Critical realism:
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| Critical realism - by Roy Wood Sellars |
a study of the nature and conditions of knowledge
The present work is an attempt to state systematically the essential problems of epistemology. These problems are real; they can be stated clearly, and they can, I am convinced, be solved. What do we mean when we say that we know a thing? What are the conditions of such knowledge?
These questions and the numerous other questions to which they lead are as empirical as any questions to be found in the special sciences and, so far as I can see, just as susceptible to being answered in a satisfactory way. But the individual thinker who approaches them must rid his mind of prejudices and be prepared to spend some time in a preliminary survey of the facts. He must, moreover, be willing to regard his conclusions as tentative and of the nature of hypotheses. Such is the spirit that I have tried to maintain throughout the present work.
The positions which I am setting forth in the following pages are the summary of many years of teaching and of hard and pretty constant thinking, inside the classroom and without.
As time passed, I found myself drifting ever more decidedly toward realism and naturalism. I became increasingly aware of the realistic structure of the individual's experience and noted those distinctions and meanings in which this structure was expressed. Whether these distinctions and meanings could be justified was the question uppermost in my mind. While the pressure of my reflection was evidently toward realism, I was dissatisfied with the customary realism and felt that idealism had the better of the argument so far as generally accepted principles were concerned. It was at the very best a drawn battle between them.
Every realist who wishes to justify the faith that is in him must meet the arguments of Berkeley, not only his more formal principle that to be for the sensible world is to be perceived but also his argument from content that all objects can be analyzed into sensations. Himie, and in our own day, F. H. Bradley, have also driven home to philosophy the psychical character of everything which is directly present in the field of experience. My knowledge of psychology and of logic made me realize the pervasive influence of mental activity; made me able to bear in mind the processes which made possible those apparently stable products which presented themselves to me so ready-made and external.
The problem which was formulating itself was to reach a position that would do justice to both the idealistic motives inexperience and the realistic structure and meanings. Was there not some way out? Could not some more adequate standpoint be reached? I determined to analyze the nature of scientific knowledge to see whether it would give me a clue. A careful study of modem science in the light of my epistemological problem did give me a clue which it took some time to work out.
Do not both Locke and Berkeley have essentially the same view of knowledge? For each of them — if there is to be knowledge of the physical world — it must be of the nature of direct or indirect apprehension. Either the physical world itself or a substitute copy must be present to the understanding when we think. Berkeley meets Locke on this ground and overcomes him. The physical world cannot be like our ideas; hence, we cannot know it. Therefore, there is no good reason to assume its existence. But is actual scientific knowledge an attempt to achieve images that faithfully copy the physical world? Does not this knowledge consist, instead, of propositions that claim to give tested knowledge about the physical world?
I want the reader to get dearly in mind the difference in outlook that this suggestion involves. // involves a relinquishment of all attempts to picture the physical world. Science offers us measurements of things and statements of their properties, i.e., their effects upon us and upon other things, and their structure; but it consciously swings ever more completely away from the assumption that physical things are open to our inspection or that substitute copies are open to our inspection.
Contents:
I. The Setting of the Problem: Natural Realism. i
II. Natural Realism and Science 22
III. The Advance of the Personal 49
IV. The Field of the Individual's Experience . . 79
V. Distinctions within the Field . . . . . . . 104
V. Distinctions within the Field . . . . . . . 104
VI. An Examination of Idealism .135
VII. The Insufficiency of Mental Pluralism. .'. 154
VIII. Mediate Realisms 182
IX. Is Consciousness Alien to the Physical? . . . 204
X. Truth and Knowledge 254