Here’s a nice corrective to all the realist claims currently being bandied about with regards to such things as systems theory:
Any domain of science that asserts the existence of systems, and/or uses the language of ”functionality” and “organization”, in order to explain the existence of components of those systems, is idealist in character. This would include much of biology, systems theory, cybernetics, complex systems theory, ecology, population theory and so on. It would also include the social and psychological sciences, where they rely on functional or systemic explanation, and theories of organization (Dunham, Grant & Watson, Idealism: The History of a Philosophy).
Can’t say I disagree with any of this, but it really serves to highlight the whole problem with the realism/idealism debate – With very few exceptions (most of which are more intellectually interesting than philosophically practical), most positions are neither purely realist nor purely idealist. Consequently all this arguing about whether or not someone is an idealist is a complete waste of time.*
Somewhere in his astonishing Hegel’s Ladder (a work three times as long as the book it is commenting upon), H.S. Harris describes the whole realism/idealism debate as a sterile logomachy – That sounds about right to me.
*There is one exception – Collingwood’s description of Russell as ‘our great Berkleyian’, which is possibly the most concise and damning critique of sense data that one could come up with from Russell’s point of view. Also, it makes me laugh.
May 29, 2011 at 11:49 am |
Oh well, another one to add to my summer reading pile, sigh.
Logomachy sounds mostly right (once I’d looked it up to see what it meant) – but been sure (with little to no supporting argument) that the real division is between those that think there is something interesting to be said about truth, whether it’s correspondance, coherence, disclosure, revelation, unveiling, etc. and those that don’t.
One reason (amongst many) why some of the idealist / realist debates seem so sterile is that they are using different notions of truth and so are talking completely past one another.
Not sure (and happyish to be corrected on this) that you can be either a realist or an idealist unless you’re hanging on to some kind, any kind of a metaphysical notion of truth. Even if this is complete nonsense, and even if you don’t like the deflationary approaches to truth, to call, just for instance Hegel and Heidegger idealists, when they have such different ideas about truth is obscuring something important. Actually having written that, I’m now thinking that maybe they didn’t have such different ideas about truth – but my point still holds, just pick two important idealists who do have different theories of truth.
“Truth is metaphysical” is true iff la vérité est métaphysique
ftw
Which also has to be one of the more absurd sentences I’ve ever written. And possibly paradoxical too, think Quine would have approved as he thought paradoxes marked a place where something interesting was going wrong.
May 29, 2011 at 5:18 pm |
I take it that the book you want to add to your reading pile is the idealism one rather than Hegel’s Ladder.
You should read it, it’s very entertaining – A historical trawl through idealism from Parmenides to Deleuze(!), McDowell and Brandom, grouped around the central theme that naturalism and idealism are not incompatible (this is a thesis that I have come to have a great deal of sympathy with as I get sucked ever deeper into the Hegelian swamp). I’ve not finished it yet, but I’m enjoying it immensely. There’s not a huge amount of detail, but there is an awful lot of breadth.
I agree with you about the role of truth in all this – What a long way we’ve come from when we used to sit around cursing epistemology and organising materialism seminars!