Epistemology: An Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge

18. Cognitive Realism

333 Chapter 18 Cognitive Realism SYNOPSIS • To exist is to play a role in some realm of identifiable items. • Actual identification by us humans is not crucial here; our own powers are not determinative. • Indeed our knowledge regarding actual existence is bound to be incomplete . • As far as we are concerned, the world’s real things are cognitively inexhaustible . • Our conception of things are always corrigible, • incomplete, and • changeable. • The reality of things outruns our conceptions of them. • This hidden depth of real things is not a basis for slepticism but rather a prime impetus of realism. • Such a realism has a pragmatic basis as serving to override the essential conceptual underpinnings for communication and discourse. • Such a view of the matter gives an idealistic cast to realism. • In particular it does not permit an actual-science realism holding that reality is as the science of our day describes it to be, but rather an aspirational science-realism that sees depicting reality as a regulative goal that science aspires to actualize. EXISTENCE To exist (in the broadest sense of this term) is to function as a constituent of a realm, to play a role in a domain of identifiable items of some sort. In principle there are thus as many modes of existence as there are types of interrelated items, and to exist is to exist as an item of the correlative kind. There is physical existence in space and time, mathematical existence in the realm of quantities or structures, sensory existence in the spectrum of colors or the catalog of odors, and so on. This means that existence is realm-correlative and thus contextualized. Strictly considered, we should not speak of existence categorically and without qualifications. It is always a matter of existence-as: as a physical object, as a number , as a character in a Shakespeare play, or the like. Existence is accordingly not homogenous but categorially differentiated: different kinds of existing things exist in their own characteristic way.To attribute to numbers the same kind of existence that colors or that mammals have is to commit a serious category mistake. All the same, when philosophers talk of existence they generally mean physical existence in the natural world. And here the term admits both a narrower and a broader construction. In its narrower construction to exist physically is to be an object in the space and time: to occupying a place here in the manner in which cats and trees and water molecules do. But to exist physically in the broader sense of the term is to play a role in the causal commerce of such things—to exist in the manner in which droughts and headaches or human desires do, and thereby to figure as part of the world’s processual development. It is such actual, real-world existence—narrow and broad alike—that will be our principal object of concern here. And the overall range of such existences can be specified in an essentially recursive manner as follows: 1. the things we experience with our internal and external senses exist. 2. the things whose existence we need to postulate in order to realize an adequate causal explanation of things that exist also exist. This view really takes the approach of a causal realism, a theory maintaining that to be a real existent is to be part of the world’s causal commerce. Such a definition is essentially recursive—ordinary material objects are existentially real, and so is anything whatsoever that is bound up with them by linkages of cause and effect. Accordingly, “to exist” in the physical mode is to feature as a component or aspect of the causal commerce real world. And some jargon-expression such as “to subsist” needs to be coined for contextualized existence within a framework of supposition at issue with fictions or hypotheses. Thus merely possible objects— or possibilia, for short—are things that merely “exist” in the sense of subsistence within a hypothetical realm on a fictional make-believe world.They are not part of the real world’s actual furnishings. 334 Cognitive Limits and the Quest for Truth HOMO MENSURA? But how is this causal view of reality related to the issue of knowledge? Clearly, whatever can be known by us humans to be real must of course, for that very reason, actually be real. But does the converse hold? Is the real for that very reason...