Realists and Idealists
The Australian Bunker Hunter
-Which common philosophys (particuarly political and historiography)
fit under the topics of Realist and Idealists?
-Is realism and Idealism a philosophy in itself?
-In regards to how information is compiled (ie Positivism,
metaphysics) can these be fit into idealists and realist philosophys?
Thanks
Mark
Immortalist
"The Australian Bunker Hunter" <bunker...@yahoo.com.au> wrote in message
news:bd4394d2.03040...@posting.google.com...
Interesting question. I will check it out but there is probably some
post-modern term for this. Meanwhile I will put these in a box, shake
violently, then roll them out like dice to see if some pattern converges:
Realism
Term often used in a general sense, meaning fidelity to life (as opposed to
idealization, caricature, etc.), but more usefully confined to the
19th-century movement in painting and literature. This was a reaction
against the subjectivity and suggestiveness of Romanticism, insisting on the
portrayal of ordinary contemporary life and current manners and problems,
and in fact (as part of its anti-Romanticism) tending to emphasize the baser
human motives and more squalid activities. In literature the novel became
the predominant form: Balzac, Stendhal and Dickens contain realistic
elements, but Flaubert and Tolstoy are considered the great masters of
Realism. Naturalism was an extension of the principles of Realism. Courbet
was the 1st major Realist painter. Impressionism may be regarded as an
off-shoot of Realism, and a 20th-century version was Social Realism.
idealism
The view that human activity may only be explained in terms of the thought
processes that bring them about; the social world consists of ideas
originating from some root, and society, for example, only exists insofar as
people think it does. Reality is based on, or evolved by, the mind; this is
metaphysical idealism which claims that no material things exist
independently of the mind. Epistemological idealism maintains that human
understanding is limited to perception of external objects. The concept is
used in geography in any study of how the cultural landscape depends on the
way in which people perceive their environment. The logic is that if human
societies are structured by thought, then the only way to understand them is
to investigate the way in which people think.
idealism (history)
Any doctrine that equates reality with mind, spirit, person, soul, thought,
or, as in Plato, archetypal ideas. George Berkeley was an idealist in
holding that all we perceive is sensible ideas. He escaped from solipsism on
the ground that other people were, like himself, spirits-ideas in the mind
of God, perceivers of the collections of ideas that were material objects.
In the early 18th century the term came to be used for the belief that the
world of common sense was only a projection of our minds. Later it was
publicized by Kant, who called his theory of knowledge transcendental
idealism, the view that the synthetic knowable is confined to the world of
phenomena as contrasted with the real world of ideas, or
things-in-themselves. Hegel's absolute idealism conceived the real as being
perfect, whole, and complete. Bradley and Bosanquet developed this in
England, and it is Hegelian idealism that has led to the organic theory of
the state (see also Hegelianism).
positivism
The philosophical doctrine of Comte and his successors. It asserts that
knowledge of reality can be achieved only through the particular sciences
and ordinary observation. Positivism rejects all metaphysical propositions,
but it has been pointed out (with regard to later logical positivism) that
this rejection itself constitutes a metaphysical proposition. Hobbes was an
earlier positivist with regard to the status of the law. The only law is
positive law, the law that is actually enforced; there is no higher law such
as natural law. Existentialism, especially in France, has been a reaction
against positivism.
logical positivism
A philosophical movement that arose from the Vienna Circle in the 1920s.
Influenced by Mach and Wittgenstein, it insisted that philosophy should be
scientific, regarding it as an analytical (rather than a speculative)
activity (see analytic philosophy), the purpose of which was clarification
of thought. Any assertion claiming to be factual (i.e. excluding the axioms
of logic or mathematics) has meaning only if its truth (or falsity) can be
empirically tested. Metaphysical propositions and those of aesthetics and
religion are consequently meaningless, since it is impossible to say how
they can be verified. A secondary goal of logical positivism was the
analysis and unification of scientific terminology. After the Nazi invasion
of Austria, members of the Circle emigrated to Britain and the USA, where
the movement continued to be influential.
analytic philosophy
began with the arrival of Wittgenstein in Cambridge in 1912 to study with
Russell and, as it turned out, significantly to influence him. Between the
wars, through the influence of Russell's writings and Wittgenstein's own
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), analytic philosophy came to dominate
British philosophy. In the 1930s the ideas of Russell and Wittgenstein were
taken up and put forward more radically and systematically by the Logical
Positivists of the Vienna Circle and Reichenbach's circle in Berlin. There
were sympathetic groups in Poland and Scandinavia and some scattered but
distinguished adherents in the United States (to which many of the European
positivists fled from Hitler), such as Nagel and Quine. The very different
ideas of the later Wittgenstein, who came back to Cambridge in 1929, closer
to those of Russell's original ally G. E. Moore, became increasingly
influential and, under the label 'linguistic philosophy', prevailed in most
of the English-speaking world from 1945 until about 1960. In the
post-positivist era from then until the present English-speaking philosophy
has been mainly analytic in the older, pre-linguistic sense, but with large
variations of method and doctrine.
Russell and Moore emerged as original thinkers in the first decade of the
century when they broke demonstratively away from the kind of Bradleian
idealism which they had been taught. They argued against the view that
reality is both an undissectable unity and spiritual in nature, that it is a
plurality made up of an indefinite multiplicity of things, and that these
things are of fundamentally different kinds - material and abstract as well
as mental. They fatally undermined the idealist theory that all relations
are internal or essential to the things they relate and, less persuasively,
that the direct objects of perception are subjective contents of
consciousness.
During this decade Russell's main work was in logic. He defined the basic
concepts of mathematics in purely logical terms and attempted, less
successfully as it turned out, to deduce the fundamental principles of
mathematics from purely logical laws. In his theory of descriptions he
provided a new kind of definition, a definition in use or contextual
definition, which did not equate synonym with synonym but gave a rule for
replacing sentences in which the word to be defined occurred with sentences
in which it did not. This was described by F. P. Ramsey as the 'paradigm of
philosophy'.
Working in conjunction with Wittgenstein between 1912 and 1914 Russell
elaborated the 'logical atomism' set out rather casually in his Our
Knowledge of the External World (1914) and Philosophy of Logical Atomism
(1918) and more systematically, but obscurely, in Wittgenstein's Tractatus.
All our significant thought and discourse, they held, can be analysed into
elementary propositions which directly picture states of affairs, the
complexes analysed being composed by the relations symbolized by the logical
terms 'not', 'and', 'or', 'if', and, perhaps, 'all' (Russell thought it
irreducible, Wittgenstein did not). The truth, or falsity, of the complex
propositions was unequivocally determined by the way in which truth and
falsity were distributed among their elementary components. Some complexes
were true whatever the truth-value of their elementary components. These
were the truths of logic and mathematics.
Both believed that the true logical content of complex propositions is
concealed by ordinary language and can be made clear only by their kind of
reductive analysis. Propositions which cannot be analysed into elementary
statements of fact are 'metaphysical', for example those of morals and
religion. They also held that elementary propositions represented the world
as it really is. But the ontological conclusions they drew from this were
different. Wittgenstein took it to reveal the general form of the world.
Russell, giving elementary propositions an empiricist interpretation as the
immediate deliverances of sense, arrived at the neutral monist conclusion
that only experiential events really exist; the minds which have the
experiences and the physical things to which the experiences attest are
merely constructions out of experience, not independently existent things.
He drew here on the analyses of material particles, points in space, and
instants of time, put forward in the early 1920s by A. N. Whitehead, the
collaborator in his early logico-mathematical work.
The Vienna Circle, led by Carnap and Schlick, took over the conception of
philosophy as reductive logical analysis and the doctrine of the analytic
(purely formal, factually empty) character of logic and mathematics. They
followed Russell in taking elementary propositions to be reports of
immediate experience and developed from this the principle that
verifiability in experience is the criterion of meaningfulness. Deprived of
significance by this criterion, judgements of value are imperatives (or
expressions of emotion) not statements and the affirmations of the
metaphysician or theologian are at best a kind of poetry. But they rejected
the analytic ontologies of their predecessors. Against Wittgenstein they
contended that language is conventional, not pictorial. Against Russell they
maintained that bodies and minds are no less really existent than events,
despite being constructions rather than elements.
Logical Positivism was memorably introduced to the English-speaking world in
A. J. Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic (1936). But as it became the height
of philosophical fashion a new tendency was in the making in Wittgenstein's
fairly esoteric circle. Language, he came to hold, in his new philosophical
incarnation, is not simply descriptive or fact-stating, it has a
multiplicity of uses and its meaning consists in the way it is used. It does
not have a logical essence which it is the business of analysis to reveal;
it has, rather, a natural history which it is the therapeutic,
puzzlement-alleviating task of philosophy to describe. Our beliefs, about
the mental states of other people for example, cannot be analysed into the
evidence we have for them; that evidence is more loosely related to the
beliefs as 'criteria' of their truth. This mood of acceptance, rather than
large-scale reconstruction or reinterpretation, of ordinary discourse, has
some affinity with the resolute pedestrianism about common sense and
ordinary language which Moore had been practising for a long time. It took a
different form in post-war Oxford: breezily definite with Ryle, scrupulously
lexicographic with J. L. Austin. This is the linguistic philosophy which,
centred at Oxford, was dominant in the English-speaking world from 1945 to
about 1960, when it disappeared in its original form almost without trace.
Philosophical analysis, in a more or less Russellian spirit, but in a
considerable variety of forms, has continued from its revival around 1960 to
the present day. W. V. Quine has been its most important developer and
enlarger. Early in his career he rejected the idea of a clear distinction
between analytic and non-analytic truths. That put the activity of analysis
itself in question and assimilated logic, mathematics, and rational
philosophy to the empirical residue of science. The verificationist theory
of meaning was widely criticized, for the most part as self-refuting, by no
one more effectively, perhaps, than by Popper, who based a new account of
the nature of science on the thesis that falsifiability is a criterion, not
of meaning, but of scientific status. The two most notable specimens of
reductive analysis (the phenomenalist conception of material things as
systems of appearances, actual and possible, and the behaviourist theory of
states of mind as dispositions of human bodies to behave in certain ways in
particular circumstances) were generally discarded, most thoroughly in the
work of various Australian materialists, for instance D. M. Armstrong and J.
J. C. Smart. They held that we have direct, if inherently fallible,
awareness of material things and that the mental states of which we are
aware in self-consciousness are in fact identical with brain-states which
cause behaviour.
There is not much literal analysis in the work of the most up-to-date
practitioners of analytic philosophy such as Putnam and Nozick. But they
think and write in the analytic spirit, respectful of science, both as a
paradigm of reasonable belief and in conformity with its argumentative
rigour, its clarity, and its determination to be objective.
verification principle
This, also called the Verifiability Principle, has two forms: (1) The
meaning of a statement is the method of its verification. (2) A statement is
meaningful if and only if it is in principle verifiable. (1) implies (2) but
not all recognize the converse implication. Verification may cover only
observational procedures, in which case the principle is applied only to
'factual' statements, allegedly analytic statements (including pure
mathematics), somehow true by definition, receiving a separate treatment.
Alternatively, verification may cover calculations for establishing these.
The verification principle was a main tenet of the original Logical
Positivists, inspired by remarks of Wittgenstein. Prominent supporters have
included Moritz Schlick and A. J. Ayer. Problems have been its judgement on
itself and the fact that any statement will have verifiable implications if
conjoined with suitably chosen others. None the less the general idea that
genuinely factual knowledge must increase our powers of empirical prediction
has influenced many.
positivist fallacy
The problem arising when a phenomenon is deemed not to exist because no
evidence is available: "Absence of evidence is interpreted as evidence of
absence."
Advice: Recognize that not all phenomena leave obvious evidence of their
existence.
Some areas of research have little or no available data or evidence.
Data-poor fields raise some special methodological concerns, one of which is
the positivist fallacy. If a phenomenon leaves no trail of evidence, then
there is nothing to study. We may even be tempted to conclude that nothing
has happened. In other words, the positivist fallacy is the misconception
that absence of evidence may be interpreted as evidence of absence.
Positivism had a marked impact on mid-twentieth century psychology. In
particular, the influence of logical positivism was notable in the
behaviorists such as B.F. Skinner. The classic example of the positivist
fallacy was the penchant of behaviorists to dismiss unobservable mental
states as non-existent. For example, because "consciousness" could not be
directly observed, for the positivist it must be regarded as an occult or
fictional quality with no truth status (Ayer, 1936).
Psychology escaped the excesses of behaviorism with the advent of the
cognitive revolution which re-introduced mental states as legitimate topics
of investigation. It is perhaps ironic that computer technology played an
important role in facilitating the acceptance of mental states. Although not
easily observable, computer memories could clearly exist in a number of
different states, and these states could significantly affect the ensuing
computational behavior.
If it is true that the positivist fallacy tends to arise from data-poor
conditions, then it should be possible to observe this same misconception in
humanities scholarship -- whenever data is limited. Consider, by way of
example, the following argument from the distinguished historical
musicologist, Albert Seay. At the beginning of his otherwise fine book on
medieval music, Seay provides the following rationale for focusing
predominantly on sacred music in preference to secular music:
"Although much music did exist for secular purposes and many musicians
satisfied the needs of secular audiences, the Church and its musical
opportunities remained the central preoccupation. No better evidence of this
emphasis on the religious can be seen than in the relative scarcity of both
information and primary source materials for secular music as compared to
those for the sacred." (Seay, 1975, p.2)
In other words, Seay is arguing that, with regard to secular medieval
music-making, absence of evidence is evidence of absence. Since secular
activities generated little documentation, we have almost no idea of the
extent and day-to-day pertinence of medieval secular music-making. For
illiterate peasants, "do-it-yourself" folk music may have shaped daily
musical experience far more than has been supposed. Of course Seay may be
entirely right about the relative unimportance of secular music-making, but
in basing his argument on the absence of data, he is in the company of the
most rabid logical positivist. The positivist fallacy is commonly regarded
as a symptom of scientific excess. However, it knows no disciplinary
boundaries; it tends to appear whenever pertinent data is scarce.
unfalsifiable hypothesis
The formulation of a theory or hypothesis which cannot be, in principle,
falsified.
Advice: Whenever possible, formulate theories, hypotheses or interpretations
so they are, in principle, falsifiable. Identify the sorts of observations
that would be inconsistent with your views.
The most well-known attempt to resolve the problem of induction was
formulated by Karl Popper in 1934. Popper accepted the view that no amount
of observation could ever verify that a particular proposition is true. That
is, an observer cannot prove that all swans are white. However, Popper
argued that one could be certain of falsity. For example, observing a single
black swan would allow one to conclude that the claim -- all swans are
white -- is false.
Accordingly, Popper endeavored to explain the growth of knowledge as arising
by trimming the tree of possible hypotheses using the pruning shears of
falsification. Truth is what remains after the falsehoods have been trimmed
away.
For Popper, what makes a theory a "scientific theory" is not that the theory
is true (since we cannot know this). Rather, what makes a theory
"scientific" is that the theory is, in principal, falsifiable. The mark of a
good theory, for Popper, is that the theory is stated in a way that admits
the possibility of being disproved or falsified.
Accordingly, a theory that claims "all blungs are blue" is a bad theory, not
simply because we don't know what a "blung" is, but because as stated, the
claim would be impossible to falsify.
A number of music scholars, such as Eugene Narmour and William Poland, have
argued that music scholars need, whenever possible, to state their theories
in a way that they can, in principle, be falsified.
descriptive metaphysics
by contrast with revisionary metaphysics, describes, according to P. F.
Strawson, 'the actual structure of our thought about the world' rather than
projecting an alternative preferred version of the world itself. A variety
of conceptual analysis, it does not address itself merely to the uses of
terms and the entailments of propositions, but to our cognitive apparatus.
Thus Kant found that a certain minimal spatiotemporal and causal structure
in our representations of external objects was a necessary condition of
ordinary experience and scientific theorizing. Strawson finds that 'bodies'
and 'persons' are the fundamental terms of our ontology, and proposes
conditions governing their identification and reidentification and the
possibility of framing meaningful subject-predicate propositions about them.
The possibility of a descriptive metaphysics is threatened first by the
claims of a cognitive science free of the a priori, second, by the suspicion
that all a priori investigation harbours revisionary content.
revisionary metaphysics
A term coined by P. F. Strawson to describe the philosophical efforts of
Descartes, Leibniz, and Berkeley, who are contrasted with the practitioners
of descriptive metaphysics. Revisionary metaphysics is said to substitute
for the actual structure of the world a picture of one which is
aesthetically, morally, emotionally, or intellectually preferable. The
charge that philosophical systems are so many well-organized and pleasing
fictions is anticipated in numerous earlier accusations of the visionary
character and distance from experience of all metaphysics. Each is
nevertheless deserving of study, Strawson maintained, on account of the
'intensity of its partial vision' and its utility as a source of
philosophical puzzles.
The existence of revisionary metaphysics depends upon a metaphilosophical
confusion between 'is, really' and 'ought to be', and between logical and
existential concerns. Yet the satisfactions it supplies ensure that
revisionary metaphysics remains a permanent temptation of philosophy, not
simply a useful term for historical analysis.