a new realism

I initally wrote to Rasmus thinking about this call for proposals:

Both in the Continental and in the analytic world, philosophical realism is becoming ever more fashionable. On the Continental side, the experience of the post-9/11 wars and of recent economic crises has led to a harsh denial of two central tenets of postmodernism, both held, for example, by Foucault, Vattimo, and Rorty: (1) that reality is socially constructed and infinitely malleable, and (2) that ‘truth’ and ‘objectivity’ represent useless notions. Facts cannot be reduced to interpretations, as even Derrida (in his final years) and more recently Latour, have recognized. On the analytic side, too, the situation is very different from what it was in the heyday of Feyerabend, Goodman, Davidson, Kuhn, Dummett, van Fraassen, and Hacking – as is shown by the growth of analytical metaphysics and of alternatives to anti-realism in semantics and philosophy of science. Now, however, philosophy is polarized between the (mostly analytic) view according to which only natural science can tell us what really exists and another (mostly Continental) view according to which only an anti-naturalistic stance can do justice to socio-political phenomena. The challenge, then, is this: can a New Realism be developed that can do justice both to the scientific worldview and to the phenomena of value, norms, politics, and religion. Papers are invited which rise to this challenge. -- call for papers at The Monist, Advisory Editors: Mario De Caro and Maurizio Ferraris

While I'm not at all sure we'd be able to get a paper together by October 31st, I think it is still interesting to explore the ideas of philosophical realism and understand how they can influence what we're doing here.  If we do put together a paper in 2 weeks, OK -- and if not there will always be another opportunity.

I've mostly become acquainted with the ideas of realism in the writings of Manuel DeLanda, who seems to very nicely bridge the analytic and continental traditions. DeLanda is a Deleuzian philosopher trained in an analytic tradition, who writes in plain language that would be accessible to readers of Scientific American.  One place where he really weighs in about "realism" is "Deleuzian Interrogations: A Conversation with Manuel DeLanda, John Protevi and Torkild Thanem".  A third-party survey of his thinking is "DeLanda’s ontology: assemblage and realism".

In my thesis, I briefly compared what DeLanda says about realism with Ernst von Glasersfeld's "radical constructivism," as described, for example, in "Aspectos del constructivismo radical (Aspects of radical constructivism)" [N.B. the article is in English].   Von Glasersfeld gives a very erudite argument against realism, but unfortunately it seems only to amount to a perfect straw-man for DeLanda. Even so, in my thesis, I felt that I remained philosophically realist, while still getting some mileage out of certain constructivist ideas.  Von Glasersfeld and Seymour Paper both draw mostly on Piaget, and I'm sure they are all quite smart guys.  Being pressed for time I didn't follow up on all this reading, but I'm noticing now that Piaget had his own idea of -- psychological and moral -- "realism":

Realism occurs when children confuse events that happen in their minds, such as dreams, with objective reality. Children see names, pictures, thoughts and feelings as actual entities and treat them as unchangeable. For example a block, when called a cube, is a completely different thing; so different it does not even exist.  In the first stage of realism, children believe that their dreams are a product of the outward physical environment and that they use their eyes to see their dreams. In the second stage, children understand that dreams come from their minds and are unreal, but still think that they are happening in the room in front of them. In the third stage, children are now able to comprehend that names were given to objects by people and that dreams are thoughts that take place in their heads.  Jean Piaget's Child Developmental Theory

Piaget's ideas of moral realism and morality of cooperation play a role in [Lawrence] Kohlberg's theory. Children in Piaget's stage of moral realism believe that rules are absolute and can't be changed. Punishment should be determined by how much damage is done, and the intention of the child is not taken into account. For example, a child operating in the stage of moral realism would believe that a child who accidentally breaks three cups should be punished more than a child who breaks one cup on purpose. Gradually, as a child matures, he or she understands that people make rules and people can change them: the beginnings of Piaget's morality of cooperation. Eventually, both the damage done and the intention of the offender in a given moral dilemma are considered in this stage of moral development. Kohlberg Tutorial

Comparing this stuff with philosophical realism may end up being a matter of comparing apples and oranges, but I think maybe we can get somewhere with it. However, I would like to start with a reading of DeLanda's  Open-Source: A Movement in Search of a Philosophy -- I'll be curious to see if "new realism" turns out to be an adequate philosophical response.