Realism and Anti-Realism.pdf

Realism and Anti-realism Oxford Handbooks Online Realism and Anti-realism Christopher J. Insole The Oxford Handbook of the Epistemology of Theology Edited by William J. Abraham and Frederick D. Aquino Print Publication Date: Jun 2017 Subject: Religion, Theology and Philosophy of Religion Online Publication Date: Jul 2017 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199662241.013.21 Abstract and Keywords The chapter argues that the search for a single construal of the realism/anti-realism distinction is misguided. There are more or less apt versions of the distinction, each framed with a specific set of interests. The terms of art, ‘realist’ and ‘anti-realist’, are not helpfully construed as applying across whole domains (‘science’, ‘religion’, ‘ethics’), or thinkers, but at the level of particular statements. As such, the distinction has less in common with categorizations such as ‘theist/atheist’, or ‘empiricist/rationalist’, and more in common with (contestable, but still useful for many) terms of art such as ‘a priori/a posteriori’ and ‘analytic/synthetic’. The chapter explores four alternative construals of the distinction: cognitivist, ontological, epistemological, and semantic. When we get to the more subtle construals of semantic anti-realism/realism, it is unclear what precisely (if anything) is at stake in the debate. Keywords: realism, anti-realism, religion, cognitivist, epistemological, ontological, semantic THE desire to draw a distinction between realism and anti-realism arises in response to a question, or anxiety, in a particular area. To reflect this motivation, this chapter tracks different ways of drawing the distinction, by the framing of a question in each case. One of the more important and edifying things that the distinction can do for us is to enable us to ask the right sort of question about a particular area of interest, rather than providing a priori answers across the board. Instead of asking whether a thinker, world view, or movement is ‘realist’ or ‘anti-realist’, it is more illuminating to ask whether a thinker or movement is realist or anti-realist, on a particular apt-for-purpose construal of this distinction, about a specified range of statements, when one has a particular set of interests. Although there are complex interrelationships, and further subtleties and subdivisions, approaches to the realism/anti-realism distinction characteristically fall into four broad categories: the cognitivist (which ask whether religious utterances are making truth claims at all, rather than expressing an attitude, or prescribing a rule); the ontological Page 1 of 17 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: Durham University; date: 31 January 2019 Realism and Anti-realism (which focus on ‘mind-independence’); the epistemological (which attend to the relationship between the truth and our beliefs about the truth); and the semantic (which attend to the conditions under which statements can be meaningfully asserted). I take each of these in turn, always with a view to their application in theological contexts. In the account that follows, I am indebted to existing surveys, provided by Brock and Mares (2007), Trigg (2010), and Craig (2012). Cognitivist Construals Some philosophers have wanted to deny that religious utterances such as ‘God exists’ are really attempting to be descriptive at all. Where the utterance is not treated as descriptive, it is typically regarded in one of two ways: either as expressive of an attitude, along the lines of ‘I like Mozart’, or ‘Boo to murder!’; or as prescriptively setting a rule for how to go on, along the lines of ‘the Bishop in chess moves diagonally across the board’, or (p. 275) ‘drive on the left’. Such expressions or prescriptions cannot be said to be true or false, as they are not attempted descriptions. Although expressivism and prescriptivism are different positions, they are both sometimes called ‘non-cognitivism’, which in turn is often treated as synonymous with ‘anti-realism’, particularly in ethics and theology. If we were to frame a question to capture this construal of the distinction, it would be along the following lines, where we ask about the function of a religious utterance (descriptive or expressive/prescriptive): COG Is the utterance x a statement that is capable of truth or falsity? On this construal (COG), one is a realist if one answers that x is a statement that is capable of truth or falsity, and an anti-realist if one answers that it is not. This is useful enough, if we are only interested in the particular question of whether or not an utterance is a truth-apt statement. But this construal has real limitations when we join it up with a wider set of questions and an extensive literature. What we immediately notice is that on many plausible and live construals of the distinction (any of the further accounts given in this chapter, all of which have their exponents), although expressivism and prescriptivism are indeed incompatible with realism, one could nonetheless be an anti-realist without endorsing expressivism or prescriptivism. This is because on many construals of the distinction, an anti-realist is talking about the status of the truth of statements, where the anti-realist claims that the truth is dependent, for example, upon our minds, beliefs, or epistemic practices. There can be a number of different motivations for a thinker embracing anti-realism on the COG construal of the realism/anti-realism distinction. A thinker could have embraced some of the other forms of anti-realism set out later in this chapter, and consider, for example, that the truth of a statement about God is dependent upon our beliefs, if the statement is construed (perhaps unhelpfully) as making descriptive truth claims. This might lead a thinker to consider that expressivism, or prescriptivism, provides the most Page 2 of 17 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: Durham University; date: 31 January 2019 Realism and Anti-realism perspicuous analysis of religious utterances, which on the surface appear initially, and misleadingly, to be descriptions. Alternatively, it might be that a thinker is a convinced atheist, but regards religious utterances as somehow valuable. Although these are possible motivations for embracing anti-realism (COG), it is also conceivable that our antirealist (COG) will refuse to be drawn on these wider claims (about atheism, or mind/belief independence). Indeed, it is characteristic of Wittgensteinian commentators, such as D. Z. Phillips, to offer an expressivist or prescriptivist analysis of religious utterances, whilst fiercely resisting attempts to push them into a declaration of atheism, or of ontological anti-realism, where truth is construed as dependent somehow upon minds/beliefs/ epistemic practices. This can be frustrating for critics of Wittgensteinian approaches, who are convinced that anti-realism (COG) must be motivated by wider ontological (lack of) commitment. There is an argument to be had as to whether the Wittgensteinian is implicitly more (or (p. 276) less) committed than he or she wants to admit, but this is indeed an argument to be had, and not something that should be built into the construal of the realism/anti-realism distinction from the start. That said, one could be a realist on the COG construal, but an anti-realist on other construals, if one considered that the statement ‘God exists’ is indeed descriptive in some sense, but that the truth of this statement depends, for example, upon our beliefs or epistemic practices. It is advisable, therefore, to distinguish COG construals of the distinction from other construals: COG anti-realism might be motivated by other forms of anti-realism, but it might not be, or not uncontroversially. A COG realist might endorse realism on other construals, or she might not. Ontological Construals Most people, unless they have read too much (and perhaps not enough) philosophy, can appreciate the force of a central issue that one version of the realism/anti-realism distinction attempts to track. This is the question of mind-independence or -dependence. Although this will need considerable refining, the intuitively plausible starting question is as follows: ONT 1 Is the truth or falsity of the statement that x exists independent of mind? One is a realist about x if one responds that x exists (or does not) independently of mind; and an anti-realist about x if one denies that x exists (or does not) independently of mind. This construal of the distinction has the quality at least of lineage. It has an ancestor in medieval debates about whether universals (‘beauty’, ‘goodness’, ‘human being’) only exist (or fail to) if they have a reality independent of individuals and of our conceptual categories, or whether universals are merely features of the way in which we think about individuals, enjoying only a ‘nominal’ reality (hence the position is known as ‘nominalism’). Moving into the modern period, the distinction maps onto debates about Page 3 of 17 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: Durham University; date: 31 January 2019 Realism and Anti-realism forms of idealism: whether features of the world have a reality that goes beyond their being ideas in the mind (Berkeley), or whether core features of the world are the product of how we receive the world, rather than being in the world itself (Kant). Even before we have complicated this basic starting question, there is an issue that is immediately thrown up in relation to how we are employing the realism/anti-realism distinction: the implication that one can be a realist even if one does not think that x exists. Not all applications of the distinction, perhaps especially in theology and ethics, are compatible with this assumption. Something needs to be said about construals of the distinction that deny this assumption. True to my opening claim, I concede immediately that these are perfectly legitimate, apt-for-purpose formulations of the distinction, but also that they are not the only way of conceiving the distinction, and not always the most useful. (p. 277) Some commentators prefer to employ the term ‘realism’, where what is envisaged is someone who is committed both to the mind-independent status of x (if x were to exist, it would have to be mind-independent), and also to the existence of x. ‘Realism about God’, implies theism as opposed to atheism, as well as the claim that the God believed in is independent of mind. Realism involves ‘commitment’ to ontological realities. Our framing question in this case would need to become: ONT 1COMM Is the truth or falsity of the statement that x exists independent of mind, and does x exist? This is useful enough for some purposes where the atheism/theism dispute is our main target. Frequently, though, we are interested in thinkers who want to sustain some sort of commitment to religious statements, but on an alternative footing. We want to be able to distinguish atheists from ‘alternative-theists’. To raise interesting questions in this context, we will need to frame the distinction in such a way that to be a realist about x is not necessarily to believe in the existence of x, but to consider that what makes a statement about x true or false is (or would be) a mind-independent reality. So a classical atheist can agree with the classical theologian that religious statements are to be construed as ‘realist’, where the atheist thinks that what makes religious statements false is that (independently of our minds) there is no God. Whilst conceding that, in some intellectual contexts, it might be appropriate to do otherwise, and with the caveat that any realist religious believer will believe in religion as well as realism (and the two are not the same), in what follows, the assumption will be that the various realism/anti-realism distinctions set out are neutral about whether or not statements about x are true or false: the issue is what it is for a statement to be true or false. Although I might talk about ‘truth’ being independent in various ways, this should be understood to mean ‘truth (or falsity)’. Page 4 of 17 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: Durham University; date: 31 January 2019 Realism and Anti-realism Nothing about the distinction itself, when construed ontologically, should be taken as implying or entailing anything at all about how much access we might or might not have to the truth about x, or about how (if at all) we access this truth (whether through correspondence, coherence, verification procedures, or lucky guesses), or about what sort of thing x might fundamentally be (a substance/accident/a bundle of properties/a selfsubsisting simple being). A typical strategy in realist/anti-realist dust-ups is for one side to attempt to strap onto the other side unpalatable further commitments; the job of defence is then to show that these unpalatable commitments have nothing to do with realism/anti-realism in this area, and might even be a problem for the other side, if they are a problem at all. This is a legitimate, or at least unavoidable, part of the process of philosophical dialectic, but if our purpose is to get more light than heat, arguments that one’s opponent is committed to absurdities should be just that: substantive arguments subsequent to the initial distinction drawn, rather than contestable absurdities build into the distinction itself. (p. 278) The first level of complexity with the ontological construal of realism/anti-realism (ONT 1) arises when we ask what sort of ‘reality’ might be substituted for x in ‘does x exist independently of mind?’ Are we talking about ‘entities’, which is to say singular terms with (or without) referents (‘unicorns’, ‘ghosts’, ‘trees’), or about ‘facts’, where by ‘facts’ we mean dimensions and aspects of the world that are represented by whole sentences in a language that form statements (‘it is wrong to murder; for a clear statement of this distinction and its importance, see Brock and Mares 2007: 2–3)?’ If one thinks that the language of ‘facts’ is too infected by association with the category of entities, another term can be used. The important thing is that by this term, ‘x’ (where we use ‘facts’), we just mean ‘dimensions and aspects of the world that are represented by whole sentences in a language that form statements’. Moral realists do not have to believe in ‘queer’ entities in order to have a realist construal of moral facts. This applies also in other areas: for example, realism about the laws of nature, about modal categories such as necessity and contingency, and realism about mathematics. Understanding that there is a difference between the realist’s commitment to the objectivity of a statement, and the reality of objects, helps to deflate one source of theological anxiety about realism. Some philosophers of religion and theologians have grave misgivings talking about God as an object or an entity. There will be misgivings, where it is thought that the intrinsic grammar that surrounds the concept of an object, or entity, is constantly corrosive of our thinking about God, by pulling us towards the paradigm of discrete, contingent, (spatially and temporally) extended, created things. Other philosophers of religion defend the propriety of talking about God as an object, pointing out that this is meant only in the abstract sense of being the ‘object’ of our thought or enquiry. Not all ‘objects’ are medium-sized dry physical objects: there are also mathematical objects, for example, which nobody argues are extended in space and time. Such philosophers can point to the way in which Aquinas is prepared to use the language of ‘oneness’, or ‘substance’ (albeit a unique type of self-subsisting substance), to talk about God, and suggest that we can Page 5 of 17 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: Durham University; date: 31 January 2019 Realism and Anti-realism properly explain, and frame, our talk of God as a divine object and entity. Such philosophers will not require or seek alternative formulations of the realism/anti-realism distinction. In setting out different construals of the realism/anti-realism distinction, it is not appropriate to take a stand on the nature of the being of God. What can be said, though, is that many theologians do have profound difficulties with talking about God as an object or entity. The problem with always and only construing the realism/anti-realism distinction in terms of the existence of objects, with one particular (albeit unique) object (‘God’) in view, is that the theologian who is allergic to object language will always have to dismiss either realism or the value of the realism/anti-realism distinction as such. This can lead to further misunderstanding, and to more heat than light. The object-happy philosopher of religion becomes convinced that the theologian has reneged on ontological commitments that she ought to have, suspecting the theologian of ‘postmodernism’ and ‘relativism’. The theologian will deny that believing in a divine object was ever part of the orthodox premodern tradition, even if it ‘regrettably’ entered (p. 279) modernity. The theologian might be ‘postmodern’, but only in a limited sense of objecting to some innovative and erroneous patterns of thinking in ‘modernity’. In return, the theologian is convinced that the philosopher of religion is a reductionist about God, conceiving of God on a par with other extended and contingent objects. Neither the object-happy philosopher of religion nor the object-averse theologian have understood each other’s aspirations, and both trigger fears in each other that need not arise. It seems better to allow some flexibility in our discourse when framing the realism/anti-realism distinction and to allow the argument to find its proper level, which is around the question of how to talk about the being of God. Some theologians will have further worries as to whether it is sufficient to stipulate that the ‘factual’ need not be restricted to objects/entities, in order to avoid any reductionism in realist construals of theological statements about God. Certain theological statements could indeed still be made and construed in a realist and factual sense, because they are not about God directly, but about the world inasmuch as the world depends upon God, and God acts in the world: ‘the world is created by God’ is a statement that (on a realist construal) picks out a dimension of the world—indeed, for theologians, the central dimension. Nonetheless, many theologians would consider there to be a danger in pushing doctrines concerning God (‘God is simple/the creator ex nihilo/perfectly good/ triune/incarnate in Jesus Christ’) through the mesh of the realism/anti-realism debate, certainly where this distinction is construed in terms of entities, but even where we invoke the notion of the ‘factual’, where ‘factual’ means ‘dimensions and aspects of the world picked out by statements’. These same theologians would find it difficult, and grammatically artificial, to disentangle the language of ‘factuality’ from talk about the (created) world. Even the etymology is against us, with factum denoting a deed, something done, and facere the action of creating, causing, or making. Just as the notion of factuality might need to be introduced Page 6 of 17 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: Durham University; date: 31 January 2019 Realism and Anti-realism (to supplement the category of an ‘entity’) to capture what the realist about ethics or laws of nature is committed to, it would be appropriate for theology to insist upon a further addition to the conceptual repertoire, in order to capture to what a distinctively theological realist is committed. As with the debate around the concept of a divine ‘object’, it is not appropriate to take a stand on the question of the appropriateness of ‘factuality’ language in relation to God. However, it is appropriate to ask for flexibility when framing the realist/anti-realism distinction, so that we can correctly locate where the dispute really is. The theologian who denies that statements about God are factual need not be reneging on the ontological commitment that is associated with realism; she could be objecting to a particular conception of the being of God. It is better to have a construal of the realism/ anti-realism distinction that can track this, rather than a construal that forces such a theologian either to identify as an anti-realist, or to deny the value of the distinction altogether. Almost any term might be suspect, at least to some theologians, but perhaps the least offensive, and a term with the backing of some of the tradition, would be ‘being’, where we ask whether ‘dimensions and aspects of being picked out by statements’ are true (p. 280) or false independently of mind. Theologians who have brushed against Neoplatonism through Heidegger would want to talk about God being ‘beyond being’, where ‘being’ also carries a depth grammar of createdness and contingency. What the ‘beyond being’ theologian is trying to protect can be dealt with through the category of analogy, where realism is compatible with a strong sense of the analogical nature of language used of God. Perfection terms such as ‘being’, ‘goodness’, and ‘knowledge’ for a Thomist are exemplified plenitudinously and paradigmatically in God (St Thomas Aquinas, ST I q.13 a.2): indeed, God is not only ‘good’, partaking of an independent property, but God is also ‘goodness’ itself; God does not simply ‘exist’, partaking in existence, but God is existence itself (hence the ‘beyond being’ moment; ST, I q.3 a.4). The meaning of the concepts ‘goodness’ and ‘being’ derive, for us, from our experience of the created world, where we encounter fragmented and partial participations in the paradigm of divine goodness and being (ST, I q.13 a.3). When we talk about ‘goodness’ and ‘being’, we only have an analogical grasp of the perfect paradigm of the goodness and being that is God. This is sometimes explained in a misleading way: that when we say ‘God is good’, we only have an analogical sense of what goodness means when ascribed to God, as if our ordinary uses of the concept of ‘goodness’ were in perfect order. This is not quite what Aquinas says: it is rather that we never really and completely know what certain perfection terms mean (including ‘being’ itself), because they apply paradigmatically to God (ST, I q.13 a.5). We only have an analogical grasp (a genuine but partial participation) of the meaning of ‘God is good’ because we do not (yet) see the divine nature in the beatific vision (ST, I q.13 and I–II q.1–5). In terms of the realist question (‘is the truth of the statement that God is good independent of minds?’), the answer is that it emphatically is, if we are talking about created minds (about which, more below); it is because of this independence that we know that we only have an analogical grasp of the Page 7 of 17 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: Durham University; date: 31 January 2019 Realism and Anti-realism concept of divine goodness (and so of goodness as such). To believe that something is true about x is not the same as saying that everything that is true about x (even in the narrow context of the terms involved in the belief itself) is or could be grasped and believed. An understanding of the analogical nature of our talk about God in fact recommends a realist construal, if realism is suitably expressed to encompass more than entities, or even ‘facts’, where the category of ‘being’ has been suggested as the means to achieve this expansion. Returning to the formulation ONT 1, we move to the last part of the question: ‘independent of mind’. The question of what sort of ‘thing/fact/dimension of being’ x might be generates distinctively theological concerns. Similarly, moving to the last part of ONT 1, ‘independent of mind’ generates distinctive theological complexity. The philosophical theologian will immediately need to disambiguate between ‘being independent of human minds’ and ‘being independent of mind as such (which includes the divine mind)’. According to classical theology, truth (or falsity) is not independent of mind, but dependent upon—created and conserved by—the divine mind; where some truths that are dependent upon the divine mind are independent of created human (p. 281) minds. A certain sort of ontological anti-realism works across the board, therefore, when framing statements about the relationship between the divine mind and created reality: ONT 1DM Is the truth or falsity of the statement that x exists independent of the divine mind? We can call this position ‘classical divine-mind anti-realism’. Theologians who accept divine simplicity—whereby God’s nature is identical with God’s essence, existence, and actions—will even be able to say that the truth of all statements, even statements about God, depends upon the divine mind; although, if we embrace divine simplicity, we can also say that all truths about God depend upon the divine will, divine existence, divine action, or any aspect of the divine being. Classical divine-mind anti-realism, construed in ontological terms, is apt for purpose when we want to uncover a relatively neglected texture in the history of ideas. Usually when the distinction is discussed, though, the focus has been on whether there are entities or facts (and we add ‘dimensions of being’) that are independent of human minds. At this point, we hit some knottier complexities. Drawing the distinction in terms of whether something is independent of (or dependent on) mind is apt enough for purpose if we are sorting through a class of entities (or putative entities) such as trees, planets, ghosts, or unicorns, where there are no human artefacts, and no reference to human minds themselves. Where artefacts and minds are concerned, the distinction will need reframing. Coins, chairs, and computers would not exist were it not for the fact that minds conceived, designed, and crafted them. But it is unlikely to be useful to consider these human-made entities as ‘mind-dependent’ in the Page 8 of 17 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: Durham University; date: 31 January 2019 Realism and Anti-realism same way that unicorns are; or, at least, we will want to distinguish the complex and considerable mind-dependence that a working currency has from the sort of minddependence that coins have. Where we have artefacts in our picture, it might be sufficient to nuance the question at the heart of the (ontologically conceived) distinction to read as follows: ONT 2 Are statements about x true or false independently of minds constantly thinking about x? The ‘thinking about x’ here, unless the distinction is to have a fairly limited application, will usually be construed as not restrictive to explicitly framed and assented-to statements, but rather the whole cognitive activity of minds. This formulation allows that the chair would not exist had it not been for minds, but that the chair does not continue to depend for its existence on being thought about by minds. Again, there are some suggestive theological parallels: classical divine-mind anti-realism would still apply across (p. 282) the created realm, as everything created does indeed constantly depend upon the divine mind thinking about it, because everything is made by God. Human-mind antirealism is more limited, and does not include the realm of artefacts, which ‘depend’ upon human minds only as a created universe would ‘depend’ upon a deistic demiurge that shapes matter into an order that then exists independently of the demiurge. The entities or facts that we might be considering could also include minds, intentions, desires, and beliefs. Minds depend trivially upon the existence of minds, but minds do not create, project, or invent minds, which is typically the sort of ontological texture that the philosopher employing the realist/anti-realist distinction is tracking. Intentions, desires, and beliefs depend upon the existence of minds, but plausibly not always upon the thoughts we have about intentions, desires, and beliefs. If we want the (ontologically conceived) distinction to do useful work for us at this point, we will need to reform our question along the following lines (with a number of variants): ONT 3 Are statements about x true or false independently of: (a) our beliefs about x? (b) our evidence for x? (c) our epistemic practices for discerning the truth or falsity of x? Each of these subclauses has a slightly different purchase that will impact on how the question is answered in different cases: ONT 3a (our ‘beliefs about x’) asks whether the truth or falsity of the statement is independent of our explicitly framed and held commitments; ONT 3b (‘evidence for x’) allows that someone might not be able to evaluate and explicitly articulate the evidence, but asks whether, nonetheless, the truth or falsity of the statement about x is (or is not) dependent upon this evidence; ONT 3c Page 9 of 17 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: Durham University; date: 31 January 2019 Realism and Anti-realism (‘epistemic practices’) has a similarly normative quality (what the competent reasoner ought to have access to), but evokes a wider range of ways of forming beliefs than the evaluation of evidence. Whether a mind exists or not is independent of our belief about this; even if, in our case, we have privileged access to the fact that it exists (and surely we do, albeit in a lowramification sense of ‘mind’). Whether intentions, desires, and beliefs depend entirely upon our beliefs about them is a more complex question, and takes us into hermeneutical depths. One is likely to gravitate towards a ‘realist’ account, if one agrees that we can have an intention, desire, or belief without being able accurately to articulate it, where intentions, beliefs, and desires are manifested in part by the whole trajectory of one’s behaviour, which includes but is not exhausted by self-reflexive utterances. That a way of carving out a distinction generates complex results, with some facts and entities straddling the distinction, need not itself tell against the distinction. Where reality is blurred, a sharp and precise picture is a distortion rather than an improvement. Recent interest in ‘response dependence’ attempts to track features of our experience that are irreducibly and inseparably co-constituted by that which is given, and (p. 283) the means by which we make that which is given intelligible. It seems unhelpful to fret over whether ‘response-dependent’ positions are fundamentally ‘realist’ or ‘anti-realist’; rather they employ the realist/anti-realist distinction, but with an interest in a domain of facts and entities where different aspects can be captured by statements that incorporate both realist and anti-realist moments. Some facts are intrinsically facts about our response to the world, which are in part constituted by how we understand these facts. Epistemological Construals All of the formulations in the previous section have centred around the concept of ‘independence’: the truth (or falsity) of statements about x is independent of mind, or of mind’s thinking about x, or of our beliefs about x. In itself, though, this independence clause is neutral between epistemological scepticism and confidence. It might in fact be that the truth about x is independent of mind, but that we have access to all the truths about x, or none, or only some. Independence does not mean unknowability: it just means that what is known or unknown (which might be all, some, or none of the truth) is true or false independently of mind. Some philosophers and theologians have found that a distinction that says nothing about the sort of access we have to the truth is insufficient to do effective work in philosophical theology. The worry is this: the claim that ‘in principle’ there are truths about God that could be construed realistically, but that we have no (or very limited) access to these truths, renders these truths of no importance in our religious and ethical construal of the world. This position, usually described as ‘Kantian’ (with its unknowable realm of the ‘thing-in-itself’), has been accused by one thinker of presupposing an ‘extreme doctrine of transcendence’ (See Alston 1995: 50)—the (mistaken) view that God is not only ontologically transcendent, but conceptually so, such that we can have no true beliefs Page 10 of 17 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: Durham University; date: 31 January 2019 Realism and Anti-realism about God. Where this is a concern, the realist/anti-realist distinction will be augmented to incorporate an epistemological clause, along the following lines: EPIST (i) Are statements about x true or false independently of our minds/our minds thinking about x/our beliefs about x/our evidence for x/our epistemic practices for discerning the truth or falsity about x? (ii) Can we in principle have access to some of these truths about x? On this construal, someone is only a realist if she can answer ‘yes’ to both (i) and (ii). In this case, (i) is framed to be neutral between different types of ontological realism/antirealism, as our focus is on the epistemological component. A level of epistemological confidence is made criterial for realism. A concern with the independence of the truth about x and our beliefs can also lead theologians and philosophers of religion with (p. 284) realist instincts in another direction: a determination that truths about God should not be reduced to the epistemic practices of an individual, group, or tradition. If extreme conceptual ‘transcendence’ is associated with Kantianism, this sort of reduction of truth to practices is more commonly diagnosed as Wittgensteinian (See Insole 2007: 364–82). In this case, the further epistemological condition will go along the following lines: (iii) Is it possible that our epistemically best beliefs about x could still be wrong? In (ii) epistemological confidence is built into the distinction, and in (iii) a sense of epistemic insecurity is stipulated. Thinkers are likely to gravitate towards one more than the other, depending on who or what they are reacting to, but there is no reason why both clauses could not be added to the core distinction: we can believe that we have access to some truths about x, but also that our epistemically best beliefs about x could still be wrong. This is especially the case if we construe having ‘access to some of these truths about x’ in (ii) as not requiring ‘knowledge’ (which usually involves true beliefs with a high degree of warrant), but simply ‘true beliefs’ (which might require some degree or type of warrant, but not to the same extent as knowledge). There have been criticisms of epistemological additions to the realist/anti-realist distinction (see Brock and Mares 2007: 6–7). The epistemic confidence condition (ii) is found to be implausible as a criterion for realism across the board: we can think of cases where there would in principle be unknowable objects/facts, but where we would not want this to undermine the possibility of their reality (facts about the past, facts about other universes, facts about objects outside the light cone). The epistemic insecurity condition (iii) has also been found wanting. It slips up when it comes to situations where we might be thought to have incorrigible and infallible knowledge. If one thought that we Page 11 of 17 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: Durham University; date: 31 January 2019 Realism and Anti-realism had such knowledge of our own existence (without some of the Cartesian accretions), it would seem peculiar to deny realism about our own existence upon this basis. These criticisms are well made if what we are searching for is a global criterion for realism and anti-realism across the board. But if, less ambitiously, we are looking for a working theological distinction, philosophers of religion and theologians have distinctive and appropriate reasons for building in these epistemological considerations. In both cases, the desire to add the epistemological clauses is as much motivated by theological considerations as general epistemology. They both arise from aspects of the doctrine of God: the epistemic confidence clause is inspired by the classical Christian belief that God is a God who acts and reveals Godself to creatures. This relates to a further irreducibly theological reason for endorsing something like (ii): faith. Faith is something of a sui generis epistemic category, distinctive to theology. On at least one mainstream understanding of faith, originating with Hugh of St Victor, coming through Aquinas, and still live in Kant’s first Critique, our assent to statements that can only be known through divine revelation (scripture, and other divine action, as mediated through the tradition) has the following features: we have evidence that is akin to the warrant we might have for a probable opinion (and not more than this), but, through a movement of the will, we hold to the beliefs with the certainty that we attach to knowledge, because (p. 285) of the importance of what is believed in, and because this movement of the will is caused by divine action (see Insole 2013: Ch. 7). At the same time, the God who is revealed is a God who is beyond our categories of conceptualization, free to be God beyond our grasp of God. The epistemic insecurity clause (iii) is theologically grounded in a meditation upon God’s transcendence and aseity, and the absolute independence of the creator ex nihilo from the creation (see Webster 2007: 147–62). Semantic Construals Emerging from twentieth-century analytical philosophy, there is a fourth way of characterizing the realist/anti-realist distinction, not in terms of cognitivism, ontological independence, or epistemic confidence/insecurity, but in terms of how concepts and statements get their meaning. The ‘anti-realist’ on this construal of the distinction maintains that our understanding of the meaning of the statement is given entirely by the conditions under which we are justified in asserting the statement. The ‘realist’ denies this, and maintains that (part of) the meaning of a statement is given by what would make it true, independently of the conditions under which we are justified in asserting the statement. There are cases where such a distinction seems quite apt: the meaning of the claim ‘Tony Hancock was very amusing’ would seem to be given by our grasp of the conditions under which we are justified in asserting the statement (people laughing). It would seem peculiar and heroic to insist on some further transcendent basis for this statement, beyond the assertability conditions. Other statements more intuitively seem to call for a realist analysis: ‘Saturn has two moons’, for example. Using our question Page 12 of 17 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: Durham University; date: 31 January 2019 Realism and Anti-realism format, the semantic realist/anti-realist distinction could be captured in the following terms: SEM Is the meaning of the statement x exhausted by the conditions under which we are justified in asserting x? On this construal, one is an anti-realist if one answers that the meaning of the statement x is exhausted by the conditions under which we are justified in asserting x, and one is a realist if one denies this. Typically, those who recommend the semantic characterization of the realism/anti-realism distinction are not content to let it be one apt-for-purpose distinction, which categorizes some statements as realist and others as anti-realist. The tendency is rather to insist that, contrary to pre-philosophical expectations, the meaning of all our statements is given entirely by the conditions under which we are justified in asserting them. Realism is construed—defined, even—as denying that the meaning of our statements is given by the conditions in which we are justified in asserting these statements. There is then a tendency amongst semantic anti-realists to insist that (p. 286) the realist denial—that the meaning of statements is exhausted by their assertability conditions—commits the realist (even if he or she does not realize it) to more or less impossible correspondence theories of truth, where somehow our belief-shaped judgements hook up onto an experience, which must be both experiential (to be part of the world) and non-experiential (to be part of our belief structure). Semantic anti-realism does not directly say anything about ontology, and is concerned not so much with what sort of things are true, as with the truth about truth. We can envisage someone who is a global semantic anti-realist and therefore a semantic anti-realist about the statement ‘there is a God’. Even the most committed realist would have to concede that the semantic anti-realist, by her own lights, believes in the truth of the statement that ‘there is a God’, inasmuch as she can believe that anything at all is true. It could be objected that the global semantic anti-realist is committed to at least a meta-level thesis that ontology has very little to do with the meaning (and so truth conditions) of our statements, and so does not really believe that ‘there is a God’. In debates where semantic anti-realism is at work, the italics often come out. But, at least if we do not want to say that semantic anti-realists really believe, we need a way to distinguish a person with this sort of general non-adherence to a particular conception of truth from someone who holds a realist conception of truth but does not really believe in the truth of the Christian faith. Once the difference between the semantic realist and anti-realist is put in terms of which conception of truth one holds, the debate becomes both fundamental, but also perhaps less serious. That is to say, we are not dealing with a confessional or doctrinal difference, nor with a disagreement between theist and atheist. Rather, we are dealing with a debate between two thinkers who confess belief in God, but who disagree about what a belief is. Both thinkers hold that it is true that there is a God, but they disagree philosophically about what constitutes such truth because they disagree about what constitutes truth as such. Page 13 of 17 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: Durham University; date: 31 January 2019 Realism and Anti-realism The debate between the semantic realist and anti-realist is one of the most nuanced and intricate in the literature, with clear distinctions and substantive commitments emerging briefly, only to vanish in the conceptual quicksand. Certain characteristic patterns and moves can be identified. The semantic anti-realist typically attempts to saddle the realist with implausible correspondence theories, whilst the realist tries to show that the antirealist requires a notion of the ‘epistemically ideal’, which ends up functioning as a synonym for (realist) truth, if anti-realism is to remain plausible. In what follows, a more ‘realist’ perspective on the debate is given first. The same issue is then construed through the eyes of a subtle and mercurial semantic anti-realist. At this point, it becomes unclear what precisely is at stake in the debate. First of all, I set out the more ‘realist’ perspective. If the meaning and truth conditions of a statement are exhausted by the conditions under which we are justified in asserting it, this cannot mean ‘any old conditions’ under which someone is justified in asserting the statement. Such conditions would be too diverse and inadequate to constitute the meaning of a statement. The meaning of the statement must be given by ‘ideally justified’ assertability conditions, or conditions that are ‘superassertible’. That is to say, they are the conditions under which an epistemically ideal subject would be justified in asserting x. Different (p. 287) semantic anti-realists take different approaches to this issue. Michael Dummett focuses on the way in which competent speakers acquire and manifest their understanding of the conditions under which a statement is verified. Hilary Putnam looks to an idealization of rational acceptability, and Crispin Wright to a similar conception of ‘superassertability’. In any case, however it is put, the realist worries that it can be hard to unpack the meaning of ‘competence’, or ‘ideal’, or ‘super’ in these formulations without drawing upon something that looks like ‘truth’ independent of our (contingent and inadequate) grasp of the conditions under which the statement is justified. Those suspicious of semantic anti-realism discern a slide towards an ideal epistemic agent that finds its resting place in God, returning by a circuitous route to divine-mind anti-realism. So a philosophical theologian who is otherwise a realist, might be led to reflect that there is a genuine debate as to whether semantic anti-realism applies to God’s grasp of statements: it looks quite plausible to suggest that God’s grasp of the meaning of a statement is co-extensive, or identical with, the conditions under which God is justified in assenting to the statement. God is always ideally justified, in such a way that there is no gap between truth and ideal justification. Related to this is the realist’s sense that the semantic anti-realist has failed to provide an account of the different assertability conditions of ‘true’ and ‘ideally justified’: we are able to understand statements such as ‘my belief is ideally justified according to all available standards, but it might not be true’, and for some religious believers the possibility of making such statements is rather important for their spiritual and epistemic humility. The inability to make such statements leads back to theological anxieties that surround the issue of epistemic insecurity, whereby God becomes reduced to a set of practices. The ‘Yale school’ of ‘post-liberal’ philosophical theology arguably has some affinities with semantic anti-realism, at least when it exclusively focuses on the Page 14 of 17 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: Durham University; date: 31 January 2019 Realism and Anti-realism grammatical assertability conditions of key doctrines, alongside a sense that sceptical anxieties about their ‘truth’ are fundamentally inappropriate. Typically, the implication is that such anxieties show a lack of proper doctrinal formation and theological commitment; it might be more charitable (and accurate) to acknowledge that the holding open of such realist/sceptical possibilities arises from a disagreement about the correct philosophical account of meaning, which in itself is a ‘secular’ philosophical dispute about which there is much to be said on both sides. There is nothing in the scriptures or tradition that commands us to have a globally semantic anti-realist theory of meaning. These critiques have arisen from a realist’s sense of what the semantic anti-realist is unable to account for. But a subtle semantic anti-realist would think that, inasmuch as the concept of ‘truth beyond ideal justification’ can be meaningful at all, semantic antirealism is perfectly well equipped to understand it. Such a concept of truth points, from within our immanent practices, to the shifting ideal limit of the epistemic virtues exemplified within our belief systems. A mercurial semantic anti-realist can indeed say that ‘my belief is ideally justified according to all available standards, but it might not be true’: the point is that such a claim gets its meaning not by being hitched onto an inaccessible ontological reality (what would that be, and how would it work?) but by marking up as transitional, from within practices of applying our epistemic virtues, whatever (p. 288) values of simplicity, explanatory power, and coherence are currently operating. The semantic anti-realist can say that it is not these virtues that exhaust the meaning of a concept such as truth, but that the work done by ‘truth’ is constantly stretching, reapplying, and transforming these same virtues. In the light of what will this stretching, reapplying, and transforming be untertaken? It would have to be in the light of other epistemic virtues, variously deployed and understood, against a further disappearing horizon of ideal justification, where the ‘ideality’ is never reduced to a particular set of practices. When the realist replies that this notion of an ideal limit does all the work done by a more traditional realist conception of truth, the semantic anti-realist can respond, ‘well exactly, but what is interesting here is not that the traditional concept of truth is back (which perhaps it is), but that the semantically anti-realist construal of truth has managed to swallow up the work done by the traditional conception’. The identity, for all practical purposes, of the semantic anti-realist’s ideal justification (where ideality is a disappearing limit) and the realist’s concept of truth (where we do not claim to know the whole truth) cuts both ways, and both sides can claim to have swallowed up the other. Once we have got to this point, it is unclear what, if anything, is at stake between the subtle realist (who does not claim to know the whole truth, or to be able to latch statements onto a corresponding reality) and the mercurial anti-realist (who does not claim the truth to be relative to any particular community of practice). Although the subtle (theological) realist and the mercurial (theological) anti-realist might converge, we could expect some more substantive disagreement between mercurial (secular) anti-realists and mercurial (theological) anti-realists, relating to the sort of ‘epistemic virtues’ to which each of these constituencies gravitate. We might expect the Page 15 of 17 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: Durham University; date: 31 January 2019 Realism and Anti-realism secular anti-realist to place a high value on elegant epistemic features such as simplicity, explanatory power, and coherence. At least some theologians (although not all) will have a different set of epistemic values, barely comprehensible to the secular anti-realist: for example, obedience, prayerfulness, discipleship, and faithfulness. As we have found before, we should be content when a disagreement finds its proper level. Here the disagreement is properly located around the question of what constitutes epistemic virtue, even where it is agreed that truth is immanent somehow to our epistemic virtues. As we have repeatedly found, a nuanced understanding of different ways of construing the realism/anti-realism distinction helps us to ask the right questions, rather than giving us a set of answers across the board. Concluding Reflections The legitimate diversity of ways of construing the distinction places limitations on its power and significance as a global categorization of a deep philosophical instinct or commitment. The distinction is a more-or-less appropriate tool, which can be used skilfully or ineptly, when trying to interpret the status of a particular set of statements. In this way, the distinction can be seen to have less in common with categorizations such as ‘religious/secular’, ‘theist/atheist’, and ‘empiricist/rationalist’, and more in common with (p. 289) (contestable, but still useful for many) terms of art such as ‘a priori/a posteriori’, ‘analytic/synthetic’, and ‘contingent/necessary’. That the distinction is not a natural kind also cuts the other way, and limits the scope for dismissing or ‘going beyond’ the distinction. The distinction is a term of art. One can object to the particular way it is framed in a particular situation, but to be ‘against’ the distinction altogether, in all circumstances, is just to be against precision, nuance, subtlety, and rigour in thinking as such. Such an obfuscatory policy might itself be apt for some purposes, but these purposes will hardly be clarity of thought, or philosophical illumination. In the whole warp and weft of our creaturely lives, clarity of thought is not everything. The purposes to which the distinction, and refusals to engage with the distinction, can be turned include precision, clarity, negotiation, dialectic, apologetics, therapy (of the Wittgensteinian kind), polemic, conversion, and demolition. We had at least better get a grip on which purpose is being served by a particular construal or refusal we are being subjected to, or subjecting others to. References Alston, William (1995). ‘Realism and the Christian Faith’. International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion 38: 37–60. Aquinas, Thomas (2006). Summa Theologiae, Blackfriars Edition. Ed. Thomas Gilby O.P. et al. 61 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brock, Stuart and Mares, Edwin (2007). Realism and Anti-Realism. Durham: Acumen Publishing. Page 16 of 17 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: Durham University; date: 31 January 2019 Realism and Anti-realism Craig, Edward (2012). ‘Realism and Antirealism’. Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://www.rep.routledge.com. Insole, Christopher J. (2007). ‘The Truth behind Practices: Wittgenstein, Robinson Crusoe and Ecclesiology’. Studies in Christian Ethics 20: 364–82. Insole, Christopher J. (2013). Kant and the Creation of Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Trigg, Roger (2010). ‘Theological Realism and Antirealism’. In Charles Taliaferro, Paul Draper, and Philip L. Quinn (eds.), A Companion to Philosophy of Religion. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 651–8. Webster, John (2007). ‘God’s Aseity’. In Andrew Moore and Michael Scott (eds.), Realism and Religion: Philosophical and Theological Perspectives. Aldershot: Ashgate, 147–62. Suggested Reading Brock and Mares (2007). Craig (2012). Insole, Christopher J. (2006). The Realist Hope: a Critique of Anti-Realist Approaches in Contemporary Philosophical Theology. Aldershot: Ashgate. Moore, Andrew (2003). Realism and Christian Faith: God, Grammar and Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Trigg (2010). Christopher J. Insole Christopher J. Insole is Professor in the Department of Theology and Religion at Durham University. Page 17 of 17 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: Durham University; date: 31 January 2019