Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Realism and Idealism

An excerpt from an e-mail by Chris C., with responses in blue.

. . . I read your post on Butchvarov's latest paper, and you made clear your argument about the problem with the crucial step in the "idealist" position; then you closed with the assertion that realism has its own set of problems.  Granted that that's obviously true, I was wondering if you had a piece, whether a paper or a blog post, that elucidated your positions on 1) Why, although you think ultimately he is wrong, you also think Butch's position is a serious alternative to realism; and 2) Why, despite its problems, you believe realism addresses those problems adequately.

That post ended rather abruptly with the claim, "Metaphysical realism, of course, has its own set of difficulties."  I was planning to say a bit more, but decided to quit since the post was already quite long by 'blog' standards.  Brevity, after all, is the soul, not only of wit, but of blog.  I was going to add something like this:

My aim in criticizing Butchvarov and other broadly Kantian idealists/nonrealists is not  to resurrect an Aristotelian or Aristotelian-Thomistic theory of knowledge, as if those gentlemen clearly had the truth, a truth we have somehow, post Descartes, forgotten.  My aim is to throw the problems themselves into the starkest relief possible.  This is in line with my conception of philosophy as fundamentally aporetic: the problems come first, solutions second, if ever.  A philosopher cannot be true to his vocation if he is incapable of inhibiting the very strong natural tendency to want answers, solutions, definite conclusions which he can live by and which will provide 'doxastic security' and legitimation of his way of life.    You are not a philosopher if you are out for solutions at all costs.  As Leo Strauss points out near the beginning of his essay on Thucydides, and elsewhere, the unum necessarium for the philosopher, the one thing needful, is free inquiry.  Inquiry, however, uncovers problems, difficulties, questions, and some of these are reasonably viewed as insolubilia.

The philosopher, therefore, is necessarily in tension with ideologues and dogmatists who claim to be in possession of the truth.  What did Socrates claim to know?  That he didn't know.  Of course, to be in secure possession of the truth (which implies knowing that one is in secure possession of it) is a superior state to be in than in the state of forever seeking it.  Obviously, knowing is better than believing, and seeing face-to-face is better than "seeing through a glass darkly." On the other hand, to think one has the truth when one doesn't is to be in a worse state than the state of seeking it.  For example, Muhammad Atta and the boys, thinking they knew the truth, saw their way clear to murdering 3000 people.

Your first question:  How can I believe that Butch's position is untenable while also considering it a serious alternative to realism?  Because I hold open the possibility that all extant (and future) positions are untenable.  In other words, I take seriously the possibility that the central problems of philosophy are genuine (contra the logical positivists, the later Wittgenstein, and such Freudian-Wittgensteinian epigoni as Morris Lazerowitz), important  — what could count as important if problems relating to God and the soul are not important? — but absolutely insoluble by us. 

Your second question:  How can I believe that metaphysical realism, despite its problems, addresses those problems adequately?  Well, I don't believe it addresses them adequately.

I would say your book is pretty much a response to those questions, but what I'm looking for is your understanding of what makes Butch's position so powerful.  What I have in mind is something like what [Stanley] Rosen does in The Elusiveness of the Ordinary, where in a couple of essays he makes clear that there is not going to be a way based on analysis or deduction to adjudicate between the Platonic and the Kantian claims – that is, the claims, respectively, that the "Forms" are external and mind-independent and that they are internal and mind-dependent.  The final two essays in the aforementioned book are Rosen's attempt to provide a way to tip the scales in favor of Plato, and I have to say I haven't really seen a better way to do it.

I haven't read Rosen's book, but I will soon get hold of it.  It will be interesting to see whether he has a compelling rational way of tipping the scales.

The point is that I was wondering if you thought, along those lines, that roughly speaking your form of realism and Butch's form of idealism form a similar sort of "fundamental alternative" in the way Rosen believes Platonism and Kantianism do.  And if so, I would be interested to see your take on what makes Butch's idealism (again roughly speaking) as something that cannot be truly defeated, but rather must be established as something of a less plausible vision of how things really stand.
 
Can any philosophical position be "truly defeated"?  I assume that we cherish the very highest standards of intellectual honesty and rigor and we are able to inhibit the extremely strong life-enhacing need for firm beliefs and tenets (etymologically from L. tenere, to hold, so that a tenet is literally something one holds onto for doxastic security and legitimation of one's modus vivendi.)  Now there are some sophomoric positions that can be definitively defeated, e.g., the relativist who maintains both that every truth is relative and that his thesis is nonrelatively true.  But in the history of philosophy has even one substantive position ever been "truly defeated," i.e., defeated to the satisfaction of all competent practioners?  (A competent practioner is one who possesses all the relevant moral and intellectual virtues, is apprised of all relevant empirical facts, understands logic, etc.)  I would say No.  But perhaps you have an example for me. 
 
Now why don't I think that I have defeated Butchvarov on any of the points we dispute?  Part of the reason is that he does not admit defeat.  If I cannot bring him to see that he is wrong about, say, nonexistent objects, then this gives me a very good reason to doubt that I am right and have truly refuted his position.  It seems to me that, unless one is an ideologue or a dogmatist, one must be impressed by the pervasive and long-standing fact of dissensus among the best and brightest.  Of course, I could be right and Butch wrong.  If he maintains that p and I maintain that not-p, then one of us is right and the other wrong.  But which one?  If I do not know that I am right, or know that he is wrong, then I haven't solved the problem that divides us.  It is not enough to be right, one must know that one is right and be able to diagnose convincingly how they other guy went wrong.
As for Platonism versus Kantianism, see my post on another latter-day Kantian, Milton Munitz, espceically the section on Platonic and Kantian intelligibility.  My Existence book avoids both Kantianism and Platonism by adopting an onto-theological idealism.  If the reality of the real traces back to divine mind, that is reality and realism enough, but it is also a form of idealism in that the real is not independent of mind as such.
 
As I've indicated in previous emails, I have always taken realism as a presumptive truth (in a general way) and I thus place the burden of truth [proof]  on idealism.  Kant impressed me, but he didn't convince me, and consequently I've never understood what it was exactly in realism that made people jump into the idealist camp.  That is, I've never understood that basic shift where someone takes idealism as presumptively true and thus places the burden of proof on realism.  What was so bad about realist arguments that made idealism so attractive as an alternative for these thinkers?
 
Well, this is a very large topic, but you can glean some idea of what motivated Kant to make his transcendental turn from his famous 1772 letter to Marcus Herz, part of which is here.  And then there is the metaphilosophical topic of burden of proof.  How does one justify a claim to the effect that the burden of proof lies on one or the other side of a dispute?  For you there is a (defeasible?) presumption in favor of realism, and that therefore the onus probandi lies on the nonrealist.  But what criteria do you employ in arriving at this judgment?

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3 responses to “Realism and Idealism”

  1. Bill Vallicella Avatar
    Bill Vallicella

    From Chris Chrappa:
    I feel a bit like I’ve wandered into a field of giants in entering the fray on your blog – a rare privilege, but also, I confess, more than a little intimidating. I’m just beginning to polish my philosophical chops again after years of greater or lesser disuse while I trudged through the rather more prosaic fields of political science. Consequently, I doubt have adequate replies to your questions, partly because (as you indicated) stricto sensu there are no adequate replies, and partly because, in a looser sense, (as I indicated) I may not have the “chops” for it.
    That being said, I’ll go ahead and give it a whirl:
    1) I actually agree pretty much completely with your “Straussian” take on philosophy as a thinking through of the fundamental problems. Later in the email you excerpted I probably tipped my hand on that by carrying on so much about Jacobi. I could just as well have chosen Reid (who was simpatico in most ways with good old F.H.). The “Straussian” line, if you will, is that qua philosopher one works through the aporias, cracks their outer shells and reveals the power within each horn; qua human, however, one is in a state of hunger for answers, leading one’s mind to incline, for whatever reasons, good or bad, toward one horn. The key is to separate the inclination from the explication, and then to further try to grasp what leads certain minds to incline one way or another.
    2) What I meant by inartfully asking about “truly defeating” Butch’s position, or Kantianism more broadly, was not that I thought philosophical positions could be once and for all refuted – I think I got myself in trouble here by writing too quickly – but rather what it was that, in your view, raised the Kantian position on existence above the level of, say, the Quinean position (either circular or false, from your book, pg.6), or the naive theories of “schmexistence” you detail in chapter two. I just flipped through the latter chapter and noticed that you provide a reply to my question on pg.63 – Kant saw that all genuine existential statements are synthetic. I’m sure there’s more, but that’s what I was getting at – something that set Kant on existence above, e.g., Quine on existence.
    So, I wasn’t asking how you could disagree with one horn of what you considered a basic alternative, but rather what in Butch’s position, or in Kant’s for that matter, elevates it to that level. I suppose another and better way of phrasing the question is: “What do you consider to be the hallmarks of a ‘foundational’ position?”
    3) There was one point in your reply that made me do a double-take – when you wrote that you defend an “onto-theological idealism” in your book. Granted that my understanding of what is considered realism or idealism today may be hazy, but I understood your view to be realist. And in my defense I may have been misled by what you wrote on pg.11 of your book:
    “[Existence itself] cannot be [a concept] since it is precisely that which establishes things as extramentally and extraconceptually existent. Our theory may thus be described as a realist, as opposed to transcendentally idealist, theory of existence. Thus we are realist not only about the things that exist, but also about the existence of the things that exist.”
    When I said I was a presumptive realist I meant it in that sense – I’m a realist about things that exist and about existence itself. I suspect my confusion on this point is more semantic than anything else, but I would be grateful if you could clarify the seeming disparity I noticed between your blog statement that your book defended a form of idealism and your statement in the book that you were defending a form of realism.
    4) On the same question, my criteria for defeasibility are, to be blunt, no criteria to speak of. “Persuasiveness” is all I can say, because I think the aporia, as it were, between existential realism and transcendental idealism is a real aporia.
    Now, I might get myself into more trouble with what follows, so let me ask beforehand that you take it with a grain of salt – I’m trying to articulate something I don’t understand very well. That is, I’m asking you to try and get the “spirit” of what I write, since some of it may not be worded as well as it could be. You might see what I’m trying to get at better than I do.
    That being said, return to what I said above: I don’t have any criteria for a defeater for my presumptive realism beyond “persuasiveness.” The first thing I mean by that is something like this: Even if I were intellectually convinced that idealism had better arguments, I very much doubt I would be able to truly believe that life is really “like that,” or that my relation to the world, indeed what I am as an “I,” was captured by it. My point was that if you turn the question around and ask the Kantian what his criteria are, he wouldn’t be able to give a much better answer.
    What we find persuasive is not entirely captured by how the arguments stand – in some way, how the arguments stand depends on what we find persuasive. Less gnomically put: On the fundamental questions there isn’t going to be a propositional way to resolve them – our minds incline in different directions based on a confluence of factors, one of which is that certain dubious propositions will strike us, not as indefeasible, but as more persuasive than their competitors. Why they strike us that way is a huge question and I can’t answer it – but I don’t think the “soft propositions” that help tilt us one way are accepted or not based on elaborated criteria. As Rosen often says, “There is no rule for the selection of rules.”
    That brings me to the second idea I mean to capture by “persuasiveness” – Inasmuch as I have a rule, it is simply that I must have the sense that my beliefs cohere with my “being-in-the-world.” Very simply put, I couldn’t say I accepted Hume’s reduction of causation to constant association if everything in my experience told me that causation was real, even if I thought his arguments were impeccable. I’d probably spend the rest of my life trying to find something wrong with Hume’s argument instead of accepting it.
    At this point, I usually revert to Chesterton and his discussion of the completely rational madman (or Kierkegaard’s factual man walking around kicking a ball saying, “Bang! The Earth is round”). Often conspiracy theories are completely cogent as a propositional matter, and of course they often persuade people for just that reason. The conspiracy theorist can envelop the Kennedy assassination in a web of hefty propositions that seem to match the gravity of the event. The one who accepts (as the conspiracists put it) “the lone gunman theory” is put in the position of saying, “I don’t know how Oswald hit his target; perhaps he just got lucky.”
    The point is we accept the latter “theory” not only because it has arguments that make sense, but also because of a larger sense of how the world works that requires much, much more evidence to flip us over to the conspiracist side.
    I use this only as a stark instance to illustrate my meaning – with philosophy we are eventually faced with aporias in which each horn has cogency and a lot of plausibility (this is where the conspiracy theory analogy breaks down). But I’m holding that our “tilts” within the aporias are not subject to criteria so much as to what seems to gel with our dialectically prior sense of “how things are.”
    That sense can change, but the thrust of philosophy is to make one humble regardless. You noted the Socratic “knowledge of ignorance,” and I will add the Delphic mottos he adopted as his own: Gnothi seauton and Meden agan – “know yourself” and “nothing in excess.” (Isn’t it interesting how today we often hear about knowledge of ignorance and knowing thyself, but somehow we leave out the quintessentially Greek statement of moderation?)
    5) Thanks, as ever, for taking the time to reply to me. It is much appreciated.

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  2. Bill Vallicella Avatar
    Bill Vallicella

    Chris,
    Let me try to address your third point. How can I be a realist in one sense and an onto-theological idealist in another? As against Butchvarov, I deny that existence is a concept. Thus I am a realist about existence and about the things that exist. But I also deny, as against people like Rand, that existing things exist independently of any consciousness. For the existence of an existent is the unity of its constituents and this unity requires a Unifier which has a mind-like synthesizing nature. So although I am far from any conceptual idealsim or subjective idealism, the Paradigm Existent is a mind and everything depends for its existence on it.

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  3. Bill Vallicella Avatar
    Bill Vallicella

    >>The point is we accept the latter “theory” not only because it has arguments that make sense, but also because of a larger sense of how the world works that requires much, much more evidence to flip us over to the conspiracist side.<< This is related to the topic of burden of proof, which is also quite murky. As brilliant as James Fetzer is, the burden is on conspiracy nuts like him and the probative bar is a lofty one. But how defends one's larger sense of things or show convincingly where the BOP lies. I am increasingly impressed by the infirmity of reason . . .

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