Is "Naive Realism" defendable?
Robert J. Pauwels
I am currently enrolled in a PHIL 101 course at a community college in
the Chicago area. One of the requirements of this course is to submit a
10 page paper defending one of the basic theoritical topics discussed in
our text book. I was considering trying to defend naive/common-sense
realism (as opposed to phenomenalism, critical realism, etc.).
My question is this -- from a philosophical view point -- do
philosophers try to defend naive realism or is this just the view taken
by those (presumably non-philosopher type people) who never really
considered any alternatives (hence called naive?).
I welcome all feed-back.
Thank you in advanced!
Bob Pauwels
wk0...@worldlink.com
andersons@skyfox
>To those who dabble in philosophy:
> I was considering trying to defend naive/common-sense
>realism (as opposed to phenomenalism, critical realism, etc.).
>
>My question is this -- from a philosophical view point -- do
>philosophers try to defend naive realism or is this just the view taken
>by those (presumably non-philosopher type people) who never really
>considered any alternatives (hence called naive?).
"Naive realism" is most often used pejoratively. Most philosophers
publishing today subscribe to some form of "representational realism".
(eg. You're only directly (immediately) aware of what's in your mind/brain.)
They sneer at the "naive". But outside of academic circles, they're
just as naive as you and me. They think with the learned and speak with
the vulgar. And even in their theories, they are forced to smuggle in
some naivety.
Naive realism isn't just defendable. Its unavoidable. But to admit to
that would be to wreck the game. Sophisticated (non-naive) realism has
been thoroughly trashed in the past (most notably by Wittgenstein), but
philosophers must turn a blind eye to keep the faith.
James A. Donald
>
> To those who dabble in philosophy:
>
> I am currently enrolled in a PHIL 101 course at a community college in
> the Chicago area. One of the requirements of this course is to submit a
> 10 page paper defending one of the basic theoritical topics discussed in
> our text book. I was considering trying to defend naive/common-sense
> realism (as opposed to phenomenalism, critical realism, etc.).
If by naive realism is meant the common sense realism, that when I see an
apple on the table, I am correct in inferring that there is indeed, in
objective reality, an actual apple on an actual table.
Then indeed naive realism has overwhelming support, except among the
politically correct.
A more polite phrase for naive realism is the concept that reality is
knowable by reason and observation - normally called objectivism.
objectivism is of course seriously politically incorrect. But like most
politically incorrect things it happens to be true.
Lenin was the first politically correct person to denounce objectivism, for
reasons that I find utterly incomprehensible.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
|
James A. Donald | Joseph Stalin said: "Ideas are more powerful
| than guns. We would not let our enemies have
jame...@infoserv.com | guns, why should we let them have ideas."
James A. Donald
>
> In a previous article, "Robert J. Pauwels" <wk0...@worldlink.com> wrote:
> >To those who dabble in philosophy:
>
> > I was considering trying to defend naive/common-sense
> >realism (as opposed to phenomenalism, critical realism, etc.).
> >
> >My question is this -- from a philosophical view point -- do
> >philosophers try to defend naive realism or is this just the view taken
> >by those (presumably non-philosopher type people) who never really
> >considered any alternatives (hence called naive?).
>
> "Naive realism" is most often used pejoratively. Most philosophers
> publishing today subscribe to some form of "representational realism".
> (eg. You're only directly (immediately) aware of what's in your mind/brain.)
> They sneer at the "naive". But outside of academic circles, they're
> just as naive as you and me. They think with the learned and speak with
> the vulgar. And even in their theories, they are forced to smuggle in
> some naivety.
Quite so.
And from what you are immediately aware of, you can immediately infer
something about external reality. If I see an apple on the table, I
immediately infer that there *is* an apple on the table.
Jake Blues
A. Donald) writes:
> And from what you are immediately aware of, you can immediately infer
> something about external reality. If I see an apple on the table, I
> immediately infer that there *is* an apple on the table.
Well, ignoring your unillicted and irrelevant political
commentary, I think it ~is~ naive to believe that your mental faculties
(whether you believe in a transcendental "mind" or attribute mentality to
the electro-chemical processes of your brain) don't contribute to or
abstract from the world as you understand it, and that the world as you
percieve it is the world as it is outside the context of perception. I
agree that certain aspects of the world can be understood and infered
through immediate apprehension, but to claim that you access what-is as it
is in itself and entirely as it is in itself through "what you are
immediately aware of" is naive by any standard I can think of.
Jake
andersons@skyfox
>In <16APR93.07325468@skyfox>, andersons@skyfox wrote:
>>
>> In a previous article, "Robert J. Pauwels" <wk0...@worldlink.com> wrote:
>> >To those who dabble in philosophy:
>> >
>> >philosophers try to defend naive realism or is this just the view taken
>> >by those (presumably non-philosopher type people) who never really
>> >considered any alternatives (hence called naive?).
>>
>> "Naive realism" is most often used pejoratively. Most philosophers
>> publishing today subscribe to some form of "representational realism".
>> (eg. You're only directly (immediately) aware of what's in your mind/brain.)
>
>Quite so.
>
>And from what you are immediately aware of, you can immediately infer
>something about external reality. If I see an apple on the table, I
>immediately infer that there *is* an apple on the table.
>
is an apple on the table. They see it, plain as day, right in front
of their faces. On the other hand, for sophisticates like Quine in
"Two Dogmas of Empiricism", apples are "posits":
"[In] point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the
gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities
enter our conception only as cultural posits. The myth of physical
objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved
more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable
structure into the flux of experience."
And as Fraser Cowley explains (in *Metaphysical Delusion*):
"In Quine's doctrine, material objects are posits of a language or
theory. Outside it, they are, as always, real things that exist quite
independently of any language or theory. Within this doctrine, truth
is relative to a language since true and false statements are about
the posits of the language. Outside it, empirical statements are true
or false in virtue of the way independently real things are. The
philosopher is therefore condemned to act and talk as if the relativist
doctrine were not true. But there is worse. According to the doctrine,
if it is true, its truth is relative to a language, and does not
therefore contradict the usual view of truth which is relative to
another language. But if a philosopher claims that his doctrine is true
and the usual view false, he can do so, paradoxically, only by assuming
that the usual view is true, for the claim can only be sustained by
appeal to some fact of the matter which is not language-relative.
His claim is therefore self-refuting. Just as the doctrine of the
double existence, representing and represented is, as Hume says, loaded
with the absurdity that it at once affirms and denies the vulgar [*naive*]
supposition of the independent reality of bodies, any claim that Quine's
doctrine is true would both affirm and deny the vulgar [*naive*] notion
of truth (132).
(Fraser Cowley, *Metaphysical Delusion*
published by Prometheus Books, 1991).
Chris Vaughan
>If by naive realism is meant the common sense realism, that when I see an
>apple on the table, I am correct in inferring that there is indeed, in
>objective reality, an actual apple on an actual table.
>
>Then indeed naive realism has overwhelming support, except among the
>politically correct.
Seems to me that this post is itself, mutatis mutandis, an exercise in
politcal correctness, which might explain why it misses the mark.
>A more polite phrase for naive realism is the concept that reality is
>knowable by reason and observation - normally called objectivism.
Not really. Naive realism claims that reality is *directly* knowable
by observation. That's an entirely different claim. Idealists and
phenomenalists do not claim that reality is unknowable by reason or
observation--they can still do science, for example. The only claim is
the the world as perceived is not necessarily the same as the world as
it is *unperceived*. (Actually, the idealist of Berkeley's stripe
thinks it is, since the world *is* only insofar as it is
perceived.)
Objectivism claims a great deal more, and since the original poster is
a "novice" asking for help on a paper, it would be well not to offer
grand equivocations in response, which only obscure what he wants to
have clarified, however important your political point is to you.
>objectivism is of course seriously politically incorrect. But like most
>politically incorrect things it happens to be true.
Like that whites are better than blacks or women ask to be raped?
(Sorry. Couldn't resist.)
>Lenin was the first politically correct person to denounce objectivism, for
>reasons that I find utterly incomprehensible.
Possibly because objectivism is bad philosophy, but more likely
because objectivism as a "school" of thought did not appear on the
scene until well after Lenin's demise. Actually, Lenin was a strong
defender of materialism, and against others such as Plekhanov who held
a symbolic theory of perception, argued that materialism requires a
very literal epistemological realism, i.e., a *naive* realism. This
thesis, in turn, became a tenet of "orthodox" Marxism. (See
_Materialism and Empirio-criticism_ for Lenin's view.) Unfortunately,
you have a lot more in common with the commies than you think.
Chris
--
Chris Vaughan *** We always find something, eh Didi,
cdva...@ucs.indiana.edu ***** to give us the impression
cdva...@iubacs.bitnet *** that we exist? -Beckett
andersons@skyfox
>In article <765457d68...@infoserv.com> jame...@infoserv.com (James
>A. Donald) writes:
>
>> And from what you are immediately aware of, you can immediately infer
>> something about external reality. If I see an apple on the table, I
>> immediately infer that there *is* an apple on the table.
>I agree that certain aspects of the world can be understood and infered
>through immediate apprehension, but to claim that you access what-is as it
>is in itself and entirely as it is in itself through "what you are
>immediately aware of" is naive by any standard I can think of.
>
> Jake
1. "What-is as it is in itself" is far too sophisticated for the
naive realist. If you mean it's naive to think that you never
make mistakes about the world, then any naive realist (like
your grandmother) will agree (unless they're pathologically
deluded). So in that sense, they're not naive.
2. "Immediate apprehension" could only make sense to the naive
realist if it was meant to contrast "seeing something on TV" with
"seeing it live and in person", or "seeing it in front of you"
with "seeing it in the rearview mirror". When your grandmother
sees the apple on the table, she doesn't (and I'll put money on
this) evaluate the "data" she "immediately apprehends" and then
calculate ("infer") that there is an apple on the table. She just
sees it. There is nothing "mediated" for the naive realist, unless
the medium is like TV or the rearview mirror.
S. Anderson
John Donald Collier
>My question is this -- from a philosophical view point -- do
>philosophers try to defend naive realism or is this just the view taken
>by those (presumably non-philosopher type people) who never really
>considered any alternatives (hence called naive?).
Some philosophers defend naive realism. One complex defense by John
Pollock in _Knowledge and Justification_ Chapter 3 looks at naive
realism, phenomenalism, scientific realism, descriptivism, direct
realism. He gives the arguments for and against both. I warn you, the
discussion is very technical, and is to intro philosophy what analysis
is to algebra. Pollock argues that phenomenalism and scientific
realism fail as epistemologies, but that direct realism, descriptivism
and naive realism are equivalent if it is allowed that certain beliefs
are prima facie justified (this last term is technical, and takes a
full chapter to explain) and if beliefs about how things appear to us
are incorrigible. If not incorrigible, then direct realism is not
equivalent to descritptivism, and the former is false, says Pollock.
His next chapter is on incorrigibility. He goes wrong there in arguing
for it. There is a vicious equivocation on exactly what is
incorrigible. He can establish that appearances identified
demonstratively are incorrigible, but he needs to establish that
appearances under some classification are incorrigible. Because of the
equivocation in his argument, he does not establish the latter, only
the former. This still leaves descriptivism and naive realism, though,
if you buy Pollock's notion of prima facie justification.
Any more information, and I would be re-writing Pollock's book.
--
John Collier Email: jcol...@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au
HPS -- U. of Melbourne Fax: +61 3 344 7959
Parkville, Victoria, AUSTRALIA 3052