One Reality?

First of all, we need to distinguish realism from what I've been calling realism*: Essentially no Anglo-American philosopher today engages in traditional metaphysics. What is called metaphysics, which I'm calling metaphysics*, is the result of criticisms by Quine and Carnap, that is, what they agree on, which is not only pretty universally accepted, but also almost invisible today: metaphysics* is about what sorts of things accepting our language, theory, practices, frameworks, literal talk, conceptual schemes, and so forth, commit us to, rather than some notion of what there is in a way that, in principle, might transcend human experience. Of course, the two are connected, roughly as follows: insofar as we have good reason to accept what we do, we have good reason to think the things to which that yields a commitment actually do exist.

Having said that we are only engaged in metaphysics* (which, by the way, does a lot to explain why language has such a central place in philosophy today), since most of the debates are of the "realist*-antirealist*" form (from now on, I'll drop the *), we need to say what realism is. I claim that Austin is right, there is no such thing, and so we need to look instead at what the worries are.

The two chief things realists want are

1. Disagreeableness. That is, apparent disagreements are real disagreements worth trying to resolve, not mere terminological differences or something of the kind not subject to cognitive resolution.
2. Indispensability. That is, we can't do what we want without assuming the existence of the relevant entities.

Examples: Dummett's bivalence is intended in large part to ensure disagreeableness. He thinks eliminative materialism (as Wright points out) is a realist position about mental states. Why do eliminative materialists take themselves to be antirealists about mental states? Because they take mental states to be dispensable.

What is Yablo (and the rest of contemporary "metaontologists" on about in the so-called debate between (neo-)Quineans and (neo-)Carnapians, or, what is pretty nearly the same thing, between advocates of metaphysical realism and pragmatic realism (Putnam's terms)? Yablo's distinction between curiosity and quizzicalness is in the right ballpark. The "Quineans" and the "metaphysical realists" want answers to (at least some) ontological questions, that is, they advocate disagreeableness. The "Carnapians" and the "pragmatic realists" claim that many metaphysical questions are either meaningless or unimportant or indeterminate, that is, not worth arguing about. They argue against disagreeableness.

The distinctions aren't as straightforward as I may have just made them sound (though they are for some): Putnam, as a pragmatic realist, claims there is no real disagreement between the mereologists and the antimereologists, but that both are realist because:

• (Hirsch) Internal to each system, there can be disagreement about, for example, medium-sized dry goods.
• (Lavine) Even across systems, there can be disagreements about medium-sized dry goods. (If one says there are three objects and the other, seven, no disagreement, but, if one says three and the other, fifteen, then there is.

Hirsch, as an ordinary language realist, claims there is disagreeableness about mereological sums but that,

• In principle, there could be cases in which there is no disagreeableness. (Fists.)
• The disagreement is unimportant.

I have been doing something odd today: I've been describing the positions of a bunch of philosphers about an issue they barely mention. In fact, they all devote most of their rhetorical energy to the question whether we employ various frameworks or not. What is going on here?

I'm not sure, but the following considerations seem to be relevant:

• If various frameworks (with various corresponding ontologies) can claim equal legitimacy, then disagreeableness fails. That is one Carnapian position, and it is also Putnam's main reason for preferring pragmatic realism to metaphysical realism.
• If there is a fact of the matter about which kinds of things there are, then disagreeableness succeeds. That is clearly the position of Putnam's metaphysical realist (though not that of what Horgan and Timmons call a metaphysical realist). The discussants seem to also take it to be the position of the Quinean realist*, but that requires further analysis.

-- ShaughanLavine - 18 Apr 2008