Abstract
We believe in the existence of an objective, mind-independent world — much of which is the way it is regardless of human interests, goals, cognitive/perceptual capacities, and research agendas. There would have been fossils, neutrinos, and curvatures in space-time even if no one had been around to theorize about them; Kepler’s laws would have accurately modeled planetary motion even if no one had realized it. To this extent we are ‘realists’. But we also believe that our concepts of objectivity, mind-independence, and cognate notions are shot through with interests, goals, and similarity standards grounded in provincial facts about ourselves. To this extent we are ‘pragmatists’. Such a package, if not examined too closely, appears incoherent: varieties of pragmatism are often claimed to undermine the very objectivity insisted upon by self-avowed realists. But this appearance is illusory.
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Kraut, R., Scharp, K. (2015). Pragmatism without Idealism. In: Daly, C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophical Methods. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137344557_14
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