Search Results

Verity

John V. Kulvicki

in On Images: Their Structure and Content

This chapter and the next focus on pictorial realism, with an aim towards responding to some objections to the structural account of depiction. One important aspect of realism is verity: pictures are ... More

This chapter and the next focus on pictorial realism, with an aim towards responding to some objections to the structural account of depiction. One important aspect of realism is verity: pictures are veritable to the extent that they represent objects true to our conceptions of them. This is an unpopular way to think of pictorial realism, but it turns out that verity does a better job of accounting for realism in general than many have thought it could. This undercuts some of the motivation for other accounts of realism, discussed in the next chapter.Less

Perceptual Saliences *

Clotilde Calabi

in Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind

Philosophers generally acknowledge that our beliefs about the world and our actions call for reasons. Against the mainstream view, which identifies reasons either with experiences or with beliefs, ... More

Philosophers generally acknowledge that our beliefs about the world and our actions call for reasons. Against the mainstream view, which identifies reasons either with experiences or with beliefs, this chapter defends the thesis that the perceived situation provides such reasons. More precisely, it defends the thesis that the world's being in a certain way warrants a certain perception of the world and that a warranted perception provides reasons for acting appropriately and for beliefs. Such reasons should be identified with perceptual saliences. Perceptual saliences are objective and normative properties. They are objective properties, not to be read as naïf realism does. They are normative properties, not to be read as anti-realism does. The best account of perceptual saliences is given by a kind of cognitive irrealism, in which attention qua sensitivity to reasons plays a major role.Less

Introduction

John Skorupski

in The Domain of Reasons

This book is about normativity and reasons. The Introduction outlines the main themes of the book and introduces the topics to be covered.

Explanatory Realism, Causal Realism, and Explanatory Exclusion

Jaegwon Kim

in Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind

“Explanatory Realism, Causal Realism, and Explanatory Exclusion” explores issues arising from taking a realist, or an irrealist, attitude toward explanation and causation. Explanatory realism is the ... More

“Explanatory Realism, Causal Realism, and Explanatory Exclusion” explores issues arising from taking a realist, or an irrealist, attitude toward explanation and causation. Explanatory realism is the view that when we invoke an event as explaining another event, there must be some objective relation holding for the two events if the explanation is to be correct. In the case of a causal explanation, for example, the explaining event must objectively be a cause of the event explained. Explanatory irrealism denies that such a relation needs to exist as an objective correlate of an explanatory relation. Causal realism is the view that causal relations are objectively real relations in the world, whereas causal irrealists claim that causal relations are in the eye of the beholder, or, in any case, that causal relations are not metaphysically real. The essay concludes with a discussion of how one's stance on these possible views affects the issue of explanatory exclusion, namely the seeming fact that two or more explanations of a single event exclude one another.Less

Pluralistic Realism

Mohan Matthen

in Seeing, Doing, and Knowing: A Philosophical Theory of Sense Perception

A catalogue of mismatches between experienced colour and the physical counterparts of colour is presented. Does it show, as C. L. Hardin has argued, that colour is not real? No. It is proposed that a ... More

A catalogue of mismatches between experienced colour and the physical counterparts of colour is presented. Does it show, as C. L. Hardin has argued, that colour is not real? No. It is proposed that a physically specifiable sense feature is real in the action-relative sense if there is some innate activity that would be disrupted by a failure of classification. This permits a plurality of idiosyncratic sensory classifications, while at the same time makes room for the idea that a sensory state might be wrong.Less

Introduction

Neil Tennant

in The Taming of the True

This introductory chapter explains the coverage of this book, which is about the realist views of meaning the truth. This book discusses the realism debate, provides a brief survey of varieties of ... More

This introductory chapter explains the coverage of this book, which is about the realist views of meaning the truth. This book discusses the realism debate, provides a brief survey of varieties of irrealism, and argues in defence of meaning objectivity. It explores the foundational relationships between manifestation, bivalence, and undecidability, and shows how to find an acceptable reading of knowability-in-principle.Less

Irrealism

Neil Tennant

in The Taming of the True

This chapter provides a brief survey of varieties of irrealism and neutralizes that brand of irrealism that would undermine the semantic realist's account of meaning. It argues that through ... More

This chapter provides a brief survey of varieties of irrealism and neutralizes that brand of irrealism that would undermine the semantic realist's account of meaning. It argues that through transcendental arguments for the incoherence of irrealism about semantic discourse can be defused, the global anti-realist need not advocate an irrealist view of semantic discourse. It explains that for the semantic anti-realist, meaning is determinate and facts about meaning provide the ultimate justification for one's choice of logic.Less

Introduction: The Space of Options

JONATHAN COHEN

in The Red and the Real: An Essay on Color Ontology

In this chapter, the author first presents a standard taxonomy of the major alternative positions about color ontology. The distinction between color realism and color irrealism is explored. Several ... More

In this chapter, the author first presents a standard taxonomy of the major alternative positions about color ontology. The distinction between color realism and color irrealism is explored. Several difficulties with the Standard Taxonomy are discussed including some directions in which one might proceed to refine the characterization of the options. The distinction between relationalist and non-relationalist accounts of color is then illustrated. The author argues that this distinction is useful in understanding the space of alternative views on color ontology because it crystallizes a central set of issues that divides the accounts, and does so while sidestepping problems that plague the Standard Taxonomy. Further, an alternative Refined Taxonomy of positions on color ontology is then provided as a useful way to clarify the relationship of color relationalism to other views.Less

Variation Revisited: Objections and Responses

JONATHAN COHEN

in The Red and the Real: An Essay on Color Ontology

This chapter attempts to consider and respond to a series of challenges against the argument from perceptual variation. Three classes of objections are illustrated. The first concerns suggestions to ... More

This chapter attempts to consider and respond to a series of challenges against the argument from perceptual variation. Three classes of objections are illustrated. The first concerns suggestions to treat one's inability to single out a distinguished variant as a mere epistemic shortcoming with no ontological import. The second revolves on accepting irrealism about color. The third focuses on some that suggest non-relationalist ways of accepting ecumenicism with respect to multiple perceptual variants. The aim of this chapter is to respond to the objections of these three classes, thus strengthening the case for relationalism. Further, by discussing these objections, the goal is to throw into greater relief the connections between relationalism and other views that have shown up in the literature.Less

Relationalism Defended: Ontology

JONATHAN COHEN

in The Red and the Real: An Essay on Color Ontology

Addressing a series of challenges to the color relationalist's ontology is the main goal of this chapter. The first objection concerns the large plurality of color properties recognized by color ... More

Addressing a series of challenges to the color relationalist's ontology is the main goal of this chapter. The first objection concerns the large plurality of color properties recognized by color relationalism. The second objection focuses on the accusation that relationalism is committed to irrealism about color. Lastly, the charge that relationalism is an error theory is examined. As it is argued in this chapter, standard motivations for parsimony in counting properties are unpersuasive when applied to relational properties. In addition, while there are some construals of the real/unreal distinction according to which that relationalism is committed to irrealism, there is no compelling and philosophically substantive reason to reject those kinds of irrealism. Further, the accusation that relationalism is an error theory is considered insufficient by the author.Less

The Question of Peripheral Realism

WReC (Warwick Research Collective)

in Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature

This theoretical chapter examines the question of what has been called ‘peripheral realism–. Reviewing the texts selected for examination in the book overall – produced at different times and places ... More

This theoretical chapter examines the question of what has been called ‘peripheral realism–. Reviewing the texts selected for examination in the book overall – produced at different times and places across the span of the long 20th century – it shows that they share not only common themes, plots and subjects, but also a range of formal features that might be called ‘irrealist’. The argument is that these techniques and devices represent formal registers of (semi-) peripherality in the world-literary system, discernible wherever literary works are composed that mediate the lived experience of capitalism's bewildering creative destruction (or destructive creation). This argument is mounted through particular reference to such authors as Dostoevsky and Machado de Assis and to literary historical development in such regions as Russia and the Caribbean, the United States, Brazil, Mexico (and Latin America more generally).Less

‘Irrealism’ in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North

WReC (Warwick Research Collective)

in Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature

This chapter examines Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North, in the light of the idea of combined unevenness developed in chapters 1 and 2. Situating its discussion in the context of recent ... More

This chapter examines Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North, in the light of the idea of combined unevenness developed in chapters 1 and 2. Situating its discussion in the context of recent attempts to uncouple the received link between literary modernism and western modernity, the chapter mobilises the notion of ‘critical irrealism’ as Michael Löwy has developed it in some of his recent writings. The focus of the chapter falls on the formal aspects of Salih's novel: the general suggestion is that the novel narrates the coexistence and clash of customary and emergent social and cultural practices in a traditional society in the throes of capitalist modernisation.Less

The Political Ecology of Storms in Caribbean Literature

Sharae Deckard

in The Caribbean: Aesthetics, World-Ecology, Politics

In this chapter, Sharae Deckard explores the metaphorics and aesthetics of tropical storms and ocean-borne “disasters” in Caribbean fictions. The essay considers how Caribbean writers use ... More

In this chapter, Sharae Deckard explores the metaphorics and aesthetics of tropical storms and ocean-borne “disasters” in Caribbean fictions. The essay considers how Caribbean writers use storm-events to construct liminal narrative spaces which overturn social hierarchies and behaviours; to figure the operations and intrusions of ‘disaster capitalism’; and, finally, to generate formal disruptions that revitalize the possibility of collective action or consciousness in the face of the stasis or amnesia produced by colonialism and/or neo-colonialism in the service of neoliberal capital. Surveying texts from the Anglophone, Francophone and Hispanophone Caribbean, the chapter examines the ways in which the radical disruptive potential of tropical storms is embedded in literary form. In so doing, it demonstrates how storm aesthetics can correspond to political ecologies and materialize the specific socio-ecological conditions from which they emerge.Less

Metaethical Loose Ends

Simon Robertson

in Nietzsche and Contemporary Ethics

This final main chapter tidies up some loose ends concerning the metaethical credentials of the evaluative and normative claims going into Nietzsche’s perfectionism. Nietzsche did not have a ... More

This final main chapter tidies up some loose ends concerning the metaethical credentials of the evaluative and normative claims going into Nietzsche’s perfectionism. Nietzsche did not have a well-worked-out metaethics; furthermore, his texts often underdetermine whatever views he might have intended. Nonetheless, the strategy is to gauge how well various positions (each with some textual support) satisfy certain basic interpretative desiderata, fit his revaluative purposes, and serve his wider philosophical needs. The chapter raises worries for a range of extant readings: realist, quasi-realist, fictionalist, and a hybrid realism/antirealism. It then attributes to Nietzsche a form of irrealism on which there are normative/evaluative truths but no metaphysically robust normative/evaluative properties.Less

Modest Quasi-Realism and the Problem of Deep Moral Error

Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons

in Passions and Projections: Themes from the Philosophy of Simon Blackburn

Simon Blackburn’s quasi-realist program seeks to accommodate the deeply embedded assumptions of commonsense morality, one of which is the thought that one’s current moral conviction on some topic ... More

Simon Blackburn’s quasi-realist program seeks to accommodate the deeply embedded assumptions of commonsense morality, one of which is the thought that one’s current moral conviction on some topic might be mistaken. Some errors in moral belief are due to mistaken (non-moral) factual beliefs, which present no particular challenge to the moral quasi-realist. More worrisome is the thought that one may be mistaken at the level of one’s current moral standards. The challenge of making sense of first-person affirmations of the possibility of deep moral error represents a hard challenge to the quasi-realist. Although Blackburn has addressed the issue of deep moral error, this chapter aims to offer a more detailed irrealist expressivist treatment of moral error than has hitherto been offered by Blackburn or by other expressivists. This will advance the cause of quasi-realism and that of moral expressivism generally.Less

Introduction: Buddhism and Political Thought

Matthew J. Moore

in Buddhism and Political Theory

The introduction argues that Western political theory has overlooked the political philosophy of Buddhism, and that it would benefit from engaging with Buddhism as a political theory. The Buddhist ... More

The introduction argues that Western political theory has overlooked the political philosophy of Buddhism, and that it would benefit from engaging with Buddhism as a political theory. The Buddhist political philosophy rests on three ideas, which are both similar to and different from the concerns of Western scholars: that human beings are not selves; that politics is necessary but not very important; and that moral norms are advice for wise living rather than categorical obligations. The introduction summarizes the author’s understandings of political theory and Buddhism generally, and argues that Western political theorists stand to benefit from learning more about Buddhism.Less

Theory of Government and Political Theory in Early Buddhism

Matthew J. Moore

in Buddhism and Political Theory

This chapter examines the political theory found in the primary texts of early Buddhism and related contemporary scholarship. It argues that the early texts contain both a theory of government, which ... More

This chapter examines the political theory found in the primary texts of early Buddhism and related contemporary scholarship. It argues that the early texts contain both a theory of government, which endorses enlightened monarchy based on a primitive social contract, and a political theory, which rests on the ideas that human beings are not selves, that politics is necessary but not very important, and that moral norms are advice rather than absolute duties. This reading directly contradicts the long Western tradition of seeing Buddhism as anti-political. It also argues that modern readings of the Buddhist political tradition as republican are mistaken.Less