those affordances must in some sense have been present as regularities of the environments of evolutionary origin.

    THIS. YES.

    The cognitive capacities that allow an organism to detect those affordances necessary for species-typical behaviors organized towards successful reproduction are the consequence of past natural selection acting on previous generations and populations, so real environmental regularities have to be part of the account as to why organisms have the affordances they have.

  11. Interesting topic and comment.

    So far as theory acceptance goes, I rather like Van Fraasen (sp??), but I’m also a realist in my bones. So I figure, why not both? Some theories are purely pragmatic – think of some of the more ‘out there’ theories in physics. Are they true? Who knows. Do they ‘work’? Do they make accurate predications? Yes? Okay then, let’s go with them. However, are all theories necessarily of this type? I think of medical theories – surely these theories are, in some way ‘true’, and it’s because of that that they work. Surely the reason an antibiotic or what have you is because the theory behind it is ‘true’ – physical things are affected by the medicine. It’s not just a matter of getting some predications right. though no doubt that figures in as well. So perhaps some theories are purely pragmatic – perhaps some are pragmatic because they are true.

    But perhaps we ought to distinguish between descriptive and explanatory theories.

    As far as perception goes, whether its passive or active – I think Aristotle and Aquinas are hugely helpful here, in a way Kant is not, though I think he said similar things. Forgive my ramble:

    Aristotle held that the intellect was divided into the active (a) an the passive (p). p is the part of the intellect which receives data from the material world, while a acts as a kind of formal cause on the sensory data, forming ideas and thoughts with determinate structure. Aquinas basically held this same view, but tweaked it a bit: p still receives sensory data, but a grasps the form, which it abstracts, from the sensory data (Scotus disagreed with this and believed that the object of the intellect wasn’t the essence or quiddity of a thing, but being itself, but for right now I won’t go into that). So you basically have a concept of the intellect (and there’s a lot more to it, with categories like quality and whatnot, but this suffices for present purposes) where it is both passive and active in its knowledge of the world.

    The medievals had this great concept: the fit of the intellect to reality. There is some kind of match between the intellect and reality, or the world or whatever you like to call it. Our cognitive faculties are able to allows us to know things about the world – of course, the medievals attributed this to the fact that God had created the world in this way (which I also happen to believe), but whether or not one believes that such a fit is a product of divine creation, it certainly seems that there is in fact a fit between our intellect, or our cognitive faculties and the world in which we live.

    This brings me from the medievals ( in my mind, all roads in philosophy lead to the medievals) back to Kant. Where Kant made the mind purely active, the medievals, and the classical tradition as a whole, saw the mind as both active and passive – passive in that there is a world which acts upon our minds, and active in that in some way, the mind acts as a formal cause upon the sensory data received by the mind to impose a determinate form upon the data, either by abstracting the form or essence from the data or by some other means.

    The physicist/theologian T.F. Torrance took significant issue with this picture, and drew out some fairly serious problems with it.

    A key point in Torrance’s thought is the rejection of the ‘image in the middle’ as the object of the intellect or as the object of knowledge. He identifies this as a product of Aristotelian metaphysics, in which the intellect abstracts its object of knowledge directly from sensory experience (‘there is nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses’). Instead of abstractive processes which produce an ‘image in the middle’ in the mind which is the object of knowledge, Torrance holds that ‘being’ is the primary object of the intellect – knowledge of being is brought about by an immediate and direct intuition of reality. Here he sides with Scotus against Aquinas.

    Torrance sees a danger in the famous ‘fit of the intellect to reality’ formula developed by the medievals: it’s very easy to slide unnoticed from that to ‘knowledge has to conform to the understanding’ and from there to various forms of idealism. But that formula seems to make a good amount of sense, so how can the slide to idealism be avoided?

    Torrance grants that the agent is active in the process of ‘knowing’ – but instead of imposing its a priori categories onto the raw data of experience (which Torrance argues imposes a necessariatinism and determinism on the world and forces the world into static categories) the concepts and categories of the mind ‘hook onto’ the structures of reality. These structures are controlling, in that our concepts and categories have to be revised, reformulated or discarded as the reality which we inquire into discloses itself and its own inner ‘rationality’ to our questions and investigation.

    One doesn’t really have to subscribe to every aspect of the medieval metaphysic or Torrance’s ideas to be able to draw out a good deal thats applicable to contemporary debates, IMO.

  12. walto:
    Neil Rickert, I don’t see the significance of something being a ‘blemish.’ Dent or front bumper, it’s there or not there. And if I think it’s there, but it isn’t, I’m wrong.

    Okay, fair enough.

    Think of a sand dune. It is made up of millions of grains of sand. Each grain has its own unique shape. And then those grains are in a particular one-in-a-gazillion arrangement. So it is highly complex.

    If I explain the complexity and the uniqueness of the sand dune to a friend, he is likely to reply “Nah! It is only a pile of sand.”

    So that uniqueness and complexity is there, but it is not seen. And the reason it is not seen is because it is not important. Nobody thinks it matters.

    My point: What’s there and what’s not there isn’t as important as what is there that is important enough to notice and to name. If you are a rock climber, the foothold is important. Otherwise it’s just an unimportant blemish.

    I am trying to change the question from “what exists” to “of the uncountably many things that exist, which are important enough for us to pay attention to them and to name them and to learn to recognize them.”

  13. Kantian Naturalist: The conclusion we reached is pertinent here: the more depersonalized the conception of the world, the less relevance it has to anything we actually care about.

    Fair point. That’s getting close to the point I was making in the “sand dunes” reply that I just made to walto.

  14. whitefrozen: Torrance grants that the agent is active in the process of ‘knowing’ – but instead of imposing its a priori categories onto the raw data of experience (which Torrance argues imposes a necessariatinism and determinism on the world and forces the world into static categories) the concepts and categories of the mind ‘hook onto’ the structures of reality. These structures are controlling, in that our concepts and categories have to be revised, reformulated or discarded as the reality which we inquire into discloses itself and its own inner ‘rationality’ to our questions and investigation.

    That’s fascinating — it sounds (to me) very much like Charles Sanders Peirce! With a few minor revisions in a more Deweyan direction I could very much agree!

    One minor point about Kant: Kant himself did distinguish between “sensibility” (our capacity to be affected by objects) and “understanding” (our capacity to judge according to rules), and he did think that sensibility had a passive moment to it.

    The problem with Kant isn’t that he can’t accommodate the passivity of perception; the problem is that he thinks that all form or structure is brought to bear on sensations by the forms of intuition (space and time) and the categories of the understanding (substance, cause, quality, relation, etc.). Since all knowable structure arises from the mind, we cannot know anything about the underlying structures that are generating sensations.

    And the slippery slope to idealism is taken by Fichte, who points out that even the assumption that there are any underlying real structures to generate sensations is itself a posit made by the mind itself.

  15. ‘That’s fascinating — it sounds (to me) very much like Charles Sanders Peirce!’

    Interesting comparison – I’d not thought of that.

    ‘One minor point about Kant:’

    Hmm, true enough – point taken!

  16. Neil Rickert: Okay, fair enough.

    Think of a sand dune.It is made up of millions of grains of sand.Each grain has its own unique shape.And then those grains are in a particular one-in-a-gazillion arrangement.So it is highly complex.

    If I explain the complexity and the uniqueness of the sand dune to a friend, he is likely to reply “Nah!It is only a pile of sand.”

    So that uniqueness and complexity is there, but it is not seen.And the reason it is not seen is because it is not important.Nobody thinks it matters.

    My point:What’s there and what’s not there isn’t as important as what is there that is important enough to notice and to name.If you are a rock climber, the foothold is important.Otherwise it’s just an unimportant blemish.

    I am trying to change the question from “what exists” to “of the uncountably many things that exist, which are important enough for us to pay attention to them and to name them and to learn to recognize them.”

    There were some early 20th Century American philosophers who called themselves “new realists.” It was their view that perception was entirely abstractive or discriminatory–even the “mistakes” or illusions were out in the world. Interestingly, some recent philosophers have claimed that “qualia ain’t in the head.”

  17. The first step on the realist path is to recognize that one has always been a realist; the second is to recognize that, however hard one tries to think differently, one will never manage to; the third is to realize that those who claim they think differently, think as realists as soon as they forget to act a part. If one then asks oneself why, one’s conversion to realism is all but complete.

    – Etienne Gilson

  18. Mung:
    The first step on the realist path is to recognize that one has always been a realist; the second is to recognize that, however hard one tries to think differently, one will never manage to; the third is to realize that those who claim they think differently, think as realists as soon as they forget to act a part. If one then asks oneself why, one’s conversion to realism is all but complete.

    – Etienne Gilson

    Nice.

  19. From the OP:

    The world is not homogeneous, so even arbitrary choices are not equally arbitrary.

    One can be almost certain that you are equivocating.

    It’s like saying the outcome of tossing a single die is not as equally arbitrary as the outcome of tossing two dice.

  20. Peter Godfrey-Smith reviews Retrieving Realism by Bert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor. Dreyfus and Taylor draw on Wittgenstein and Heidegger to re-frame what “realism” means (though there are many philosophers in both the analytic and Continental traditions who would vehemently deny that Wittgenstein or Heidegger can be allies to realism in any sense). In the review, Godfrey-Smith brings Dewey into the story through some very illuminating contrasts of Dewey with Heidegger and with Wittgenstein.

  21. walto: some recent philosophers have claimed that “qualia ain’t in the head.”

    It depends on what you mean by qualia, of course, but I suppose you are referring to either radical enactivists like Noe, who say they ain’t (only) in the head because qualia are our embodied, ongoing interactions with the world, or people like Dennett, who say they ain’t in the head or anywhere else for that matter.

    Or did you have someone else in mind?

  22. As noted in the text linked by the OP, Kaufman originally published this essay in his previous blog. There is a longer conversation about it in the comments there. In those comments, he references a paper where he attempts to answer the questions about a reality separate from frameworks raised in the essay.

    The link to that paper on his university site appearing in those comments is now broken, but I can upload a copy to dropbox if anyone is interested in reading it and does not have access to the original journal where it appears.

    He takes realism as the common-sense notion that physical objects have a continued existence separate and external from our minds. He claims that Hume should be understood as saying it is folly to try to prove existence of the external world. Instead, we should take to heart Hume’s view as completed by Wittgenstein that “the belief that physical objects exist separately and externally from us is a part of the very framework that makes thinking and speaking of physical objects possible” (quote is Kaufman, not Wittgenstein).

    Kaufman says we must separate our metaphysical attitude from our ontology as specified by the conceptual scheme. He claims that thinking that realism and anti-realism are ontological positions is a mistake that modern anti-realists make.

  23. Kantian Naturalist: Here you go: “Qualia Ain’t In the Head” by Alex Byrne and Michael Type. I haven’t read this (or even heard of it) but I’m a third-degree black belt at Google.

    I was familiar with representationalism for qualia and the argument that the content of that representation is external. The paper seems to be about contrasting that view with Pautz’s internalism; but I’ve only skimmed the first few paragraphs.

    I do recall Walt as speaking positively about Pautz at one point so maybe he did have him in mind.

    I understand the representational viewpoint as saying the phenomenal experience was the representation, which would be both the content and the vehicle, with the vehicle being only in the head (not so for radical enactivists, I believe).

    So I guess it is correct to say the qualia are not only in the head for the philosophical position of representationalism.

    Prinz (and I think Crane) have a different take on internalism for qualia, relating it somehow to a mode of presentation for the content. But I don’t understand the subtleties well enough to rehearse their arguments.

  24. Kantian Naturalist:

    The cognitive capacities that allow an organism to detect those affordances necessary for species-typical behaviors organized towards successful reproduction are the consequence of past natural selection acting on previous generations and populations, so real environmental regularities have to be part of the account as to why organisms have the affordances they have.

    I am trying to understand the differences among the types realism and where the evolution approach might fit. My current understanding:

    Internal Realism: questions of what is real are legitimate only if asked within a framework; asking which framework better fits reality is an illegitimate question.

    Pragmatic realism: Asking which framework better fits reality is a legitimate question and should be answered pragmatically.

    Rain forest realism (from Ladyman and Ross): The Real Patterns of any scientific framework all have legitimate claim to reality. Weak emergentists’ claims that the entities of various sciences are real seems to be me to reflect an approach that ends up in a similar place.

    Reductionist-scientific Realism. Only the entities of our best physics are real; any other entities can be reduced to these.

    As I see it, reality according to evolutionary history is a form of pragmatic realism, with mother nature being the pragmatist in question and reproductive success her purpose.

  25. Kantian Naturalist: Peter Godfrey-Smith reviews Retrieving Realism by Bert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor.

    Thanks.

    I don’t think I will be buying the book, because I won’t have the patience to read it. But I like the broad idea of a realism that is not tied to our intellectualist accounts.

    As I’ve previously said, I do consider myself a realist. But a lot of what goes under the name of “realism” seems to be about whether our descriptions of reality are real. And that’s where I disagree.

    Reality comes to us undescribed and undescribable. We have to invent ways of describing it, in order to make it describable for us. I think we do that pretty well, but I question whether that’s the only possible way of describing reality. It might be the only possible way for humans to describe reality, though I doubt that, too.

    None of this matters in ordinary life, and perhaps not in ordinary philosophy. But if we are trying to understand human cognition (or, roughly, what the brain does), then this has a lot to do with the problems that the brain must solve. And the reason people have trouble understanding consciousness, is that they have seriously mistaken ideas about the problems that a cognitive system must deal with.

  26. BruceS: Pragmatic realism: Asking which framework better fits reality is a legitimate question and should be answered pragmatically.

    Yes, that would be about my view.

    As I see it, reality according to evolutionary history is a form of pragmatic realism, with mother nature being the pragmatist in question and reproductive success her purpose.

    While not quite right, I see that as at least roughly right.

  27. It seems to me that the history of science is about finding reliable ways to describe and catalog perceptions. A quick and dirty definition of reality is that list of reliable descriptions. Reliability being the key word. Reliability and sharability. Those are the two weapons of reality.

    Both are lacking in theistic accounts.

  28. I think we do that pretty well, but I question whether that’s the only possible way of describing reality.

    Quantum mechanics shows us at the atomic level, we change reality by the way we choose to perceive it. If we wish to see photon as particle, it will behave like a particle, if we choose to see a photon as a wave, it will behave as a wave. Wheeler showed we can even change the “historic” behavior of photons by the way we wish to look at the past in his double-slit-delayed-choice experiment.

    In mathematics, we see the way we choose to value a conditionally convergent series affects its value. There is lots of determinism and things that cannot be changed by one individual’s way of looking at things, but there is room for a little suppleness in what defines “real” based on what we choose to consider as real — our choices has both conceptual and real physical consequences. As John Wheeler suggested, the universe is participatory (how we view it has physical influence), not purely “just there” independent of how we choose to look at it.

  29. Neil Rickert:

    While not quite right, I see [pragmatic realism for evolution] as at least roughly right.

    My list does omit metaphysical realism about ordinary objects (as opposed to scientific realism about unobservables).

    But I’m not sure if the concept covering the regularities that natural selection is sensitive to can be considered an ordinary object for metaphysical realism. Maybe specific instances of those regularities.

    The idea of mother nature as a pragmatist is a variation on her as a designer as used in etiological explanations of biological purpose.

  30. stcordova: Quantum mechanics shows us at the atomic level, we change reality by the way we choose to perceive it. If we wish to see photon as particle, it will behave like a particle, if we choose to see a photon as a wave, it will behave as a wave. Wheeler showed we can even change the “historic” behavior of photons by the way we wish to look at the past in his double-slit-delayed-choice experiment.

    Quantum mechanics shows that fundamental particles have properties such that they have measurable effects like waves if they are measured as waves, and likewise measurable effects like particles if they are measured as particles. Our choice of measurement determines the observable effects; that doesn’t mean that reality itself is affected by our choices.

    It is not widely appreciated that there are deterministic, metaphysically realistic versions of quantum mechanics that are empirically equivalent to the Copenhagen Interpretation. Until such time as the debate over the metaphysics of quantum phenomena can be experimentally resolved (and I’m not holding my breath!), we should abstain from saying “quantum mechanics shows that ____” any more than necessary.

  31. stcordova: Quantum mechanics shows us at the atomic level, we change reality by the way we choose to perceive it.If we wish to see photon as particle, it will behave like a particle, if we choose to see a photon as a wave, it will behave as a wave.Wheeler showed we can even change the “historic” behavior of photons by the way we wish to look at the past in his double-slit-delayed-choice experiment.

    Discourse about entities in QM assumes that we are using the framework of QM. So it is not about reality independent of framework. To say that we change reality per se involves the further assumption of scientific realism (and that QM is the correct framework for reality, of course).

    In any event, I’m also not sure if “changing reality” is the best way to describe QM measurement. I’d word it as measurement revealing an aspect of QM reality that we can understand using our conceptual framework of ordinary objects.

    (And if you take the multiverse approach, all that looking at a measurement does is change entanglement relations in the quantum state of the universe. At least, that is what my instance of consciousness thinks it does).

    As I understand it, delayed erasure experiments look retrocausal only because we choose which QM events to select before looking at the results. So again, I’d say it is not so much about changing reality as deciding which aspects to observe under our ordinary-objects framework.

  32. Kantian Naturalist:

    It is not widely appreciated that there are deterministic, metaphysically realistic versions of quantum mechanics that are empirically equivalent to the Copenhagen Interpretation.

    I suppose you are talking about hidden variable theories when you say deterministic. Two caveats if I understand the theory:
    First, the value of the hidden variable is unavoidably hidden until we measure, and then the empirical probabilities must be reproduced. One can say something similar about the quantum state in a collapse interpretation: it evolves deterministically until we measure, then collapses into a certain eigenstate. So probabilities are there and determinism is there in both approaches.

    Second, in hidden variables theories, the hidden variable value can instantaneously change due to measurements at a remote location. So hidden variables don’t give you local determinism, should you be hoping for that.

  33. that doesn’t mean that reality itself is affected by our choices.

    The problem is however, the process of trying to know something can change what it is. Trying to gain certainty about a particle’s momentum, changes possible certainty of its position. Trying to find out if Shrodinger’s cat is alive might kill the cat.

    If nature has a mathematical fabric at its root, even though there is seemingly immutable determinism, because there are some propositions in math are not deterministically determined, but are observer dependent, I would not be surprised if this is true of the physical universe. Some of the properties are affected by our measuring apparatus. Our quest to know “what is” changes “what is”.

  34. I’m not convinced that the concepts of free will and determinism make any sense.

    Jerry Coyne uses determinism to argue against criminal responsibility, but this makes no sense to me.

  35. stcordova: The problem is however, the process of trying to know something can change what it is.Trying to gain certainty about a particle’s momentum, changes possible certainty of its position.

    I think this might be mixing what we can know with what there is.

    HUP says that increasing certainty in measured position decreases certainty in simultaneous measurements of momentum. But that still involves the issue of us choosing some aspect of reality to measure, not a change in reality itself (whatever reality is in a QM world).

    ETA: However, I should add that a measurement does change the probability associated with certain future measurements.

    So from that viewpoint you are correct: we can affect the outcome of future measurements when we measure. Whether and how that changes reality would depend on your interpretation of QM and your position on scientific realism.

    Trying to find out if Shrodinger’s cat is alive might kill the cat.

    As I’m sure you know, Schrdinger invented that example to show the unacceptable consequences of the simplest versions of the Copenhagen interpretation, not to illustrate how QM affects the world. These days, most would say decoherence has killed it (the example, not the cat). For all practical purpose in any event.

    If nature has a mathematical fabric at its root, even though there is seemingly immutable determinism, because there are some propositions in math are not deterministically determined,

    AFAIK, the only serious scientist who say reality IS mathematical in its very nature is Max Tegmark and even he restricts the mathematics to computable functions, I believe. I’m going by memory on that. (Is computatable what you mean by deterministic?)

    Not sure where to put the people who see cellular automata as the way to do physics.

  36. petrushka:
    I’m not convinced that the concepts of free will and determinism make any sense.

    Jerry Coyne uses determinism to argue against criminal responsibility, but this makes no sense to me.

    There are interesting discussions of free will and determinism here and here at Philosophy TV.

    The first is centered around experiment philosophy and people’s intuitions about free will, determinism, and a future neuroscience which can predict behavior perfectly. It discusses experiments aimed at finding what people’s intuitions about free will are in those situations. The results are more complicated than Coyne thinks (going by memory on past blog entries by him since I don’t read him any more).

    The second is about Libet’s and other similar experiments and why they are not a threat to compatibilist free will. However, there may be a threat to free will which needs unconstrained, rational deliberation from the science of social psychology; it claims that such deliberation may be much more context sensitive than would easily fit into many compatibilists versions of free will and moral responsibility.

  37. Bruce, to KN:

    Second, in hidden variables theories, the hidden variable value can instantaneously change due to measurements at a remote location. So hidden variables don’t give you local determinism, should you be hoping for that.

    And the last remaining hopes for a locally deterministic theory were just dashed by this experiment.

  38. BruceS,

    I’m not hoping for local determinism. In fact I’m not even hoping for determinism per se. I was only pointing out that quantum mechanics hasn’t yet ruled determinism out, because we don’t have a settled quantum mechanical theory yet.

    BruceS: HUP says that increasing certainty in measured position decreases certainty in simultaneous measurements of momentum. But that still involves the issue of us choosing some aspect of reality to measure, not a change in reality itself (whatever reality is in a QM world).

    I think it is a bit more precise to say that there is an inversely proportional relationship between the accuracy of our measurement of momentum and the accuracy of our measurement of position. But this could also be re-framed as saying that our classical mechanical concepts of position and momentum don’t capture the determinate properties of quantum phenomena (if there are any). Quantum fields might still have (for all I know) quite definite properties, just not those!

  39. petrushka: It seems to me that the history of science is about finding reliable ways to describe and catalog perceptions. A quick and dirty definition of reality is that list of reliable descriptions. Reliability being the key word. Reliability and sharability. Those are the two weapons of reality.

    That seems right to me, too. I would say that reliability and shareability are the criteria whereby we determine whether our embodied coping strategies (feedback mechanisms between perception and action) are tracking counterfactually robust real structures and patterns.

    I don’t think that there are any other criteria of “reality” besides reliability and shareability that make any practical difference — not even in science. If anything, scientific realism itself depends on those criteria. (I tried making that case here, basically using Kukla’s work on stances to criticize Ladyman and Ross.)

    One project I might undertake is to contrast what Kukla calls a “stance” — an embodied coping strategy characterized by reliability and shareability — with discursive practices that lack reliability and shareability, but seem to have it. I call these “poses”. A pose is an embodied coping strategy that seems to be reliable and shareable in the short-term but which fails to satisfy those criteria when examined over the long-term. Religion is a pose. This is no threat to those who don’t treat religious discourse in realistic terms, but it is a threat to theistic realism.

  40. BruceS: In today’s man bites dog story, a philosopher dumps on topology*

    I’ll have to admit that I rechecked the URL to see if I was reading The Onion. It reads like a parody of mathematics.

    Maybe Tim Maudlin should concentrate on an area other than mathematics.

    *This joke, such at it is,depends on my understanding that Neil specialized in topology, amongother things.

    Actually, functional analysis. But that depends heavily on topology, so functional analysts are pretty much the experts in point set topology (but not so much in algebraic topology).

  41. Kantian Naturalist: Quantum mechanics shows that fundamental particles have properties such that they have measurable effects like waves if they are measured as waves, and likewise measurable effects like particles if they are measured as particles. Our choice of measurement determines the observable effects; that doesn’t mean that reality itself is affected by our choices.

    Thank you.

  42. 2. Most people who say and think they are idealists would like, if they could, not to be, but believe that it is impossible. They are told they will never get outside their thought and that something beyond thought it unthinkable. If they listen to this objection and look for an answer to it, they are lost from the start, because all idealist objections to the realist position are formulated in idealist terms. So it is hardly surprising that the idealist always wins. His questions invariably imply an idealist solution to the problems. The realist, therefore, when invited to take part in discussions on what is not his own ground, should first of all accustom himself to saying no, and not imagine himself in difficulties because he is unable to answer questions which are in fact insoluble, but which for him do not arise.

    – Etienne Gilson

  43. Kantian Naturalist:

    I.But this could also be re-framed as saying that our classical mechanical concepts of position and momentum don’t capture the determinate properties of quantum phenomena (if there are any). Quantum fields might still have (for all I know) quite definite properties, just not those!

    I believe HUP is not about measuring single observables, it’s about pairs of observables not being simultaneously determinate to unlimited accuracy It applies to only certain pairs (whose operators do not commute, if my limited understanding of the math is correct). But there is no limit in theory to how accurately we can measure position on its own.

    You are right, it does involve the standard deviation of one being greater than a constant divided by the other’s s.d.

    I’m also not sure about whether there are philosophical differences between a property and an observable in QM, the latter being the term I see more often.

  44. Kantian Naturalist:

    . If anything, scientific realism itself depends on those criteria. (I tried making that case here, basically using Kukla’s work on stances to criticize Ladyman and Ross.)

    Walt mentioned that paper a in another thread and I havd a look at it when he did. I have to admit I was puzzled by how the concept of measurement stance related to the cognitive aspects of science, that is all the modelling and analysis work that surrounds measurement and experiment which a key part of determining real patterns.

    I was also unsure how embodied coping applies to the instrumentation operated without human presence, like that inside the LHC..

    Are you saying that we have to interact with/measure something in the world before we can even start to make a claim about what might be a real pattern? “Coping” seems a strange term for that interaction to me.

    I’ll try to take a closer look and ask more specific questions, if you have time to reply.

  45. Neil Rickert: I’ll have to admit that I rechecked the URL to see if I was reading The Onion.It reads like a parody of mathematics.

    Maybe Tim Maudlin should concentrate on an area other than mathematics.

    That sounds like another case of the math establishment trying to suppress someone with a revolutionary new conceptual framework that upsets all the presuppositions of mathematics!

    Seriously, although I assume/hope there were some referees for the math in the book, I wonder if he shouldn’t have tried to publish some of the core ideas in a peer-reviewed journal first. I don’t know if any math publication would be interested or whether it would only be of interest to phil or phil of math publications.

  46. BruceS: That sounds like another case of the math establishment trying to suppress someone with a revolutionary new conceptual framework that upsets all the presuppositions of mathematics!

    I’m not trying to supress anything. There might be some good math there. But the reviewers (the one you cited and another I found via google) seem to say that we will have to wait for volume 2 before we can judge that.

    The whole approach, however, is weird. Mind you, I tend to think that about intuitionist mathematics and about Bishop’s constructivist mathematics. But I don’t treat that as crackpot mathematics — just as weird.

    Traditional mathematics mostly grew out of physics. Maudlin seems to want to reinvent a modified geometry/topology based on folk intuitions. But that makes one wonder how it could be useful to the sciences.

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