Anti-realismIn philosophy, the term anti-realism is used to describe any\nposition involving either the denial of the objective reality of entities of a certain type or the insistence that we should be agnostic about their real existence. Thus, we may speak of anti-realism with respect to other minds, the past, the future, universals, mathematical entities (such as natural numbers), moral categories, the material world, or even thought. The term was popularised by Michael Dummett, who introduced it in\nhis paper Realism to re-examine several classical philosophical\ndisputes involving such doctrines as nominalism, \nconceptual realism, idealism and phenomenalism. The novelty of\nDummett's approach consisted in seeing these disputes as analogous to\nthe dispute between intuitionism and Platonism in the philosophy of mathematics. According to intuitionists (anti-realists with respect to mathematical\nobjects), the truth of a mathematical statement consists in our ability\nto prove it. According to platonists (realists), the truth of a\nstatement consists in its correspondence to objective reality. Thus,\nintuitionists are ready to accept a statement of the form "P or Q" as\ntrue only if we can prove P or if we can prove Q. In particular, we\ncannot in general claim that "P or not P" is true, since in some cases\nwe may be able neither to prove nor to disprove the statement P. Dummett argues that the intuitionistic notion of truth lies at the\nbottom of various classical forms of anti-realism. He uses this\nnotion to re-interpret phenomenalism, claiming that it need not\ntake the form of a reductionism (often considered untenable). In philosophy of science, anti-realism applies chiefly to claims about the non-reality of "unobservable" entities such as electrons, which are not detectable with our normal human senses but which many nonetheless claim are real. For a brief discussion comparing such anti-realism to its opposite, realism, see (Okasha 2002, ch. 4). Ian Hacking (1999, p. 84) also uses the same definition. The anti-realist position in the philosophy of science is often called Instrumentalism, which takes a purely functionalist view of the existence of unobservable (or only indirectly observable) entities: X exists only to the same extent that it works within a theory Y, and nothing more useful may be said about it ontologically. In discussions of art (including visual\nart, writing, music, and lyrics), anti-realism and\nanti-realist may be used in one of the philosophical senses\ndescribed above, or may simply be used in contrast to realism, in\nwhatever sense the latter is meant. Thus surrealism in visual art\nis an "anti-realist" tendency, and the psychedelic bands common in\nthe United States in the 1960s were "anti-realist," etc. These terms may not be as precise when applied to art as when applied\nto philosophical matters.References
See alsoIrrealism -- Crispin Wright -- Maya (illusion)\nCategory:Epistemology |
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