Relation to truth· Truth, language and science
Scientific realism
Axis: Status of knowledge — Does science describe the world as it is, or does it construct its own objects?
Successful scientific theories describe, at least approximately, a reality that exists independently of us. Scientific progress brings us closer to the truth about the structure of the world.
Movements 3
Show inferred positions (3)
Rationalisminferable
The school is firmly realist about knowledge: reason does not construct its object, it reaches the real order of things as it is in itself. The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things, writes Spinoza, the true idea agreeing with what it represents. Descartes' clear and distinct ideas grasp the real essence of things, and the intelligible order of Leibniz's monads is the very architecture of reality: to know is to read the structure of the world, not to fabricate it.
Spinoza, Ethics, II, proposition 7 · Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, V · Leibniz, Monadology, §§ 56-62
The Enlightenmentinferable
Newtonian confidence carries a realist thesis: the laws of nature are not convenient conventions but the real structure of an ordered world, which reason deciphers rather than constructs. To know is to lift the veil of prejudice and appearance and reach things as they are; error stems from ignorance and imposture, not from any relativity built into knowledge itself. This objectivism grounds the authority the Enlightenment grants to science over opinions and traditions.
d'Alembert, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopédie · Voltaire, Elements of Newton's Philosophy
Empiricisminferable
Empiricism conceives of science as knowledge of observable regularities rather than of the inner nature of things: Locke holds the real essence of bodies to be beyond our reach and grants only a nominal essence, framed by the mind, to the kinds we sort things into. Berkeley, the third great figure of the school, radicalises this primacy of experience into idealism: for him esse est percipi, to be is to be perceived, and bodies are but collections of sensible ideas, which dismisses unintelligible matter without threatening the science of phenomena. The position leans toward a sober realism, anchored in experience, without claiming to grasp essences.
Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, III, 6 and IV, 3 (real and nominal essence) · Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, §3 and §9 (esse est percipi, against matter) · Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, section IV
Philosophers 4
Descartesexplicit
Clear and distinct ideas reach the real as it is: guaranteed by the veracity of a non-deceiving God, they are not constructions of the mind but the true apprehension of the nature of things, such as the geometrical extension of the material world. This is a strong, metaphysically grounded scientific realism.
Meditations on First Philosophy, V and VI · Principles of Philosophy, I, art. 45 and II, art. 4
Charles Sanders Peirceexplicit
The real, for Peirce, is that whose characters are independent of what you or I may think of it: my fancy changes nothing in it, it forces itself upon inquiry. This scientific realism is the counterpart of his definition of truth, for the final opinion toward which inquiry converges is binding only because an external real compels it. He thus parts ways with any constructivism that would make the true a matter of paradigm or arbitrary consensus: the consensus of inquirers is not the cause of truth but its symptom, the effect of a reality that compels every sufficiently patient mind to yield. Peirce even calls himself a realist in the medieval sense, holding laws and generalities to be real, not individuals alone.
How to Make Our Ideas Clear (1878) · The Fixation of Belief (1877)
Show inferred positions (2)
Baconinferable
If method is worth reforming, it is because there are, beneath the phenomena, real forms and laws to be discovered, not invented. The whole Baconian reform presupposes an ordered nature, independent of our mind, whose right knowledge fits its structure; knowledge is moreover measured by its operative power over things, the warrant that it has grasped the real and not a fiction of the mind.
Novum Organum, II, §1-4 (the doctrine of forms)
Lockeinferable
Locke distinguishes a thing's real essence (its inner constitution, unknown to us) from its nominal essence (the abstract idea we form from observable qualities, by which we sort it). Genera and species are thus partly the workmanship of the understanding; yet Locke holds to a mind-independent reality of bodies' primary qualities, which anchors his position toward a cautious rather than an avowed constructivism.
Essay Concerning Human Understanding, III, ch. 3 and ch. 6 (real and nominal essence) · Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II, ch. 8 (primary and secondary qualities)