Explanatory Realism: The Convergence of Conceptual Schemes

Abstract

The upshot of the preceding chapter is that the existence of rational agents as such — of intentional agents with the further capacity for reflective self- attributions and self-appraisals presupposes the ability to engage in means-ends reasonings and to check such reasonings against a family of communal norms of inference. Since such means-ends reasonings are causal reasonings, however, the communal norms of inference at issue here must be norms of material as well as formal inferences — that is, they must be (deontic formulations of) principles of a chronologic, an arena-geometry, and a material logic of contents (time, space, and causality) collectively constituting a determinate conceptual scheme or representational system. Briefly put, the existence of any rational agent presupposes the existence of a community of such agents possessing a shared world-picture, a community whose conceptual scheme constitutes some specific, determinate Constitutive Realism.