What do you take “realism” to mean?

Don't really know, I've never cared. Everything I experience is real enough for me. Philosophy isn't satisfied with this and seeks to find arguments to establish that realism is naïve and untenable. I don't have a philosophical view on this.

I'm mostly interested in what a realist theory of language might be.

The basic issue from a semiotic point of view is whether you consider meanings to be constructed or constrained.

Does a word have to positively put you in mind of some definite thing? Or does it really operate by limiting your thoughts so you pretty much have no choice but to be thinking of something much like what I had in mind, for all practical purposes?

So realism aims to speak about what actually exists. But practically speaking, this is achieved by establishing it as the contrast to all else that could have been the case.

It I say there is a cat on the mat as a real fact, I hope to get away with offering that single word “cat” and thus by implication eliminating every other interpretation you might have had.

There is no tank, or armadillo, or Empire State Building, on the mat instead. You can be sure of that. An infinity of alternative realities are being dismissed by my plain speaking realism. But by the same token, all those unactualised realities now seem confusingly like “actual possibilities”.

The trick is to understand how constraint does the heavy lifting here and not construction. Realism is not a construction of facts. It is a hierarchical nest of constraints. It is a pragmatic limitation of uncertainty made efficient by our willingness to go along with the game of taking utterances at face value.

Thank you. Yes, that all sounds familiar. We can do awfully precise things with language despite the seemingly arbitrary nature of signs and signifiers.

Realism is not a construction of facts. It is a hierarchical nest of constraints. It is a pragmatic limitation of uncertainty made efficient by our willingness to go along with the game of taking utterances at face value. — apokrisis

That's a nice frame. How contested would this account be?

Does Lawson have a point about idealism and the necessity of a realist theory of language?

Philosophy isn't satisfied with this and seeks to find arguments to establish that realism is naïve and untenable. I don't have a philosophical view on this. — Tom Storm

This forum might give the impression that idealism is more popular among philosophers than it actually is. The Philpapers survey says:

External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism?
Accept or lean toward: non-skeptical realism 760 / 931 (81.6%)
Other 86 / 931 (9.2%)
Accept or lean toward: skepticism 45 / 931 (4.8%)
Accept or lean toward: idealism 40 / 931 (4.3%)

Does Lawson have a point about idealism and the necessity of a realist theory of language? — Tom Storm

Peircean realism would be considered pretty idealistic by some. :razz:

But it leads to pansemiosis rather than Panpsychism or other Cartesian stories. So language as epistemic practice is also more generically the deep ontology of existence itself.

This cashes out in models of the “real material world” in terms of holistic systems of constraint rather than reductionist systems of construction.

This cashes out in self-reference being the feature rather than the bug.

When it comes to Wittgenstein, Cheryl Misak gives a good account of how Peirce was an unacknowleged influence in his eventual “turn”.

This forum might give the impression that idealism is more popular among philosophers than it actually is. — wonderer1

Interesting. I would have guessed idealists here might be 25%?

But it leads to pansemiosis rather than Panpsychism or other Cartesian stories. So language as epistemic practice is also more generically the deep ontology of existence itself.

This cashes out in models of the “real material world” in terms of holistic systems of constraint rather than reductionist systems of construction.

This cashes out in self-reference being the feature rather than the bug. — apokrisis

I'm pretty sure Lawson has argued this too, but I confess to not understanding it very well.

I'm pretty sure Lawson has argued this too, — Tom Storm

I’ve not read Lawson. A quick squizz suggests he is rather lightweight. :grin:

The difference looks like being that jump from epistemology to ontology. Saying that our models of reality are an exercise in pragmatic self-interest is one thing. An everyday kind of point.

But showing that this organisational logic is indeed the way that the Cosmos “reasons its way into existence” is the big step that Peirce takes. This is the metaphysical shock that naive realism is still to confront.

This forum might give the impression that idealism is more popular among philosophers than it actually is. The Philpapers survey says:

External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism?
Accept or lean toward: non-skeptical realism 760 / 931 (81.6%)
Other 86 / 931 (9.2%)
Accept or lean toward: skepticism 45 / 931 (4.8%)
Accept or lean toward: idealism 40 / 931 (4.3%) — wonderer1

One problem with this survey is that modern realism is itself an outgrowth of Kantian Transcendental Idealism.

“… “Critique of pure Reason” is the founding document of realism… Kant not only invents the now common philosophical term ‘realism’. He also lays out the theoretical topography of the forms of realism that still frames our understanding of philosophical questions concerning reality.” (Dietmar Heidemann)

There are of course other forms of Idealism than Kant’s, so you might want to specify what you have in mind.

I’ve not read Lawson. A quick squizz suggests he is rather lightweight. :grin: — apokrisis

Yes, a 'popular philosopher.'

But showing that this organisational logic is indeed the way that the Cosmos “reasons its way into existence” is the big step that Peirce takes. This is the metaphysical shock that naive realism is still to confront. — apokrisis

Sounds tantalizing as an idea but I've not read enough to contextualize it.

“… “Critique of pure Reason” is the founding document of realism… Kant not only invents the now common philosophical term ‘realism’. He also lays out the theoretical topography of the forms of realism that still frames our understanding of philosophical questions concerning reality.” (Dietmar Heidemann) — Joshs

The world of phenomena and human experience?

It I say there is a cat on the mat as a real fact, I hope to get away with offering that single word “cat” and thus by implication eliminating every other interpretation you might have had.

There is no tank, or armadillo, or Empire State Building, on the mat instead. You can be sure of that. An infinity of alternative realities are being dismissed by my plain speaking realism. But by the same token, all those unactualised realities now seem confusingly like “actual possibilities” — apokrisis

It seems to me that when I say there is a cat on the mat,
there is more that must be understood besides a fact of the matter; namely the sense of the matter itself. Is what I mean by cat and mat the same as what you understand them to mean? This is especially pertinent if you deny that there is a cat on the mat. We might have to investigate to what extent what I intend to convey is compatible with the way you are interpreting my utterance. In traditional logical conceptions of the meaning of words, when a person employs a concept they have simply embraced a set of objects and ignored all others, the way a dictionary does.
But this isn’t how people use words. The actual use of a world creates a distinction not between it and an indiscriminate infinity of alternative realities, but between it and contrasting meanings that are specifically RELEVANT to the context in which the word is being used.

I wonder if you can assist me to better understand the issue of how language does (or does not) map onto the world and what the significance of this matter might be for philosophy. I have done some modest reading in this space but am curious what others think.

If we suppose that there no realist notion of language, what is it that language does when we attempt to describe reality? (I've generally held that language is metaphorical, but then what?) — Tom Storm

I would say that language doesn’t simply represent, describe or map onto a pre-existing world, it maps out a way to go on. When we use a word , it forms a bridge between the memory of our previous usage and the new circumstance that it helps to create. To name something is to help bring it into existence as this freshly relevant event.

Thanks Joshs. Is what we call reality then an anticipatory, endlessly recreated phenomenon?

Flicking through a bit more of Lawson, I also want to point out how selfhood - the “reality” of the first person point of view - is a product of the closure, the epistemic cut, that produces the self-interested view we then call “the real world”.

So the ideal gets manufactured by the othering of the real. They become equally "real" as two sides of the same coin. In our consciousness – our semiotically-organised Umwelt or experiential state – we find a self appearing in interaction with its world. We experience a world that has a selfhood as its sturdy centre, giving everything its meaning.

Reductionist metaphysics - which includes the dualised reductionism of Cartesianism and Panpsychism - makes a problem of this. The self is either everything or it is nothing. The self-referential natures of modelling is treated as a fundamental paradox – an acid of contradiction that eats away at all philosophical certainty.

But a holistic metaphysics says the self-reference is how selves become real as actors or agents in the world. The mind's ability to close itself – to learn to ignore the world in the quite concrete way now modelled by Bayesian Brain neuroscience – is how a meaningful engagement with the world, the claimed essence of a "realist metaphysics", can in fact arise.

Of course actual closure – picking up Lawson's principle theme – leads to solipsism. We might as well be living the confusion of a fevered dream.

So pragmatism speaks to the dynamical balancing act of closure and openness. As epistemic systems, we want to become as closed as possible, but only so as to also be as open as possible in terms of what is actually then surprising, significant, or otherwise worth paying open-minded attention to.

Science is set up in this fashion. Make a prediction. Look for the exception. Beef up the model. Go around this knowledge ratcheting loop another time.

Brains do the same thing every moment of the day. The self sits on the side of well-managed predictability and reality – the phenomenal – is discovered by its degree of noumenal surprise. Harsh reality is what we least expected.

Again, reductionism wants to reduce the complexity of a dichotomous relation to the simplicity of monistic choice. Either the ideal or the real has to be the fundamental case. Pragmatism says instead that the closure in terms of the self-centred view of reality is the feature that makes possible any growth of knowledge about the "truth" of the real world.

Lawson goes off on the usual Romantic tangent of wanting to give art the role of exploring reality's openness. But that's a bit too Cartesian again.

Science is set up as the relentless machine for mining the "truth" of reality. Science's problem is not that it ain't sufficiently open to having its theories confounded by surprises. It's problem lies in its failure to be holistic and realise the extent to which knowledge is an exercise that is making the human self as much as comprehending the world.

Science by and large accepts the Cartesian division between itself and the humanities. It's understanding of causality is limited to material and efficient cause. Formal and final cause are treated as being beyond its pay grade.

This lack of holism is why modern life seems a little shit. And any amount of art ain't going to fix it.

But this isn’t how people use words. The actual use of a world creates a distinction not between it and an indiscriminate infinity of alternative realities, but between it and contrasting meanings that are specifically RELEVANT to the context in which the word is being used. — Joshs

Of course I agree. We don't use words as reductionist units of meaning. We use them to weave the webs of constraint I mention.

We speak in sentences. We speak grammatically. Speech acts have the recursive organisation of the nested hierarchy.

If I just mention "cat", then the implication is that this is enough. I don't need to be more specific, nor more general. The dynamical balance in terms of hierarchical recursion is judged about right so that you will take my "true meaning". The least has been said in a way that the most has also been said.

You could still suspect that with my bad eyesight it is in fact a small dog. There is one in the house and the cat is in fact on your knee. Or the house may have three cats and you want to know exactly which one I mean.

But these small fine-tunings only emphasise just how much can be left out in terms of either the more global generalities or more local particulars.

If I had said there is an animal on the mat, that lack of specificity might have alarmed you. If I said there was a dead cat on the mat, that specificity might also alarm you.

So the deadly dullness of the "cat on the mat" account of a "state of affairs" is chosen by me quite deliberately as evidence for all that naive realism wants to leave out when applying its lumpen account of language pragmatics.

As a statement of facts, it sounds like the kind of thing no reasonable person could dream of disputing. The world just is all that is the case. And anyone with two eyes can see that without further debate.

But even the cat being on the mat is a claim dependent on an unspoken weight of context. It depends on linguistic holism and not logical atomism.

Science is set up as the relentless machine for mining the "truth" of reality. Science's problem is not that it ain't sufficiently open to having its theories confounded by surprises. It's problem lies in its failure to be holistic and realise the extent to which knowledge is an exercise that is making the human self as much as comprehending the world. — apokrisis

:up: Nice.

Lawson goes off on the usual Romantic tangent of wanting to give art the role of exploring reality's openness. But that's a bit too Cartesian again. — apokrisis

Indeed. He is member of the British progressive middle class, after all.

Science by and large accepts the Cartesian division between itself and the humanities. It's understanding of causality is limited to material and efficient cause. Formal and final cause are treated as being beyond its pay grade.

This lack of holism is why modern life seems a little shit. And any amount of art ain't going to fix it. — apokrisis

Is there a tentative solution to this? It seems to me that science does have a pay grade and the big questions we seem to like asking are outside its domain.

Is there a tentative solution to this? — Tom Storm

There are plenty of ecologically informed scientists who have fingered how we wound up in our current bind. The short answer is fossil fuels want to be entropified. Humans stumbled into that role of becoming dedicated to the mission. The industrial revolution was about reorganising society - it’s politics, economics, and other “humanitarian” subjects - around this new task.

But that is not a solution so much as the late in the picture diagnosis of a terminal condition. :confused:

If we suppose that there no realist notion of language, what is it that language does when we attempt to describe reality? — Tom Storm

Language usage orients language-users.

(I've generally held that language is metaphorical, but then what?)

Yep. Read George Lakoff et al.

... do we need a theory of language that explains how any realist claim is possible in order to accept those claims?

Nope. (Witty's 'nonsense', re: TLP)

If we do not employ a realist account of language (as per postmodern thinkers), what is it we can meaningfully say about this notion of 'reality' we are so fond of describing and seems to be a substitute for god?

This depends on the language-game you're engaged in which uses the term "reality".

... theory of language was not possible because it falls to the self-referential paradox that it is unable to give an account of itself.

Is this problem insurmountable or overstated?

No. Yes. Read Witty's PI as a contextual extension (rather than critical refutation or theoretical correction) of his TLP. The latter expresses only one possible language-game (re: logical atomism) out of innumerably many other language-games suggested in the former.

I think Hilary Lawson loses the plot – the problem of the criterion (and its ilk) arises from confusing maps with territories and then complaining that 'maps =/= territories is an intractable paradox' when it's not: in practice, a map is made by abstracting features of interest from a given territory just as language is used to discursively make explicit (e.g. problematize) the invariant, ineluctable, conditions (i.e. "reality") of their circumstance. To avoid circle-jerking p0m0 / anti-realist nonsense, language must be shown (reflectively practiced) rather than said (theorized-via-language).

Thank you. Lots to follow up.

This depends on the language-game you're engaged in which uses the term "reality". — 180 Proof

Fair point.

I think Hilary Lawson loses the plot – the problem of the criterion (and its ilk) arises from confusing maps with territories and then complaining that 'maps =/= territories is an intractable paradox' when it's not: in practice, a map is made by abstracting features of interest from a given territory just as language is used to discursively make explicit (e.g. problematize) the invariant, ineluctable, conditions (i.e. "reality") of their circumstance. To avoid circle-jerking p0m0 / anti-realist nonsense, language must be shown (reflectively practiced) rather than said (theorized-using-language). — 180 Proof

Right, that's good to know. I was wondering to what extent Lawson may have become fixated and how to stop the circle-jerking...

:up:

One problem with this survey is that modern realism is itself an outgrowth of Kantian Transcendental Idealism. — Joshs

We all stand on the shoulders of giants. I'm not seeing how that's a problem.

Kantian Transcendental Idealism is an outgrowth of Christianity. Do you think that people shouldn't outgrow Christianity?

I also want to point out how selfhood - the “reality” of the first person point of view - is a product of the closure, the epistemic cut, that produces the self-interested view we then call “the real world”. — apokrisis

Is 'the epistemic cut' avoidable, do you think? It seems a necessary condition of existence. Which would explain why the 'self-overcoming' or 'detachment' of traditional philosophy would provide a portal to understanding 'things as they truly are'.

Some people probably never think about some ‘real world’ they just live life.

Kantian Transcendental Idealism is an outgrowth of Christianity. Do you think that people shouldn't outgrow Christianity? — wonderer1

They should. And realism should outgrow Kantian Idealism. But most forms of realism in fact haven’t outgrown it. That’s what the author I quoted meant when he said that Kant “lays out the theoretical topography of the forms of realism that still frames our understanding of philosophical questions concerning reality.”

He goes on:

“ On the standard view, idealism and realism are incompatible philosophical theo­ries. For Kant, however, they are not. He rather claims that transcendental idealism and empirical realism form a unity, i.e., only in combination they demonstrate that objects of external perception are real: Transcendental idealists hold that the objects as we represent them in space and time are appearances and not things-in-them­selves. This, according to Kant, implies empirical realism, i.e., the view that the rep­resented objects of our spatio-temporal system of experience are real beings outside us. “

Relative to the OP’s assertion that “this forum might give the impression that idealism is more popular among philosophers than it actually is”, I would make the opposite claim concerning Kantian Idealism. It is more popular among allegedly anti-Idealist empirical realists than they realize.

:up:

Is 'the epistemic cut' avoidable, do you think? It seems a necessary condition of existence. — Wayfarer

The cut in organisms separates the material dynamics that constitutes the physical world from the information or algorithms that are the regulating model of that world. So you have the chemistry, and you have the genome. You have the environment, and you have our self-centred, self-producing, neural model of it.

When it comes to philosophic detachment, this came about with the further levels of the epistemic cut represented by the codes of words and numbers. Mainly numbers. The Greek concept of logic and proof as the ultimate way of modelling an utterly abstract environment from the point of view of an utterly abstract selfhood.

We became causal thinkers existing in a causal cosmos. Rational and detached.

The pay off of such a modelling relation with the world was the technology that could regulate the realm we call the physical. Western natural philosophy took things to that level. It built a culture around that habit of thought - especially after the industrial revolution saw us hop on the entropic rocket of fossil fuel.

So the epistemic cut speaks to the modelling division that pays its way in the world. It is a necessary condition for life and mind. But we didn’t have to get so technological in some inevitable sense. It was an accident of history that a Europe undergoing a minor post-Enlightenment agrarian revolution stumbled into a use for lumps of black burny stuff that appeared to come in unlimited supply.

I would make the opposite claim concerning Kantian Idealism. It is more popular among allegedly anti-Idealist empirical realists than they realize. — Joshs

Do you accept the realism of the enactivist/pragmatist as having properly gone beyond Kant now? What we experience of the world is the self-centred reality of its affordances?

If we suppose that there no realist notion of language, what is it that language does when we attempt to describe reality? (I've generally held that language is metaphorical, but then what?) — Tom Storm

The only reality we describe is the reality of shared human experience and concern, as I see it. Saying that the map is not the territory is saying that the network of collective representations which constitute our real, shared world is the map, while our individual pre-linguistic experiences are the territory. The map is an abstracted generalization and sharing derived from a vast number of particular experiences. Of course, this is not to say that the maps do not feed back into and condition the experiences of individuals.

Do you accept the realism of the enactivist/pragmatist as having properly gone beyond Kant now? What we experience of the world is the self-centred reality of its affordances — apokrisis

yes, I think that’s right.

So realism aims to speak about what actually exists. But practically speaking, this is achieved by establishing it as the contrast to all else that could have been the case. — apokrisis

That is correct, because that what the underlying material of language - information - is: just differences. A photosensitive organism does not see 'the world as it is' - it just perceives that an area is different than another one. And our seeing is different only quantitatively, not qualitatively: we see more differences, but still nothing but differences. Our language, that is, our descriptions of what we perceive, reflects that. Any definition of a thing just describes is how that thing is not like other things. That is why no definition is finite: there still might be a thing that fits the description, but is somewhat different.