Abstract
This chapter considers metaphysical realism in its own right. It opposes itself to various kinds of constructivism and relativism. We reply to criticisms of metaphysical realism offered by Hilary Putnam and W.V.O. Quine. Putnam’s later defense of realism—and his attempt to align it with his earlier defenses of practices—is shown to be wanting. The chapter as a whole centers around a defense of Thomas Aquinas’ idea that cognition can answer to the thing known without its mode of being being that of the thing known. This classical central principle of realism seems to be viable and avoids a number of the pitfalls found in other approaches.
Kant’s glory … is to say that the very fact that we cannot separate our own conceptual contribution from what is “objectively there” is not a disaster…. The whole Kantian strategy … is to celebrate the loss of essences….
Hilary Putnam
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Notes
- 1.
See Paul A. Boghossian, Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), for an excellent critique of many forms of constructivism as well as Harvey Siegel, Relativism Refuted: A Critique of Contemporary Epistemological Relativism (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1987).
- 2.
We believe both Putnam’s and Quine’s criticisms represent the most influential challenges to metaphysical realism in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. See Thomas A. Russman, A Prospectus for the Triumph of Realism (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1987), for some important criticisms of Wilfred Sellars and Richard Rorty, not to mention Putnam and Quine. See also Douglas B. Rasmussen, “Rorty, Wittgenstein, and the Nature of Intentionality,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 57 (1983): 152–62. Finally, see Boghossian, Fear of Knowledge, pp. 32–35, for a critical evaluation of Nelson Goodman.
- 3.
See Douglas B. Rasmussen, “The Significance for Cognitive Realism of the Thought of John Poinsot,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 68 (Summer 1994): 409–24, for a discussion of these theses in greater detail.
- 4.
For a helpful discussion of the various accounts of metaphysical realism, criticisms, and replies, see Drew Khlentzos, “Challenges to Metaphysical Realism,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta, ed., https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/realism-sem-challenge/. This entry examines what is called the “Representation Problem”—that is, the problem of how thought or language can hook on to the world and whether this is indeed a real problem. This problem is seen as central to the viability of metaphysical realism. See also Christos Kyriacou and Robin McKenna, Metaepistemology: Realism and Anti-Realism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) for essays that seek to transcend the divide between realism and anti-realism.
- 5.
See Douglas B. Rasmussen, “Quine and Aristotelian Essentialism,” The New Scholasticism 58 (Summer 1984): 316–35, for a critique of the claim that the nature of something is some universal element existing in or as part of individual beings. See also Joseph Owens, “Common Nature: A Point of Comparison between Thomistic and Scotistic Metaphysics,” Mediaeval Studies 19 (1957): 1–14. Platonism is not required for individual beings to have a nature.
- 6.
See Hilary Putnam, “What is Mathematical Truth?” in Mathematics, Matter and Method, Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 60.
- 7.
Sense perception is discussed below in “The Myth of the Framework.”
- 8.
For some important insights regarding the “moderate realist” approach to abstraction, see Joseph Owens, Cognition: An Epistemological Inquiry (Houston, TX: Center for Thomistic Studies, 1992), pp. 139–65. See also Aquinas, On Being and Essence, 2nd rev. ed., trans. Armand Maurer, C.S.B. (Toronto: The Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1968).
- 9.
Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, II, Question 76, our translation. For Aquinas, failure to make this distinction is the major error of Platonism, but this error is committed by any view that treats concepts as tertium quids, third things, between the knower and the known.
- 10.
Russman , A Prospectus for the Triumph of Realism, pp. 25–26.
- 11.
Hilary Putnam, “Sosa on Internal Realism and Conceptual Relativity,” in Mario De Caro, ed., Naturalism, Realism, and Normativity (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2016), p. 76. This essay originally appeared in John Greco, ed., Ernest Sosa and His Critics (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 233–48.
- 12.
We will follow Putnam in his use of the term properties for the time being; but when we later discuss the process of determining the real definition of something, we will make a distinction between those properties or characteristics that are essential and those that are essential and fundamental.
- 13.
John P. O’Callaghan, Thomist Realism and the Linguistic Turn: Toward a More Perfect Form of Existence (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), p. 260. See also O’Callaghan, “The Plurality of Forms; Then and Now,” The Review of Metaphysics 62, no. 1 (September 2008): 3–43.
- 14.
One could hold that there is some overarching conceptual system á la some version of idealism, but this would be going from the frying pan to the fire in terms of the difficulties. Certainly, it would not seem to be something Putnam seeks to advance.
- 15.
This is not to say that there cannot be analogous terms, which are found not only in metaphysics but also in scientific accounts of the development of things. Yet, such terms still require some foundation in things. Regarding so-called family resemblances, it is true that one must not simply assume that there is always something common behind common words. As we shall see later, the process of determining real definitions is not a priori. However, much depends on the level and manner of abstraction involved. For example, in response to Wittgenstein’s claim that there is only a family resemblance among games, and hence they cannot be defined (see Philosophical Investigations, 3rd ed., G.E.M. Anscombe translator [Basil Blackwell & Mott, 1958], pp. 31e and 32e, entries 66 and 67), David Kelley offers this definition: “a game is a form of recreation constituted by a set of rules that specify an object to be attained and the permissible means of attaining it,” The Art of Reasoning with Symbolic Logic (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1990), p. 50. This seems to be a good definition, but it is a matter of investigation whether it is so. One has to “look and see.” Of course, this issue is also complicated by the fact that a game is a human artifact and not a cognitive-independent reality. On this and related matters, see David S. Oderberg, Real Essentialism (New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 38–43. Finally, see Roderick T. Long, “A Beauty Contest for Dichotomies: Browne’s Terminological Revolutions,” The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 8, no. 1 (Fall 2006), p. 155, where he notes, “There’s a straight-forward sense in which a family-resemblance concept inconvertibly has necessary and sufficient conditions for its application: namely, something being sufficiently similar overall to the exemplar(s) is a necessary and sufficient condition for its falling under a concept.”
- 16.
O’Callaghan, Thomist Realism and the Linguistic Turn, p. 264. See also: D. H. Mellor, “Nature’s Joints: A Realistic Defence of Natural Properties,” pp. 23–40; and Tuomas E. Tahko, “Boundaries in Reality,” pp. 41–60, in David Oderberg, ed., Classifying Reality (West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).
- 17.
Hilary Putnam, “What is Mathematical Truth?” p. 73 (emphasis added).
- 18.
Hilary Putnam, “The Question of Realism,” in James Conant, ed., Words and Life (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 306; and “Realism without Absolutes,” Words and Life, p. 284.
- 19.
We take the critique offered here and at the end of this chapter on Putnam’s conceptual relativism to blunt the objection raised in Chap. 4 that the notion of human nature is too ambiguous and contentious to be of any use. See also “Defining the Nature of Something,” below, regarding why real definitions are not descriptions, as well as Oderberg’s Real Essentialism, pp. 101–05, for why a real definition of human nature is not merely biological.
- 20.
Of course, this is not to deny that the natures of some things have been shaped by human purposes. But this process results after we have learned something about the nature of what we change—consider, for example, a thoroughbred racehorse.
- 21.
Willard Van Orman Quine, “Identity, Ostension, and Hypostasis,” From a Logical Point of View: Nine Logico-Philosophical Essays, 2nd ed., rev. (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 78 (emphasis added).
- 22.
Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” From a Logical Point of View, pp. 20–46.
- 23.
Ibid., p. 44.
- 24.
W. V. Quine, “Ontological Relativity” in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1960), p. 50. There could be an issue here for Quine in that, on his account, one would be unable to distinguish between truth as it refers to the object and truth as it refers to the theory about the object, since one never gets beyond theorizing.
- 25.
From A Logical Point of View, p. viii.
- 26.
Willard Van Orman Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1960), p. 22.
- 27.
Richard Cartwright, “Ontology and the Theory of Meaning,” Philosophy of Science 21 (October 1954): 316–98. These points are also raised in Douglas B. Rasmussen, “Grounding Necessary Truth in the Nature of Things: A Redux,” in Paolo C. Biondi and Louis F. Groarke, eds., Shifting the Paradigm: Alternative Perspectives on Induction (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2014), pp. 333–35.
- 28.
Quine, “Identity, Ostension, and Hypostasis,” pp. 78–79 (emphasis added).
- 29.
See Rasmussen, “Quine and Aristotelian Essentialism,” for a more extended critique of Quine’s rejection of essentialism. See also Oderberg, Real Essentialism, pp. 25–30.
- 30.
See O’Callaghan, Thomistic Realism and the Linguistic Turn, for a thorough account and analysis of these assumptions.
- 31.
John McDowell, “Meaning and Intentionality in Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 17 (1992): 45.
- 32.
The “master thesis” is certainly one that Putnam endorses. See Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 5; and idem, Representation and Reality (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1988), pp. 21–22. For criticism of this thesis, see Douglas B. Rasmussen, “Realism, Intentionality, and the Nature of Logical Relations,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 66 (1992): 267–77.
- 33.
Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969), pp. 133–232.
- 34.
See the translation by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 15, 29, 127, and 253; John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Vol. 2, ed. A. C. Fraser (New York: Dover, 1959), p. 32; and George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge in Berkeley Selections, ed. Mary W. Calkins (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1957), p. 124. See also O’Callaghan, Thomistic Realism and the Linguistic Turn, pp. 81–99.
- 35.
David Hume, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding (New York: The Liberal Arts Press, 1955). pp. 160 and 162.
- 36.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), p. 34n, Bxxxixn, and p. 439, A491/B519. Further, Kant states: “All appearances, are not things; they are nothing but representations, and cannot exist outside our mind.” Critique of Pure Reason, p. 440, A492/B520.
- 37.
Ibid., pp. 41–42, A1–A2/B1–B2.
- 38.
See Milton K. Munitz, Contemporary Analytic Philosophy (New York and London, 1981), pp. 363–80, for a discussion of Quine’s Kantian turn as well as Henry B. Veatch, “Is Quine a Metaphysician?” The Review of Metaphysics 31, no. 3 (March 1978): 406–30.
- 39.
See Hilary Putnam, “Language and Philosophy,” in Mind, Language and Reality, Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 8–14; and Quine, Word and Object, pp. 270–76.
- 40.
This question applies whether the mark or sound or movement X is used informatively or non-informatively—for example, when it is used to joke or to command, or as in the case of such syncategorematic terms as “and,” “or,” “of,” “therefore,” to direct us in how to construct phrases or sentences. To get the point of a joke or a command, or the function of the syncategorematic terms, we still need to understand the semantic reference or significance of the mark or sound or movement in this minimal sense. If this is not possible, we do not have a language. We do not have a way of differentiating between the physical event as such and as making a linguistic reference.
- 41.
Marks and sounds can themselves be the subject of conventions; but saying this only pushes the issue back one step to the status of those marks and sounds before becoming a part of a convention.
- 42.
See Roger Pouivet, After Wittgenstein, St. Thomas, trans. Michael S. Sherwin (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine Press, 2006).
- 43.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), p. 3 (emphasis added, and quotation marks and location of commas made to conform to U. S. style).
- 44.
Ibid., p. 5 (emphasis added).
- 45.
See Douglas B. Rasmussen, “Deely, Wittgenstein, and Mental Events,” The New Scholasticism 54 (Winter 1980): 60–67; and idem, “Wittgenstein and the Search for Meanings,” in John Deely and Jonathan Evans, eds., Semiotics 1982 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987), pp. 577–90. See also Oswald Hanfling, Philosophy of Language I (Milton Keynes, UK: Open University Press, 1973), p. 31.
- 46.
See the following works by Sir Anthony Kenny: Wittgenstein, rev. ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 12–13 and 141–59; The Legacy of Wittgenstein (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), chapter 5; The Metaphysics of Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); The Unknown God: Agnostic Essays (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), chapter 11.
- 47.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. 81e, entry 201.
- 48.
We will discuss this distinction in more detail when we consider the difference between first and second intentions below. Also, while it is possible for the concept of a dog to exist independent of some particular knower, it cannot exist independent of every particular knower, tout court.
- 49.
Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, Question 85, Article 2, https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.I.Q85.A2.Obj2. Also, Aristotle states: “But it is clear that knowledge, perception, opinion and understanding always have some object other than themselves. They are only incidentally their own objects…. Thinking and being thought are different…. For the essences of ‘thinking’ and ‘being thought of’ are not the same” Metaphysics 1074b35–1075a, translated by Anthony J. Lisska in “Axioms of Intentionality in Aquinas’ Theory of Knowledge,” International Philosophical Quarterly 16 (December 1976): 318.
- 50.
Aquinas , Summa Theologiae, I, Question 85, Article 2, reply to objections 1 and 2, https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.I.Q85.A2.C.3. For example, the concept human being signifies indeterminately what is common to the respective natures of individual human beings that is exhibited determinately in each. We will amplify upon this view in our discussion of abstraction below.
- 51.
Aquinas makes it clear that the first apprehension of a thing’s nature is only partial and that a fuller apprehension requires a process of comparing one thing to another. See Summa Theologiae, I, Question 85, Article 5, https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.I.Q85.A5.SC.
- 52.
See Aquinas, Truth, Questions 1–9, trans. Robert W. Mulligan (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1952), Question 8, Article 6, answer to difficulties 11, p. 347; and Article 8, answer to difficulties 10, p. 360. This is, of course, an extension of Aristotle’s insight that the actual sounding of the sound and the actual hearing are one actuality (De Anima 426a15).
- 53.
Anthony Kenny, The Metaphysics of Mind, p. 134.
- 54.
Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, Question 85, Article 1, reply to objection 1, https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.I.Q85.A1.Rep1.
- 55.
Armand Mauer’s note on p. 39 of Aquinas, On Being and Essence.
- 56.
Aquinas , Concerning Being and Essence, trans. George C. Leckie (New York: Appleton-Century Crofts, 1937), p. 13.
- 57.
“The nature of the species is indeterminate with regard to the individual, as is the nature of the genus with regard to the species. It follows that, just as the genus, when attributed to the species, implies indistinctly in its signification everything that is in the species in a determinate way, so the species, when attributed to the individual, must signify everything essentially in the individual, though in an indistinct way.” Aquinas, On Being and Essence, p. 42.
- 58.
The etymology of the Latin term “universale” is “turned towards something one,” and the notion of “a single whole bearing down upon all the individuals” was uppermost in the original Greek designation, katholou. We owe this bit of scholarship to Owens, Cognition, pp. 153–54.
- 59.
This approach stands in stark contrast to how modern philosophers generally treat abstraction. For them abstraction is only a “partial conception” of the nature of an existent and thus amounts to a lessening of cognitive content. See, for example, John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, p. 84. However, abstraction can and often should be understood as bearing primarily on the entire form of an existent, rather than on the traits that are “taken away.” See Owens’s discussion of abstraction, Cognition, pp. 141–43.
- 60.
For Aquinas, “prescind” and “abstract” are clearly not synonymous.
- 61.
Aquinas , On Being and Essence, p. 44. We have changed the punctuation of this quotation slightly. We changed the single quotes to double quotes.
- 62.
Owens, Cognition, pp. 145–48; and Aquinas, Being and Essence, pp. 37–44.
- 63.
We will return to this point shortly. Also, see Douglas B. Rasmussen, “Quine and Aristotelian Essentialism,” p. 321.
- 64.
Aquinas , Being and Essence, pp. 47–48; and Joseph Owens, “Common Nature: A Point of Comparison Between Thomistic and Scotistic Metaphysics.”
- 65.
The relation could also go the other way—many with respect to one. Aristotle (De Anima 42b16–17) describes the relationship as being like the relationship that a bent line has to itself when it is pulled out straight. See Henry B. Veatch’s account of the abstraction process, as well as his discussion of the relational nature of concepts, in Intentional Logic: A Logic Based on Philosophical Realism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1952; Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1970), pp. 81–115.
- 66.
See Joseph Owens, Cognition, pp. 139–65.
- 67.
Aquinas, Being and Essence, p. 47.
- 68.
See discussion of moderate essentialism in “Defining the Nature of Something,” below.
- 69.
See Douglas B. Rasmussen, “The Significance for Cognitive Realism of the Thought of John Poinsot.” See also Robert W. Schmidt, The Domain of Logic According to Saint Thomas Aquinas (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), chapter 6, “Relations,” pp. 130–74.
- 70.
“Sign ” is used here in its most general sense—namely, as something that makes known another thing. See Francis H. Parker and Henry B. Veatch, Logic as a Human Instrument (New York and Evanston, IL: Harper & Row Publishers, 1959), pp. 13–29, for a discussion of formal and other types of signs. See also Laird Addis, Natural Signs: A Theory of Intentionality (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989).
- 71.
This point would also seem to apply to neurological states of the brain.
- 72.
For example, smoke may be a sign in the sense of being a signal of fire, but it does not signify fire as “fire” does. Smoke has to be recognized—just as the marks or sounds that are transformed into “fire” do—before one knows what it is signifying. Smoke, just like marks, sounds, and movements, is not inherently of or about something. See Mortimer J. Adler, Some Questions About Language: A Theory of Human Discourse and Its Objects (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1976), pp. 22–24.
- 73.
See John Deely, “The Ontological Status of Intentionality,” The New Scholasticism 46 (Spring 1972): 220–33, on how the inherently relational character of cognitive activities for Aristotle, Aquinas, and John Poinsot (John of St. Thomas) differs from Brentano’s view. Further, see Anton C. Pegis, “St. Thomas Aquinas and Husserl on Intentionality,” in Victor B. Brezick, ed., Thomistic Papers 1 (Houston, TX: University of St. Thomas, 1984), pp. 109–34, on the differences between Aquinas’s and Husserl’s accounts of intentionality.
- 74.
See Stephen Theron, Philosophy or Dialectic? (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1994), pp. 21–61, for an in-depth discussion of the importance of these distinctions for logic and metaphysics. See also Douglas B. Rasmussen, “Grounding Necessary Truth in the Nature of Things: A Redux,” pp. 337–41.
- 75.
R. J. Henle, Theory of Knowledge (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1983), pp. 151–55. See also Veatch, Intentional Logic, pp. 249–61.
- 76.
For some important accounts of this issue, see John Deely, “Reference to the Non-Existent,” The Thomist 39 (April 1975), pp. 254–308; and Addis, Natural Signs, pp.116–22. Further, see Russman, A Prospectus for the Triumph of Realism, pp. 70–75, for an approach to this issue that integrates Wittgenstein’s account of language games into a realist epistemology. Regarding the object of false propositions, see these two essays by Francis H. Parker: “Realistic Epistemology,” in John Wild, ed., The Return to Reason: Essays in Realistic Philosophy (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1953), pp. 152–76; and “On the Being of Falsity,” in Roland Houde and Joseph P. Mullally, eds., Philosophy of Knowledge: Selected Readings (Chicago, Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1960), pp. 290–316.
- 77.
The concept of furniture is not like the concept of humanity in that it is does not prescind from specific determinations.
- 78.
Further, regardless of where one is on the abstraction ladder, there is no reason to suppose that semantic reference is always of or about a single intelligible feature. Often the reference is constituted by a context and sets of relationships and activities. In this regard, we note below the importance of analogizing concept formation with learning what Wittgenstein calls language games.
- 79.
Veatch, Intentional Logic, p. 115.
- 80.
This process is similar to what is done in developing calculus where the value of a function at a limit does not depend on the actual value of a function at the limit but on its value as it gets “infinitely close” to the limit. It never reaches the limit but is treated “as though” it does.
- 81.
For example, see H. W. B. Joseph, An Introduction to Logic, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1916); Ayn Rand, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology: Expanded Second Edition, Harry Binswanger and Leonard Peikoff, eds. (New York: Meridian, 1990); and David Kelley, “A Theory of Abstraction,” Cognition and Brain Theory 7, nos. 3 & 4 (1984): 329–57.
- 82.
Also, it is possible for a concept to be about psychological operations or states of certain living beings that do not require being conceived in order to exist.
- 83.
If there is a Deity, we make no claim here as to what cognition would be for such a being.
- 84.
This phrase comes from Karl Popper. See Russman, A Prospectus for the Triumph of Realism, pp. 1–6.
- 85.
See Pierre Le Morvan, “Arguments Against Direct Realism and How To Counter Them,” American Philosophical Quarterly 41, no. 3 (2004): 221–34; David Kelley, The Evidence of the Senses: A Realist Theory of Perception (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1986); and Thomas A. Russman, “Selective Perception,” Reason Papers 7 (Spring 1981): 21–32, for powerful defenses of perceptual realism.
- 86.
Étienne Gilson, Thomist Realism and the Critique of Knowledge, trans. Mark A. Wauck (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), p. 173. See also Anthony J. Lisska, Aquinas’s Theory of Perception: An Analytic Reconstruction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
- 87.
This is one of Aristotle’s crucial insights. See: Posterior Analytics 71b32; Prior Analytics 68b35–7; Physics 184a16–20; Metaphysics 1029b3–12; Topics 141b2–142a12.
- 88.
We are summarizing here some points from Thomas Russman’s A Prospectus for the Triumph of Realism, pp. 11–13 and pp. 60–62.
- 89.
Ibid., p. 9. See Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. 3e, entry 2.
- 90.
See Colin McGinn, The Making of a Philosopher: My Journey Through Twentieth-Century Philosophy (New York: Harper Collins, 2002), pp. 152–53, for a similar view of Wittgenstein.
- 91.
For Aristotle, the nature of a thing is not only the answer to a what-is-it question, but also a principle in terms of which the changes and developments of a being are explained. This involves a realization that there is more than one type of causality—his notion of four causes—and that the nature of a being involves the relationship between potentiality and actuality. See Ruth Groff and John Greco, eds., Powers and Capacities in Philosophy: The New Aristotelianism (New York and London: Routledge, 2013.)
- 92.
Hilary Putnam, “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’,” in Mind, Language and Reality, p. 227.
- 93.
See Addis, Natural Signs, pp. 87–94; and Russman, A Prospectus for the Triumph of Realism, pp. 54–57.
- 94.
Aside from philosophical fashion, there is no more reason for thinking real definitions face some insuperable difficulty and instead must be ultimately about language, or be true in virtue of language, than there is for so regarding necessary truths. See Panayot Butchvarov, Being Qua Being: A Theory of Identity, Existence, and Predication (Bloomington, IN and London: Indiana University Press, 1979), p. 134.
- 95.
Oderberg makes this point in responding to this and other charges made by Popper against what-is-it questions in Real Essentialism, pp. 30–38.
- 96.
Rand, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, p. 45.
- 97.
See these still highly relevant works: Baruch A. Brody, Identity and Essence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 135–55; and Rom Harré and E. H. Madden, Causal Powers: A Theory of Natural Necessity (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1975), chapters 4, 5 and 6.
- 98.
See Rand, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, p. 48.
- 99.
See Douglas B. Rasmussen, “Grounding Necessary Truth in the Nature of Things: A Redux,” pp. 343–80.
- 100.
Naturally, if S ceased to exist or evolved into something radically different, then there would indeed be a change in our conceptual account. Also, when it comes to defining S, there is no guarantee that the properties of S might not be such that there is no fundamentally essential property, and hence S must be treated as a borderline case—as is sometimes said to be the case in determining whether some primitive organisms in biology are plants or animals.
- 101.
Douglas J. Den Uyl and Douglas B. Rasmussen, The Perfectionist Turn: From Metanorms to Metaethics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), p. 231.
- 102.
As we noted in earlier chapters, this modality does not function causelessly; it requires Sally’s direction.
- 103.
J. L. Austin, Philosophical Papers, 2nd ed., J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 98 (emphasis added).
- 104.
Susan Haack, “Epistemology with a Knowing Subject,” The Review of Metaphysics 23, no. 2 (December 1979): 309.
- 105.
Henry B. Veatch, Two Logics: The Conflict Between Classical and Neo-Analytic Philosophy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1969), pp. 153–54.
- 106.
See the following: Gerald Vision, Modern Anti-Realism and Manufactured Truth (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), pp. 81–86; and E. Jonathan Lowe, “Essentialism, Metaphysical Realism, and the Errors of Conceptualism,” Philosophia Scientiae 12, no. 1 (2008 [Anti-] Realisms: The Metaphysical Issue): 9–33.
- 107.
Hilary Putnam, “Sense, Nonsense, and the Senses: An Inquiry into the Powers of the Human Mind,” in The Threefold Cord: Mind, Body, and World (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), pp. 5–6.
- 108.
Ibid., p. 6.
- 109.
See Colin McGinn, “Can You Believe It?” The New York Review of Books 48, no. 6 (April 12, 2001): 71–75.
- 110.
Putnam, “Sense, Nonsense, and the Senses,” p. 6.
- 111.
Ibid., p. 7.
- 112.
“For although it be necessary for the truth of a cognition that the cognition answer to the thing known, still it is not necessary that the mode of being of the thing known be the same as the mode of being of its cognition.” Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, II, Question 76, our translation.
- 113.
Aquinas , Summa Theologiae I, Question 76, Article 3, reply to objection 4, translation by O’Callaghan, Thomistic Realism and the Linguistic Turn, p. 267.
- 114.
Hilary Putnam, “On Not Writing Off Scientific Realism,” in Mario De Caro and David Macarthur, eds., Philosophy in an Age of Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), p. 101.
- 115.
Ibid.
- 116.
See Hilary Putnam, The Many Faces of Realism, pp. 16–21; idem, “A Defense of Conceptual Relativity,” in Putnam, Ethics without Ontology (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2004, pp. 38–40.
- 117.
Paul Boghossian, Fear of Knowledge, p. 37 (emphasis added).
- 118.
Perhaps, it might be objected that we are still missing Putnam’s point—namely, we do not know apart from the choice of what conceptual scheme to employ what it is to be an individual. Indeed, there is nothing about the initial situation Putnam stipulates that provides a basis for determining what it is to be an individual. However, this is a point that can be readily granted, because it shows that Putnam cannot claim there are contradictory accounts of the initial situation. There is nothing in that situation in terms of which different accounts of the number of individuals might be judged—nothing that would make them contradictory accounts of the same situation. And if this is so, there is no problem to be solved. But it does, of course, raise the question of why one should accept Putnam’s initial situation as indicative of our cognitive situation.
- 119.
Presumably such constructions are possible because “x” has no initial content. So, x without a nature could mean that x is an individual or the property of another individual. For example, if x1 were the side of a triangle the only “individual” might be x1 + x2 + x3 which makes up the individual triangle.
- 120.
Putnam, “Sense, Nonsense, and the Senses,” p. 9.
- 121.
Ibid., p. 15. David Macarthur argues that natural realism is not merely common sense and that its success hinges on its ability to provide a more satisfying account of perception that can withstand skeptical threats motivated by the traditional realist/antirealist dispute. See David Macarthur, “Putnam’s Natural Realism and the Question of a Perceptual Interface,” Philosophical Explorations 7, no. 2 (June 2004): 167–81.
- 122.
See John Haldane, “On Coming Home to (Metaphysical) Realism,” Philosophy 71, no. 276 (April 1996): 287–96.
- 123.
Étienne Gilson, “Vade Mecum of a Young Realist,” Philosophy of Knowledge, p. 386.
- 124.
These last three paragraphs are adapted from Douglas B. Rasmussen, “The Importance of Metaphysical Realism for Ethical Knowledge,” Social Philosophy & Policy 25, no. 1 (Winter 2008): 56–99.
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Rasmussen, D.B., Den Uyl, D.J. (2020). On the Alleged Demise of Metaphysical Realism. In: The Realist Turn. Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48435-4_7
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