Realism and Knowledge First. Interview with Timothy Williamson

The renowned British philosopher Timothy Williamson talks about his philosophical views and main lines of research. Williamson is a metaphysical realist in a broad sense. Fir him there are true or false answers to questions about all aspects of reality. Classical logic is a universal true theory. Knowledge-first epistemology is an alternative to the traditional belief-first epistemology. The former takes the concept of knowledge as a basic concept, explaining other epistemic concepts, including belief, in its terms, whereas the latter does the opposite. Knowledge, not truth, is the fundamental epistemic good. The Gettier problem and the skeptical problem that arise within traditional epistemology are ill posed and therefore cannot be solved. Hybrid epistemological theories do not satisfy the principles of simplicity and beauty and are refuted by counter-examples. Epistemic contextualism is problematic, and relativism violates the semantics of the phenomena being explained. Knowledge does not entail knowledge about knowledge. Knowledge-how is a kind of knowledge-that. The distinction between a priori and a posteriori is superficial, and there are no analytical truths. The concept of qualia is unhelpful for solving the problems related to consciousness. The so-called “hard problem” of consciousness points to an area of conceptual confusions in which we do not know how to reason properly. Speculative metaphysics is quite a respectable enterprise. But progress in metaphysics is not automatic; it requires the right methodology.

Anti-Realisms Local and Global

The Madhyamaka school of Buddhist philosophy rejects the metaphysical realist thesis that there is such a thing as how things are anyway, independently of the concepts we happen to use. While other Buddhist schools claim that such things as persons, trees, and tables are mere useful fictions, they maintain that these fictions are usefully grounded in facts about the ultimate nature of reality. Not so Mādhyamikas, who are pan-fictionalists. They support this stance by seeking to demonstrate that various hypotheses concerning things with intrinsic nature (things that are thus purported to be ultimately real) lead to absurdities. The conclusion one is invited to draw is that all things are empty, that is, devoid of intrinsic nature. Some sample reductios are examined, and various realist objections are considered. Several different interpretations of Madhyamaka anti-realism are discussed, with a semantic non-dualist reading, to the effect that the very idea of ultimate truth is incoherent, being judged the most plausible.

Metaphysics in a Review of "Karl Popper's Philosophy of Science" (Rationality Without Foundations) by Stefano Gattei

This article is the result of a book review of a work by Stefano Gattei. The starting point of Popper's view is that "almost every phase of our scientific development is under metaphysical rule, that is, ideas that are tested, ideas which determine not only what problems we need to explain, but also what kinds of answers we will consider to be one that is important or satisfactory or accepted, and as a remedy, or guarantee, of a previous answer". Popper's indeterminism is important because Popper's custom begins by considering an intuitive Laplacian view of determinism: "the world is like a motion picture film: or a projected image. Parts of the film have proved to be the past. And unproven people are the past. front". Popper has always been claimed to be a metaphysical realist: to him, to be a realist means to think, in covenant with common sense, that the world of his existence is independent of human beings. It means, "my existence will end without the world coming to an end too". As well as other metaphysical positions, realism is a non-testable conjecture: "realism is neither proven nor disproved".

Deepening the Controversy over Metaphysical Realism

A significant ontological commitment is required to sustain metaphysical realism—the view that there is a single, objective way the world is—in order to defend it from common sense objections. This involves presupposing the existence of properties (or tropes, or universals) and relations between them which define the objective structure of the world. This paper explores the grounds for accepting this ontological assumption and examines a sceptical argument which questions whether, having assumed the world is objectively divided into fundamental properties, we could ever know which properties these are. It then assesses the responses available to the metaphysical realist, arguing that the sceptical difficulty cannot merely be dismissed by means of another assumption in the manner of radical scepticism, as David Lewis suggests, but that the sceptic's argument might be defused by the non-question-begging success of some form of strong scientific realism which links the predicates of our scientific theories directly to the fundamental properties the world contains. It remains unclear however whether this widely accepted metaphysical theory can find principled philosophical support.

Putnam, Pragmatism, and Democratic Theory

In a powerful series of texts, Hilary Putnam has criticized what he takes to be a prevalent scientistic conception of objectivity in modern philosophy. This article is concerned with two connected facets of this critique, upon which Putnam himself has laid increasing emphasis: the attempt to reconstruct conceptions of ethical and political value in the wake of his criticism of “metaphysical realist” notions of objectivity, and his affiliation with the tradition of pragmatist philosophy. Four principal manifestations of Putnam's concern with ethical and political value are examined: the internalist argument for moral objectivity; the criticism of instrumental reason; the account of a “moral image”; and the “reconsideration of Deweyan democracy.” It is argued that an interpretation of Dewey's moral and political philosophy provides an illuminating vantage point from to understand the shortcomings of Putnam's ethical and political writings.