Problems:

1. Numerous, ranging from the ancient Skeptics, to Berkeley, to modern science.

2. Science is incomplete. We don't know how far from a complete scientific understanding of the world we are. Also, the Kuhnian challenge of paradigm shifts.

3. What breathes life into the equations? Also, the challenge of mathematical realism in and of itself.

4. Not sure what the critique is here.

5. This is admitting to global skepticism. Why even suppose there is a real world if you can't know anything about it?

6. Demonstrating how this is different from anti-realism. But it has been used by various realists in these forums and elsewhere as an attempt to avoid traditional objections, and out of a suspicion for metaphysical questions in general. But can metaphysics be avoided altogether without assuming realism is the case?

I think the best answer is just to be honest and admit there isn't any evidence for the claims realism makes. Basic epistemological and metaphysical questions like these don't have good answers, and not because they're meaningless but just because they're hard.

There's no good reason at all to believe that the world would be differentiated by someone's mind.

I think that any realism worth the name will require a metaphysics that can explain how it's possible for the world as known and the world as it is in itself to be partially identical. Without that you are left with indirect realism which, as modern philosophy since Descartes has amply demonstrated, inevitably collapses into either subjective or transcendental idealism.

There is no such thing as the world in itself. You don't get to take anti-realist assumptions for granted.

Funny, slip of the tongue? or are you implying that that there is no guarantee, god died so he can't guarantee correspondence theory.


I think the world has a structure and thought has a structure, I don't think there is necessarily an isomorphism between the two. There may be evolutionary reasons why we perceive the world in the way we do. If we can decide on the structure of thought shouldn't that drive our conclusions about what is real. Perhaps what is left over might be what is real..we make a claim about the tree, that claim is for something, the claim and what the claim is for are separate, and it allows for error.

There is no such thing as the world in itself. You don't get to take anti-realist assumptions for granted. — jkop

Plenty of realists would disagree. "In itself" need not denote Kant's "ding an sich", which is just his particular take on the concept.

There is no such thing as the world in itself. You don't get to take anti-realist assumptions for granted. — jkop

Then how does the realist distinguish between a veridical and a non-veridical experience? The very principle of realism is that the way the world is is independent of our experiences such that we can see things that aren't there and not see things that are there.

But, if you are claiming that there were evolutionary reasons for how we came to see and think about the world, are you not, implicitly, claiming that there is an isomorphism between your conception of evolution and what actually happened; the actual evolution?

Regarding '5', I think the claim is not that we cannot know the Real, but that we cannot know, in any determinable sense, how we know it or exactly what it is we know of it. The empirical world is still understood to be an expression of the noumenon; and we know things about it. So through knowing about the empirical world we are knowing the noumenon, even though we cannot know anything determinate about it. It's really just pointing at the limitations of discursive knowing.

Why even suppose there is a real world if you can't know anything about it? — Marchesk

Acknowledging that knowledge has limitations is not global scepticism. Given that the world we know is the 'world of appearances', it regardless behaves with an enormous amount and depth of consistency and predictability. Look at how much has been accomplished by virtue of quantum theory, even though it is widely acknowledged that the fundamental nature of what it describes remains a mystery.

I understand by the transcendental idealism of all appearances the doctrine that they are all together to be regarded as mere representations and not things in themselves, and accordingly that space and time are only sensible forms of our intuition, but not determinations given for themselves or conditions of objects as things in themselves. To this idealism is opposed transcendental realism, which regards space and time as something given in themselves (independent of our sensibility). The transcendental realist therefore represents outer appearances (if their reality is conceded) as things in themselves, which would exist independently of us and our sensibility and thus would also be outside us according to pure concepts of the understanding. (CPR, A369) — Kant

So you can know a great deal about it, while still not knowing what it really is. All this amounts to is, among other things, acknowledging the 'role of the observer' in whatever it is we know, instead of presuming that we can attain a knowledge which is completely independent of our own faculties. Meaning that, science remains a human undertaking - something which seems to disturb many scientists.

If the forest doesn't exist because we are not in it, and a tree falls silently because a human ear is not there to hear it, then how did we come into existence? I mean, if we weren't there to observe evolution happening, how could nature have gotten away with an outrageous trick like that?

Were there craters on the moon before a telescope enabled us to see them? (Yes.) Were there canals on Mars before a telescope enables us to not see them anymore? (No.) Are there really a trillion trillion galaxies in the universe? (Maybe. They'll have to count them all. Finding out how many holes it took to fill the Albert Hall was relatively easy.)

I assert that nature existed prior to our existence, it exists independently of our observations, and it will be around after philosophers have departed the scene at some (in)convenient moment of time in the very near future.

I assert that nature existed prior to our existence, it exists independently of our observations, and it will be around after philosophers have departed the scene at some convenient moment of time in the near future. — Bitter Crank

Samuel Johnson attended a lecture by Bishop Berkeley, and after having emerged from the lecture, when asked of his view of the good Bishop's sophistry, vigorously kicked a large stone, declaring 'I refute it thus!'

how is that related to reality? If what we perceive, and how our perceptions become structured as thought are related to utility, to survival, then we are naturally inclined to actively seek adaptive cues in the environment, and they influence/bias the way we conceive the world for ourselves. I think this strengthens the claim that our conception of the world may not be isomorphic with what is the case.

Good old Samuel.

I'm saying that if you think there has been a process of "perceptions becoming structured as thought related to utility, to survival" then you are thinking that something has actually occurred which is isomorphic with that thought of it having occurred.

We cannot both think about the world and escape the assumption that what we think corresponds to the actual world.

Edit: that should read "escape the assumption that what we think could correspond or fail to correspond to the world". If what we say could correspond to the world, then it could also fail to correspond; rather than being utterly discontinuous with the world.

But the point is, 'the past' is no different to any other object of perception. So the existence of the time 'before humans existed' doesn't refute Kantian arguments, because it doesn't understand the point at issue.

(Kant once remarked) 'If I take away the thinking subject, the whole material world must vanish, as this world is nothing but the phenomenal appearance in the sensibility of our own subject, and is a species of this subject's representations.' … [An] objection would run: 'Everyone knows that the earth, and a fortiori the universe, existed for a long time before there were any living beings, and therefore any perceiving subjects. But according to what Kant has just been quoted as saying, that is impossible.'

Schopenhauer's defence of Kant on this score was twofold. First, the objector has not understood to the very bottom the Kantian demonstration that time is one of the forms of our sensibility. The earth, say, as it was before there was life, is a field of empirical enquiry in which we have come to know a great deal; its reality is no more being denied than is the reality of perceived objects in the same room. The point is, the whole of the empirical world in space and time is the creation of our understanding, which apprehends all the objects of empirical knowledge within it as being in some part of that space and at some part of that time: and this is as true of the earth before there was life as it is of the pen I am now holding a few inches in front of my face and seeing slightly out of focus as it moves across the paper.

This, incidentally, illustrates a difficulty in the way of understanding which transcendental idealism has permanently to contend with: the assumptions of 'the inborn realism which arises from the original disposition of the intellect' enter unawares into the way in which the statements of transcendental idealism are understood, so that these statements appear faulty in ways in which, properly understood, they are not.

Such realistic assumptions so pervade our normal use of concepts that the claims of transcendental idealism disclose their own non-absurdity only after difficult consideration, whereas criticisms of them at first appear cogent which on examination are seen to rest on confusion.

Bryan Magee, Schopenhauer's Philosophy

To try and unpack that a bit further, the perspective of time in terms of a sequence of events of finite duration, measured in terms of units such as years, is part of what the mind brings to the picture. Is there time outside of such a perspective? The answer will intuitively appear to be 'yes', but whether 'time is objectively real' is still a matter of debate in science itself.

I am not suggesting that we can escape the world, I am suggesting that the way the world is structured does not necessarily correspond to the structure of thought.

Sure the structure of thought is dependent on the structure of the world, but that does not mean there is an isomorphic correspondence, which is why I brought up the bias of evolution. I think unless we understand the structure of thought, we will never be able to understand the structure of the world. Epistemology, I think must drive ontology, and not the other way around.

Our concept of what is real is dependent upon our concept of the world, and I don't think that reality can be grasped without our epistemological understanding of our concept of the world.

I will think on it (but I don't like it).

So you can know a great deal about it, while still not knowing what it really is. — Wayfarer

But in Kant's system, knowledge only occurs at the level of judgement, right? Since the noumenal world (i.e. the world in itself) epistemologically and ontologically precedes the functions of judgment, it literally can't be known. Kant is then faced with the seemingly intractable problem of having to explain how we can know both that noumena exist and that they cause our sense impressions, given that both "causality" and "existence" only have meaning within the context of the content generated by the operations of the mind.

If objects don't exist outside of a perspective then that is solipsism.

If objects only exist in minds as a result of some external cause that isn't a object, then indirect realism would be the case.

But in Kant's system, knowledge only occurs at the level of judgement, right? Since the noumenal world (i.e. the world in itself) epistemologically and ontologically precedes the functions of judgment, it literally can't be known. — Aaron R

Thank you Aaron. But I wonder. If you investigate the word 'noumenon', it actually means something very much like 'an ideal object' or 'the object of thought'; the root of the term is 'nous'.

Now in the Greek tradition, intelligible objects, such as numbers and geometrical forms, are known in a manner that is 'higher' than the knowledge of sensory objects - when the intellect knows such things as mathematical ideas, then the mind is perfectly united with the idea*. Whereas the objects of sense are only intelligible insofar as they conform to laws and are instances of the forms which nous perceives directly.

In Platonic epistemology, that is the root of the distinction between pistis, knowledge of sense objects and dianoia, knowledge of numbers and geometrical objects (and noesis, although I'll leave that aside here.)

So I think distinction between phenomena and noumena is descended from the Platonic differentiation between appearance and reality. But it's not a dichotomy or an absolute dualism; it's more that the phenomenal domain is how the noumenal realm manifests on the level of appearances; its 'sensible form', as Kant would say.

I think the problems arise when you ask 'what is this "noumenon"? How can you know it exists?' My view is that this question arises from conceiving of the noumenal as a kind of 'invisible phenomenon' that is 'behind' the world of appearances, 'pulling the strings'. We want to look behind the curtain, peer behind the apparent to the real behind it. But in traditional philosophy, the 'cause' doesn't exist on the same level as 'the effect'. If you think back to the formal and final causes, they are not causes in the sense that material causes are; meaning that, on the whole, they're among the kinds of conceptions that have been rejected in most modern philosophy. You find the vestiges of those beliefs in the early modern philosophers, but since then, naturalism and empiricism has tended to seek its explanations solely in terms of efficient and material causation and endeavoured to banish metaphysics from the picture.

So the exasperation that is expressed about the 'thing in itself' is often this kind of eye-rolling cynicism that a (mere) philosopher could intuit the reality of some unknown thing which the vast armoury of modern scientific instrumentation can't detect; in relation to which, a re-reading of the Bohr-Einstein debates about the interpretation of quantum mechanics, and Heisenberg's later philosophical essays on the same, make for salutary reading.

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*'Aristotle, especially in his De Anima, argues that thinking in general, which includes knowledge as one kind of thinking, cannot be a property of a body, it cannot, as he puts it, ‘be blended with a body’. This is because in thinking the intelligible object or form in present in the intellect and thinking itself is the identification of the intellect with this intelligible.' ~ Lloyd Gerson, Platonism V Naturalism, Pp 16-17.

So I think distinction between phenomena and noumena is descended from the Platonic differentiation between appearance and reality. But it's not a dichotomy or an absolute dualism; it's more that the phenomenal domain is how the noumenal realm manifests on the level of appearances; its 'sensible form', as Kant would say. — Wayfarer

I agree with you regarding the etymological point, but I'm not sure there textual evidence supports your interpretation of Kant's own use of the word. Kant distinguishes between positive and negative senses of "noumenon":

If by a noumenon we understand a thing insofar as it is not an object of our sensible intuition, because we abstract from the manner of our intuition of then this is a noumenon in the negative sense. But if we understand by that an object of a non-sensible intuition then we assume a special kind of intuition, namely intellectual intuition, which, however, is not our own, and the possibility of which we cannot understand, and this would be the noumenon in a positive sense. — Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

In the positive sense, a noumenon would be the object of a purely intellectual intuition, which is a faculty that Kant believes we do not possess. On the negative side, the noumenon is to be understood as the object in abstraction from sensible intuition which, by his own theory, leaves us with a "concept" that is devoid of any cognitive content and, as such, is not really a concept at all. Noumena, in the negative sense, are literally the contradiction of sense intuitions and, as such, mutually exclusive with the content of cognition. It's a sort-of modernistic return of the medieval "via negativa".

That said, I like where you are going with most of your post, and I don't deny the basic notion that the faculties of the mind color our experience of the world, but not to the exclusion of the possibility of knowing the world as it is in itself. As such, I don't think Kant is "where it's at" philosophically speaking. That is, admittedly, a bias of mine that I won't pretend to be able to justify to everyone's satisfaction.

I think the best answer is just to be honest and admit there isn't any evidence for the claims realism makes. — The Great Whatever

David Chalmers in a conference on consciousness briefly discussed why he rejected idealism. It was because it left the structure of experience unexplained. I agree with that. There is something beyond our experiences which is the reason for our experiences. What we experience is a world much bigger and older than us mere humans. Even the fact that I have parents which gave birth to me is enough to doubt idealism (I wasn't experiencing anything as a zygote).

Basic epistemological and metaphysical questions like these don't have good answers, and not because they're meaningless but just because they're hard. — The Great Whatever

This is what interests me, because no answers proposed seem entirely satisfactory, and knowledgeable people can debate them endlessly. I think realism must be the case, but the objection idealism puts forth has not been fully answered by realists. I sometimes wonder if both aren't right in a way, and some sort of synthesis is the answer.

noumena would be the object of a purely intellectual intuition, which is a faculty that Kant believes we do not possess. — Aaron R

Interesting! I might be reading something into Kant which isn't there.

I first encountered Kant through an unusual source, namely, a book by the name of The Central Philosophy of Buddhism, by T R V Murti. Murti was an Oxford-trained Indian scholar, and his book had extensive comparisons between Buddhism and Kant, Hegel, Bradley, Hume and so on (see e.g. here). It has rather fallen out of academic fashion since, but I still admire it.

In any case, the view that I advocate is 'epistemic idealism', i.e., that whatever we affirm to be real is a statement about what we know. I think the basic problem with the kind of realism that most people take for granted, is that it acts as if 'what we know' exists independently of us - it is what I call 'there anyway realism', that 'reality is what persists when you stop believing it', as one saying has it.

There's a sense in which that is true, but to say that is all there is to it, looses sight of the nature of understanding. After all, the light I see out my window isn't really inside my skull; what's inside my skull are the neural patterns which constitute my consciousness. If I try and imagine that scenario, however, then I'll create this kind of image of 'myself in the world', or of 'the world with no observer in it'. But all of those tacitly rely on the human perspective - not in the sense of being my particular idiosyncratic understanding of life, but in the inter-subjective that language and culture provides.

So the reason I referred to the Einstein-Bohr debates, is that Einstein clung doggedly to a form of 'transcendental realism' - that what science is exploring, must exist independently of any act or thought on the part of the observer. But it was precisely that principle which 'uncertainty' and the 'observer problem' called into question, and which was the subject of decades-long debates between the two of them. I won't go into all the details again, which are always being discussed in one thread or another, except to say that I think the consensus that has emerged amongst philosophers of science doesn't really favour Einstein's position. And it has also occured to me, that it's possible thatn Neils Bohr's 'principle of complementarity' really amounts to exactly what is meant by a 'dialectic'. And I think that these developments generally favour a generally Kantian or neo-kantian view, rather than a realist one. (The most comprehensive study of which being Bernard D'Espagnat's books, but they're very hard to read for the non-specialist.)

So nobody has any thoughts on object oriented realism? It is a form of speculative realism that seeks to answer the sort of post Kantian objections to realism, correct? I thought it was an interesting approach, that sort of gets around the problem of differentiation but acknowledging the limits of understanding, but not because the mind differentiates, but rather because of the nature of objects in relation to one another (including us in relation to the things we perceive). Or something like that.

Thanks for the link to the Murti book. Looks like a worthwhile read.

As you can probably tell, I am one of those unsophisticated ignoramuses that tends to lean in the direction of "there anyway" realism. I don't support the notion that we can uncritically read the content of the "in-itself" directly off of our every experience, but I do think that we can achieve some genuine communion with a world "not of our own making" through the processes of rational and empirical inquiry. Whether and to what extent quantum mechanics supports any particular philosophical outlook is a hotly contested question, as I am sure you well know, and is (as you mention) worthy of a thread all its own. Maybe I'll actually get around to starting it one day (probably not). :)

In my opinion, Harman's object-oriented realism ends up collapsing back into Kantian noumenalism wherein the "in-itself" (i.e. "real objects") is simply posited and ends up trapped under a sensual crust that no mind can penetrate, whether rationally or empirically. As far as I can tell, (and despite the pomp and circumstance) Harman's realism amounts to little more than a lazy dogmatism, with unsavory consequences with regards the use of reason. Not that I am totally against dogmatism in matters philosophical, but if you're looking for a knock-down response to idealism, I'd say to look elsewhere.

Sorry for three posts in a row, but here are some additional thoughts regarding the OP:

Generally speaking, I think that there are three main approaches to responding to idealism (here I mean subjective idealism):

1. Dogmatic Realism - simply refuse to accept the burden of proof. Those who take this approach typically believe that you simply can't reason your way to realism starting from idealistic premises, and so the only option is to refuse to play on the idealist's home turf. The proof of the pudding is in the eating and idealistic meals are simply too unsavory to try to choke down. Instead, of trying to refute idealist metaphysics, focus on improving realist metaphysics. The idealist obviously won't be convinced, but good riddance!

2. Transcendental Realism - try to show that realism falls out of an analysis of thought/reason itself. If you can show that the very act of making of an assertion or the asking of a question presupposes realist premises then the idealist is check-mated from the very start!

3. Deflationary Realism - try to show that the idealism/realism debate doesn't make sense because nobody knows what they mean by the word "real". Instead, you'll propose a suitable deflationary definition of the word "real" that undercuts the entire debate and ends the confusion once and for all!

I am one of those unsophisticated ignoramuses that tends to lean in the direction of "there anyway" realism. — Aaron R

I was really not trying to cast aspersions - just to gently point out that mosty people look to 'naturalism' to defend 'normalism' - the idea that us normal folks, doing our normal things, is the yardstick of what ought to be considered real.

Whereas Plato (and traditional philosophy, generally) questions what us good folk take to be normal from another perspective altogether. So 'waking up to the real' - leaving the Cave - is possible, but not through what is generally understood by naturalism nowadays. Thomas Nagel's essay Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament describes this very well.