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Defining Realism The world consists of some fixed totality of mind-independent objects. There is exactly one true and complete description of “the way the world is.” Truth involves some sort of correspondence relation between words or thought-signs and external things and sets of things. I shall call this perspective the externalist perspective, because its favorite point of view is a God’s Eye point of view. (Putnam 1981, 49) Most writers on the topic agree that, as the name suggests, anti-realism is defined in contrast to realism: anti-realism is not whatever realism is. In J. L. Austin’s phrase, realism wears the trousers in the pair,1 so we must first understand it in order to grasp anti-realism. In this opening chapter I will draw on largely analytic sources to construct a definition of realism in the form of a set of theses (denoted R1–R6), or a Realism Matrix. During my examination of the continental philosophers, I will progressively construct a correlative Anti-Realism Matrix (A1–A6) by tracing these figures ’ various rejections and modifications of realism. These views arise from the historical conversation between the thinkers as they try to solve the problems and improve the positions left them by their predecessors. These matrices will then serve as the tool to analyze and organize much of the rest of the book. For the reader’s convenience, I have listed these theses with representative quotes at the beginning of the book. I have chosen this method for two reasons. First, although I dislike the clichéd division of virtues which awards clarity and rigor to analytic philosophers and relevance (whatever that means) to the continentals, in this case the conceptual tools offered by these analytic thinkers prove exceptionally useful in organizing and focusing the issue. Since I believe antirealism is at the heart of continental thought as well, the resulting clarity greatly enhances comprehension of the central course of continental thought that I will be tracing. Second, deploying an analytic definition in 1 13 the continental field will show that the two camps share this topic and thus supplies terms for a fruitful dialogue. Of course, there are as many species of realism as there are kinds of objects, since realism can be type-specific or “local” rather than “global”: one can be a realist about stars but not about the occurrence of the sequence “7777” in pi; a realist about the past, but not about the future; a realist about unobserveds, but not unobservables; or the reverse for each pair. For the most part, this study will abstract from such fine distinctions to examine the issue at a global level, that is, concerning all entities. Realism has also focused on different realms at various points in history, as documented by C. F. Delaney, who believes “not only that the realism dispute is an important issue in each philosophical age but in each it is viewed as the central issue” (Dahlstrom 1984, 2; see also 11).2 According to Delaney, realism has serially taken on medieval nominalism, German idealism, and analytic semantic anti-realism as instantiated by Dummett. I will try to show that the latter two are not as far apart as they seem. Theses of Realism Hilary Putnam’s particularly clear and influential definition of what he calls “metaphysical (or external) realism” will supply several of my theses. This definition has become a touchstone in the literature, leading one of the few commentators who engages both the analytic and continental traditions to say of it: “This view obviously represents the dominant meaning of realism in Anglo-American philosophy (as well as the form of realism generally rejected by continental philosophy), so much so that it is generally the way in which ‘realism’ is defined” (Alcoff 1996, 166). Putnam certainly knows realism, being a prominent advocate of it before he converted to internal realism and became one of realism’s principal critics in the late 1970s, only to move to some kind of Jamesian “natural” or “naive realism” in the mid-1990s (see Putnam 1994a, 487–89). In 1981, Putnam lists three components of metaphysical realism which together make up “a bundle of intimately associated philosophical ideas” (Putnam 1988, 107): [1] The world consists of some fixed totality of mind-independent objects. [3] There is exactly one true and complete description of “the way the world is.” [2] Truth involves some sort of...

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