Beyond Realism and Antirealism ---At Last?

This paper recapitulates my four primary lines of argument that what is wrong with scientific realism is not realist answers to questions to which various anti-realists give different answers, but instead assumptions shared by realists and anti-realists in framing the question. Each strategy incorporates its predecessors as a consequence. A first, minimalist challenge, taken over from Arthur Fine and Michael Williams, rejects the assumption that the sciences have a general aim or goal. A second consideration is that realists and antirealists undertake a mistaken, substantive commitment to a separation between mind and world, which allows them to frame the issue in terms of how epistemic “access” to the world is mediated. A third strategy for dissolving the realism question challenges its underlying commitment to the independence of meaning and truth, a strategy pursued in different ways by Donald Davidson, Robert Brandom, John McDowell, John Haugeland, and myself. The fourth and most encompassing strategy shows that realists and antirealists are thereby committed to an objectionably antinaturalist conception of scientific understanding, in conflict with what the sciences themselves have to say about our own conceptual capacities.

Debating the Reality of Race, Caste, and Ethnicity

There is a lively ongoing debate among philosophers and social scientists about the reality of race and among social scientists about the reality of caste and ethnicity. This paper tries to sort out what the issues are and makes some preliminary suggestions about what the evidence shows. Standard philosophical analyses try to find the necessary and sufficient conditions of our concept of race. I argue that this is not the best way to approach the issue and that the reality of these concepts should be taken as a scientific realism question; that is, do our best social scientific accounts of these phenomena show that appealing to the concepts of race, caste, and ethnicity is essential to successful social science explanation? I argue that in some cases that is the case and lay out the empirical issues involved.

The Methodological Implications of Resolving the Realism Debate

This paper explores the question of whether or not the resolution of the realism question has any implications for scientific methodology. It proposes a solution to the question that draws features from recent “deflationary” approaches to the realism question. The normative methodological role of the deflationary approach is then defended from the claim that no interpretative, normative or methodological role is left for a deflationary position. An illustration of the utility of the approach is demonstrated through a case study of the role that the realism question has played in the field of quantum mechanics.

Framing the realism question

This paper begins with a revaluation of Carnap's critique of existence questions, and finds that with modification his argument is successful in giving a prima facie cause for doubt that the ontological question addressed by religious realists and non-realists has content. The second part of the paper argues that these doubts can be met with proper attention to the role of truth in the religious realism debate. The paper concludes by arguing for a close relationship between the semantic and the ontological varieties of religious realism.