Realism, Objectivity, and Evaluation

Academia Letters, 2021

The problem of the relationship between realism and pluralism is central to the feasibility of the realistic point of view. How can the realist explain the apparent plurality of world descriptions? Is there anything that unifies otherwise different accounts? However, the discussion of such matters is often complicated by several unnecessary assumptions that could distract from the main lines of reasoning. To keep things as simple as possible and bring out the conceptual knots of the matter, I will take a different approach. In what follows I am going to employ some resources from basic category theory and try to argue that realism is incompatible with pluralism. From this result it follows that, if there are sufficient reasons to believe in the reality of pluralism, realism is not a viable option. Any attempt to couple realism with pluralism should go through the move of disentangling the metaphysical isomorphism with the deep ontology of the World from the various ways in which we can try to describe it. The World has a single ontology-so an alleged realist might argue-, a single metaphysical organization or structure that in some sense underlies our true and complete description of it. However, there are several ways to match this organization; there are also several true and complete descriptions of the World. The problem is that once it is assumed that all true and complete descriptions must conform to a single structure, it becomes very difficult to think that the resulting pluralism is a real kind of pluralism. Therefore, the realist is ultimately committed to a monistic attitude. I think this situation can be made evident by employing a style of reasoning borrowed from category theory. First of all, let me set out some preliminary stipulations. Realism is a very complicated cluster of theses involving truth, metaphysics, semantics, modality, and so on. For our purposes, let me stick to a very minimal definition: Realism holds iff there is a Complete and True Description of how the World is (CTDW). In other words, there is a true answer to every question about what happens in the World.

This essay demonstrates that realism is a moral theory that aims at conserving stability by looking at what classical realism entails and then, examining Morgenthau's classical realist theory.

Oxford Handbooks Online, 2018

This chapter is concerned with a semantic (as opposed to ontological) approach to metaphysics, developed by Michael Dummett and Crispin Wright, that takes truth as fundamental, and explicates debates about realisms in terms of truth. On this approach realism is fundamentally concerned with the objectivity of truth, where objectivity does not consist in the existence of entities. The chapter shows that Dummett worked with three separable criteria for the objectivity of truth, which support a subtle and flexible framework for characterizing various degrees of realism. It argues that Dummett’s so-called “manifestation” arguments against semantic realism can handle many objections that have been brought against them. It discusses Wright’s minimalism about truth, his four semantic criteria of realism, their inter-relations, and their connections to Dummett’s criteria. It concludes with reflections on the meta-philosophical status of the semantic approach: the reasons in favor of pursuing...

Symposium on Thomas Scanlon's Being Realistic about Reasons

[This is for an author-meets-critics symposium on Thomas Scanlon's Being Realistic About Reasons, with replies from Scanlon, Canadian Journal of Philosophy.] One of the key aims of Scanlon's Being Realistic about Reasons is to demystify knowledge of normative and mathematical truths. In this paper, I develop an epistemological challenge that Scanlon fails to explicitly address. I argue that Scanlon’s “metaphysical pluralism” can be understood as a response to that challenge. However, it affords an answer to the challenge only to the extent that it undermines the objectivity of normative and mathematical inquiry.

2004

Philosophical Studies, 2010

Metaethical-or, more generally, metanormative-realism faces a serious epistemological challenge. Realists owe us-very roughly speaking-an account of how it is that we can have epistemic access to the normative truths about which they are realists. This much is, it seems, uncontroversial among metaethicists, myself included. But this is as far as the agreement goes, for it is not clear-nor uncontroversial-how best to understand the challenge, what the best realist way of coping with it is, and how successful this attempt is. In this paper I try, first, to present the challenge in its strongest version, and second, to show how realistsindeed, robust realists-can cope with it. The strongest version of the challenge is, I argue, that of explaining the correlation between our normative beliefs and the independent normative truths. And I suggest an evolutionary explanation (of a preestablished harmony kind) as a way of solving it.

Philosophical Studies, 2005

Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research, 2017

Realist philosophers of mathematics have accounted for the objectivity and robustness of mathematics by recourse to a foundational theory of mathematics that ultimately determines the ontology and truth of mathematics. The methodology for establishing these truths and discovering the ontology was set by the foundational theory. Other traditional philosophers of mathematics, but this time those who are not realists, account for the objectivity of mathematics by fastening on to: an objective account of: epistemology, ontology, truth, epistemology or methodology. One of these has to stay stable. Otherwise, it is traditionally thought, we have a rampant relativism where 'anything goes'. Pluralism is a relatively new family of positions. The pluralist in mathematics who is pluralist in: epistemology, foundations, methodology, ontology and truth cannot account for the objectivity of mathematics in either the realist or in the other traditional ways. But such a pluralist is not a rampant relativist. In the paper, I look at what it is to be a pluralist in: epistemology, foundations, methodology, ontology and truth. I then give an account of the objectivity and robustness of mathematics in terms of rigour, borrowings, crosschecking and fixtures-all technical terms defined in the paper. This account is an alternative to the realist and traditional accounts of objectivity in mathematics.

This chapter is concerned with a semantic (as opposed to ontological) approach to metaphysics, developed by Michael Dummett and Crispin Wright, that takes the concept of truth as fundamental, and explicates debates about realisms in terms of truth. On this approach realism is fundamentally concerned with the objectivity of truth conditions of classes of statements, where objectivity is not a matter of the existence of entities. I show that Dummett worked with three separable criteria for the objectivity of truth, which support a subtle and flexible framework for characterizing various degrees of realism. I argue that