Mental realism reloaded

Journal for General Philosophy of Science, 2009

I argue that there is a distinction to be drawn between two kinds of mental realism, and I draw some lessons for the realism-antirealism debate. Although it is already at hand, the distinction has not yet been drawn clearly. The difference to be shown consists in what realism is about: it may be either about the interpretation of folk psychology, or the ontology of mental entities. I specify the commitment to the fact-stating character of the discourse as the central component of realism about folk psychology, and from this I separate realism about mental entities as an ontological commitment towards them. I point out that the two views are mutually independent, which provides the possibility of considering folk psychology as not being in cognitive competition with scientific psychology. At the end I make a tentative suggestion as to how to interpret the former in order to avoid this conflict.

Journal for General Philosophy of Science, 2009

I argue that there is a distinction to be drawn between two kinds of mental realism, and I draw some lessons for the realism-antirealism debate. Although it is already at hand, the distinction has not yet been drawn clearly. The difference to be shown consists in what realism is about: it may be either about the interpretation of folk psychology, or the ontology of mental entities. I specify the commitment to the fact-stating character of the discourse as the central component of realism about folk psychology, and from this I separate realism about mental entities as an ontological commitment towards them. I point out that the two views are mutually independent, which provides the possibility of considering folk psychology as not being in cognitive competition with scientific psychology. At the end I make a tentative suggestion as to how to interpret the former in order to avoid this conflict.

2010

2016

In section 1, I explain why a specifically Dummettian conception of realism will be relevant only in a restricted range of cases. In section 2, I suggest that Crispin Wright could be read as holding that the truth of certain judgements depends on our capacity to know it (if and) only if their being true consists in their being superassertible. In section 3, I point out that insisting on knowability, as both Dummett and Wright do, prevents one from seeing that their are other legitimate forms of realism. I argue against the claim attributed to Wright in section 2, which leads me to suggest that it is a mistake to construe the realism debates as being essentially concerned with the nature of truth. The purpose of this paper is to explain and criticize a conception of realism which is suggested by the general approach to the realism debates which Crispin Wright has developed, mainly in his Truth and Objectivity [Wright 1992]. This book largely contributed to restructuring the whole pro...

Wittgenstein, Human Beings and Conversation, 2022

1 1. Wittgenstein took this-'Not empiricism and yet realism'-to be something to aim at in philosophy. My concern in this paper is to suggest what he might have meant by this. The task is made tricky by the fact that the term 'realism' is used in a variety of ways in philosophy. Wittgenstein himself is, presumably, understanding the term differently when he speaks of refusing both 'the scepticism of the idealist' and ' the assurances of the realist'. 2 To give a rough indication of how I will use the term in this paper: 'realism' is the view that things and their properties exist independently of human concepts and practices. The formulation leaves room for the suggestion that we should be realists about some but not other of the things people speak of (perhaps trees but not unicorns), and about some but not other general areas of our thought and speech: perhaps science but not ethics. I will suggest that there is nothing in Wittgenstein to cast a completely general doubt on realism so understood. What, then, does he have in mind when he rejects 'the assurances of the realist'? One possibility is this: he is insisting that it is not the business of philosophy to offer assurances that, for example, trees and mountains exist independently of us. Another, more relevant to my concerns in this paper, is that he is rejecting the assurances of views that hold that we have the 'right' concepts: that our experience of the world dictates that these are the concepts in terms of which it is to be described. Such views are, I believe, well characterized as 'empiricism'. They are, I will suggest in the next section, particularly clearly exemplified in Locke's thinking; and may, I believe, be at least part of what Wittgenstein has in mind when he calls for 'Not empiricism and yet realism'. 2. John Locke remarks that: 2 The Comfort, and Advantage of Society, not being to be had without Communication of Thoughts, it was necessary, that Man should find out some external sensible Signs, whereby those invisible Ideas, which his thoughts are made up of, might be made known to others. […] The use then of Words, is to be sensible Marks of Ideas; and the Ideas they stand for, are their proper and immediate Signification. 3 Locke goes on to suggest that some, though not all, of our ideas are 'real and true' in the sense that they 'have a conformity with the real being and existence of things, or with their archetypes'; and, further, that the particular way in which certain of our ideas ('simple' ones) derive from experience guarantees that they are real and true: […] because they answer and agree to those powers of things, which produce them in our minds, that being all that is requisite to make them real, and not fictions at pleasure. For in simple ideas (as has been shown) the mind is wholly confined to the operation of things upon it, and can make to it self no simple idea, more than what it has received. Most contemporary philosophers reject Locke's central thought in the first of these remarks: reject, that is, the suggestion that the use of words is to be sensible marks of 'invisible ideas'. The shift away from that way of thinking is indicated by the replacement of the term 'idea' by the term 'concept', or perhaps 'means of representation', as the core notion in philosophical discussions of meaning. That shift has, however, sometimes left in place an

a great deal of confusion arises from the use of the word 'idealism', but it is not that hard to sort it out

European Journal of Philosophy

Your belief that Obama is a Democrat wouldn't be the belief that it is if it didn't represent Obama, nor would the pain in your ankle be the state that is if, say, it felt like an itch. Accordingly, it is tempting to hold that phenomenal and representational properties are essential to the mental states that have them. But, as several theorists have forcefully argued (including Kripke (1980) and Burge (1979, 1982)) this attractive idea is seemingly in tension with another equally attractive thesis, namely, physicalism about the mental. In this paper, we show that these seemingly incontrovertible essentialist intuitions are in fact compatible with physicalism. By appealing to a plenitudinous ontology of objects, we argue that there are physical things with which mental states can be identified. This is preferable to existing views that give up the essentiality claims or weaken the physicalist thesis.

mbph.de

This essay deals with the concept of truth in the context of a version of internal realism 1 . In §1 I define some variants of realism using a set of realistic axioms. In §2 I will argue that for semantical reasons we should be realists of some kind. In §3 I plead for an internalistic setting of realism starting from the thesis that truth is, at least, not a non-epistemic concept. We have to bear the consequences of this in form of a more complicated concept of truth. The "internal" of "internal realism" points to the justification aspect of truth. The "realism" of "internal realism" points to the correspondence aspect. A thesis concerning the irreducibility of the two aspects will be established in §4.

Philosophia, 1995

A common belief is that the senses reflect the real world to the brain, which in turn, presents it to our mental consciousness. People consider mental consciousness to be their own living self (first person) where we have mental experiences. An independent non-physical mental entity where we think, feel, and control our actions. It was found that there is specific brain activity for each conscious perception we have. The problem is that the nature of the interaction between brain activity and consciousness is still a mystery, coined the ‘hard problem’ - meaning that science can never explain how physical activity in the brain presents mental consciousness experiences. But perhaps we bark at the wrong tree. Suppose we have no mental consciousness and what we think of as mental experiences are illusions our brain produces. The belief that there is a mental entity is based solely on intuition and long-standing tradition. But many intuitive beliefs were proven wrong in the past. Is it not possible that the belief in mental consciousness is also wrong? In his article, I try to lay reasons supporting the idea that there is no mental consciousness.