My Ph.D. is a test of the thesis that there can be common ground between believers and unbelievers. One of those points of common ground is the reality of objective truth.
I see - I meant that the view I am expounding is “Christian Direct Realism,” not that “Christian Direct Realism” created reality! I should have said: “I want people to be led to the creator of reality. I called this view, Christian, direct realism.” Something like that.
Not capitalizing “creator” wasn’t very intentional, but I would stand by it, because people need to come to the source and creator of reality, whoever he may be. Turns out he is God, and revealed in the face of Jesus Christ!
Yeah , I had the same experience. I'm assuming that he was trying to imply something else. maybe it should be "...led to the creator of reality -- this is Christian direct realism."
In your statement of critical realism, "mediating conceptions, frames, codes, etc." are what people use to interpret the world, and there is a common world - we're not just constructing our own subjective world. Let me summarize these mediating terms as concepts. In short, we interpret the world through our concepts.
In short, my argument is that our concepts must be themselves received from and reflective of the world, or they are not just incorrect but empty or meaningless.
Commonly, people think of knowledge as divided into an active side, our concepts, and a passive side, experience of the world. And the critical realist line, also called neo-Kantianism by many, is that we view the world through our concepts, we interpret the world through our concepts. However, if this way of thinking is followed to its logical conclusion, then our concepts are imposed upon the world, and they don't help us to interpret the world, but occlude the world from our view. People shift from a neo-Kantian insight to saying things like, "You can only view the world through your own concepts."
But this assumes that the only way for us to know the world would have to be without all concepts, pure experience, brute empiricism. In short, it's realism with brute empiricism or critical realism (or worse) with our concepts interpreting experience to us. I think that this is a dichotomy to escape, rather than something to embrace one side of. (Maybe I would want to avoid the term "direct realism" in the future because it sounds too much like brute empiricism.)
There's only so much I can say right now, so let me focus on one way of escaping this dichotomy. In analytic philosophy, it's called meaning externalism. Meaning externalism that the meaning of our words or concepts is not determined by what's in our mind or head, whereas meaning internalism would say that they are. For example, some people (following Thomas Kuhn) say that Newton's concept of force differed from Einstein's concept of force. After all, Newton said that Force = mass times acceleration, whereas Einstein said that ... something more complicated. :) But this assumes that the meaning of a word is determined by what a person thinks about it. Therefore, Einstein didn't really disagree with Newton about force; he introduced a different concept, Einsteinian force as opposed to Newtonian force. Then, they viewed the world through these different concepts; what they see are almost two different worlds. (This is the neo-Kantian, almost social constructionist idea.)
But a variety of figures - chiefly Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam - cogently argued since the seventies that "concepts" that express what are called natural kinds, everything in the natural world from "horse" to "force," do not have a meaning that is "internal" but rather give expression to a kind of thing that must be empirically discovered. Accordingly, what we take to be definitions of our concepts are accountable to reality and empirical discovery. This means that Newton and Einstein were both speaking about force, a phenomenon encountered in the natural world, and saying different things about it.
How does critical realism or neo-Kantianism fare, given meaning externalism? Well, we can't think of (at least certain) concepts as being imposed on reality, because they are received, however imperfectly, from reality via sense experience. Now, what is true is that our understanding of the world is not just one direct sense experience after another. Rather, we generalize and expect to find the same again. We could think of Newton's theory as arising from certain kinds of experiences (and experiments), and Newton and Newtonians taking those to be completely general. But Einstein comes along and shows that other experiences (and experiments) require a somewhat different general theory. And of course, at the periphery even today, there are questions about whether Einstein's theory can account for everything. In short, it is true that we understand the world in general frameworks, but these general frameworks are themselves received from experience, are accountable to experience, and change by further experience.
This view is strongly empirical and realist, but it does not insist, "We know reality!" (Fist hitting table to prove that the world exists.) Instead, it allows for all sorts of complexity and possibility of error in our knowing the world. But it avoids the implicit idea of concepts being imposed on reality that comes in even critical realism. Let me know what of that made sense, and what I should explain further in a future post!
This was really well-written, Joel, and helped frame your thinking and project in clear and powerful ways. I very much look forward to more!
"In fact, I want people to come into contact with reality more fully in order to be led to the creator of reality: Christian direct realism."
Is this a typo? I really expected the creator of reality to be identified as God. (I see the lowercase "c" there.)
How does Christian direct realism create reality for the atheist? Isn't there a "common direct realism" that serves as the grounds for communication?
I see - I meant that the view I am expounding is “Christian Direct Realism,” not that “Christian Direct Realism” created reality! I should have said: “I want people to be led to the creator of reality. I called this view, Christian, direct realism.” Something like that.
Not capitalizing “creator” wasn’t very intentional, but I would stand by it, because people need to come to the source and creator of reality, whoever he may be. Turns out he is God, and revealed in the face of Jesus Christ!
Yeah , I had the same experience. I'm assuming that he was trying to imply something else. maybe it should be "...led to the creator of reality -- this is Christian direct realism."
TJ, thanks for this! Let me give it a go.
In your statement of critical realism, "mediating conceptions, frames, codes, etc." are what people use to interpret the world, and there is a common world - we're not just constructing our own subjective world. Let me summarize these mediating terms as concepts. In short, we interpret the world through our concepts.
In short, my argument is that our concepts must be themselves received from and reflective of the world, or they are not just incorrect but empty or meaningless.
Commonly, people think of knowledge as divided into an active side, our concepts, and a passive side, experience of the world. And the critical realist line, also called neo-Kantianism by many, is that we view the world through our concepts, we interpret the world through our concepts. However, if this way of thinking is followed to its logical conclusion, then our concepts are imposed upon the world, and they don't help us to interpret the world, but occlude the world from our view. People shift from a neo-Kantian insight to saying things like, "You can only view the world through your own concepts."
But this assumes that the only way for us to know the world would have to be without all concepts, pure experience, brute empiricism. In short, it's realism with brute empiricism or critical realism (or worse) with our concepts interpreting experience to us. I think that this is a dichotomy to escape, rather than something to embrace one side of. (Maybe I would want to avoid the term "direct realism" in the future because it sounds too much like brute empiricism.)
There's only so much I can say right now, so let me focus on one way of escaping this dichotomy. In analytic philosophy, it's called meaning externalism. Meaning externalism that the meaning of our words or concepts is not determined by what's in our mind or head, whereas meaning internalism would say that they are. For example, some people (following Thomas Kuhn) say that Newton's concept of force differed from Einstein's concept of force. After all, Newton said that Force = mass times acceleration, whereas Einstein said that ... something more complicated. :) But this assumes that the meaning of a word is determined by what a person thinks about it. Therefore, Einstein didn't really disagree with Newton about force; he introduced a different concept, Einsteinian force as opposed to Newtonian force. Then, they viewed the world through these different concepts; what they see are almost two different worlds. (This is the neo-Kantian, almost social constructionist idea.)
But a variety of figures - chiefly Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam - cogently argued since the seventies that "concepts" that express what are called natural kinds, everything in the natural world from "horse" to "force," do not have a meaning that is "internal" but rather give expression to a kind of thing that must be empirically discovered. Accordingly, what we take to be definitions of our concepts are accountable to reality and empirical discovery. This means that Newton and Einstein were both speaking about force, a phenomenon encountered in the natural world, and saying different things about it.
How does critical realism or neo-Kantianism fare, given meaning externalism? Well, we can't think of (at least certain) concepts as being imposed on reality, because they are received, however imperfectly, from reality via sense experience. Now, what is true is that our understanding of the world is not just one direct sense experience after another. Rather, we generalize and expect to find the same again. We could think of Newton's theory as arising from certain kinds of experiences (and experiments), and Newton and Newtonians taking those to be completely general. But Einstein comes along and shows that other experiences (and experiments) require a somewhat different general theory. And of course, at the periphery even today, there are questions about whether Einstein's theory can account for everything. In short, it is true that we understand the world in general frameworks, but these general frameworks are themselves received from experience, are accountable to experience, and change by further experience.
This view is strongly empirical and realist, but it does not insist, "We know reality!" (Fist hitting table to prove that the world exists.) Instead, it allows for all sorts of complexity and possibility of error in our knowing the world. But it avoids the implicit idea of concepts being imposed on reality that comes in even critical realism. Let me know what of that made sense, and what I should explain further in a future post!