Realism, antirealism and the middle way

I'm calling it Demirealism, but that's mostly an in-joke

Photo by Alex on Unsplash

The separation is a subtle one: the antelope hunted at dawn is not far removed from the antelope deity in that night’s storytelling. The border is porous. Myths nourish science, and science nourishes myth. But the value of knowledge remains. If we find the antelope we can eat.

Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

I’ve had lots of interesting conversations about realism and antirealism in the last few months. It’s an interesting topic, albeit mostly only to philosophy nerds. But I think it contains some useful broader lessons.

Broadly, the realist position says that objective truths exist — facts whose character does not depend on the context or the mind of the observer — and that our claims about reality can correspond to them.

The anti-realist position says the opposite: that facts cannot be objective, and all truth and facthood depend on human practices (language, culture, practice, pre-existing concepts), so our claims should not be understood as straightforwardly corresponding to a mind- independent reality. More extreme versions of this view question whether a “mind independent reality” is even possible.

Neither of these positions feels very satisfying to me. At their extremes, both lead to absurd outcomes.

At the extreme, the anti-realist position leads us into a self-referential cul-de-sac. If truths are always contextual, it becomes hard to confidently explain or criticise much at all. Every claim can be defended or challenged only by appealing to the same context — the patchwork of language, practice, culture, societal norms and assumptions — that both the claim and the criticism were born in. When that happens, we lose our common ground. Instead of being anchored in a material world that pushes back on all of us in similar (if mysterious) ways, we’re set adrift in a sea of circular whatabouttery¹. The sense that we are learning something about the world, rather than merely rearranging our descriptions of it, starts to slip away.

But, contrary to the view of most people who critique this sort of relativism, the realist position at the opposite end of the spectrum isn’t any better. It leads us into a cul-de- sac on the other side of the street, where we have the hubris to think that we, or our tribe, uniquely in the world, possess some understanding of reality so extraordinary in its objectivity and rightness that it entitles us to trample on the views (and frequently the rights) of others. It’s the ultimate expression of mistaking the map for the territory, of believing our faculties of reason and experience to sit outside of the world, able to puzzle its operations into some ultimate, objective, mathematical orderliness².

An only-slightly-milder version of this realism is endemic in the western world, partly because it’s more useful. You can get a lot more done if you swap your relativist cosmic shrug for a worldly toolkit of certainties. It will not have escaped anyone’s notice that the world’s billionaires are not postmodernists.

But, for all its seeming effectiveness, the world’s current tendency towards realism creates other problems. The realist perspective depends structurally on the assumption, or more charitably, the belief, that the mental model we have of the world corresponds to the actual underlying reality of things. This is what generates the confidence that we know what’s going on and what we can do to create the change we want. And that confidence is what gives rise to a great many moral claims. We must do things this way, because of these irrefutable facts³.

But there is no such correspondence, and cannot be. Helmholtz wrote about this in the late 1860s in his substantial philosophical tome, Treatise on Physiological Optics: much of which actually is about optics, and the functioning of the eye. But towards the end, he turns his attention to perception: what happens after the eye has done its job?

Optics makes the argument that our perceptions of the world are born of both the observed phenomenon in the world and the biological and mental machinery we used to perceive it:

“To expect to obtain an idea which would reproduce the nature of the thing conceived, that is, which would be true in an absolute sense, would mean to expect an effect which would be perfectly independent of the nature of the thing on which the effect was produced; which would be an obvious absurdity.”

Hermann von Helmholtz, Treatise on Physiological Optics

In other words, the mental model we have of the world is, and can only ever be, some combination of the real world as it exists and the perceptual machinery we used to observe it. It’s a mixture of the world and the way you think, equally as inseparable as the milk I stir daily into my tea. We can try to tease the two apart and may experience some success in doing that - but it will never be reliable or complete.

So the realist ideal of a truly objective, mind-independent perspective will always elude us. But this doesn’t rescue the anti-realists. There is a real, objective, actual material reality. It’s just one that is forever beyond our reach: not because we lack the right tools, philosophy, model or insight, but as a structural feature of the way perception works.

So far, so abstract, one might say. But it really isn’t: we are living through the problems caused by this mindset. Modern institutions, technologies, and systems are built on the assumption that our models of the world are not just useful, but fundamentally correct: accurate enough to justify decisive action. Accurate enough to override judgement, intuition or a principled stance, because they are Objective. But they really aren’t, because nothing is.

Setting aside this inconvenient reality leads us to to hubris, to overconfidence and short-termism. It leads us to engage with the world without knowing that we’re wearing blinkers that trap us in mental models and prevailing paradigms that limit not only the range of things we might do, but the range of things it is possible for us to imagine.

Normal science, operating within an established paradigm “does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none” said Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The paradigm is invisible to those inside it. A magnificent example of this kind of intellectual blinker is Bryan Kam’s Latent Platonism. It’s the idea that Plato was so influential to western thought that western people think in terms of platonic forms without even realising, in the form of an unconscious preference for abstract concepts over direct experience:

“[Latent Platonism is] the conviction (mostly implicit, as the term suggests) that our concepts are more real than our experience, that the world should conform to our fixed conceptual models, and that if it does not, something is wrong with us, other people, or the world”

Bryan Kam & Isabella Granic, Neither/Nor preprint

We all engage with the world using mental machinery that we are barely aware of. For almost everyone, the models and paradigms that guide our lives are not of our own choosing, let alone our own making. Our engagement with the world is so fundamentally and unavoidably shaped by our cultures and the thinkers who have come before us that we don’t even notice it’s happening. But it’s possible to pay more attention, and by degrees, to find one’s way to a different point of view.

“There are no worlds ready-made for sale or to let. Each man must build his own. This effort of the mind to build the materials of sensation into an intelligible world, and this struggle of the will to mould the relations of persons into a moral order, is philosophy. Every man must have a philosophy, just as he must wear a coat. It may be a firmly woven and well-fitted garment: it may be a patch-work of tradition and prejudice.”

William Hyde, Practical Idealism

For me, being the ex-hyper-rational-materialist that I find myself to be, this means generally trying to more frequently and more explicitly nudge my mental machinery a bit, to make it less complacent. And, more specifically, to mindfully avoid both realist and anti-realist tropes and firmly chart a middle way. The more moderate realists and anti-realists do this already, and in so doing, end up more or less agreeing with one another (though I’m not sure they’d agree with me).

The careful realist says “our models are approximate and fallible, but circling something real” and the careful anti-realist says “there’s a world out there pushing back on us, but we can’t access it unmediated by our concepts and practices”. This is the mindful treatment of the problem that I want to find, and internalise. To make, if you will, into a new coat.

We need facts. We need an idea of where things are, and some ability to reason and predict, a basis to take action. We need to have something to hang our hats on. We need, in times of disagreement, to find things that we can agree on. The reality of the physical world gives us that, along with brute reminders when we get it wrong.

But we also need open-mindedness, an awareness of the limitations of perception and reason, and an openness to experience that is not readily conceptualisable. We need to reclaim judgement and intuition as important tools -- manifestations of embodied knowledge -- not biases to be weeded out. We need to write and use our spreadsheets with wisdom and humility, because we can’t code any of that into them directly. Here’s Helmholtz again:

To ask whether the idea I have of a table, its form, strength, colour, weight, etc., is true per se, apart from any practical use I can make of this idea, and whether it corresponds with the real thing, or is false and due to an illusion, has just as much sense as to ask whether a certain musical note is red, yellow or blue.

Hermann von Helmholtz, Treatise on Physiological Optics

He’s right⁴. But it doesn’t stop us sitting at tables. We mustn’t give up on facts. But we mustn’t hold them too tightly either.

1. Some circularity is good - when it’s iterative. But what makes it good, iterative, pragmatic circularity is the connection to some reality which forces it in a particular direction. Without that, circles can only be vicious. Initially I misspelled this as viscous, which made me laugh. Maybe it would be that too.

2. Aside: I think most philosophers who identify with these terms would object to these as describing extreme positions -- which they do. But that’s deliberate. I’m trying to talk about this as it operates in the real world: billionaires and social media activists, not academics and authors.

3. Or indeed, just because that’s _right way_. It’s the leap from “is” to “ought” that Hume warned us about centuries ago, and that realists tend to make without noticing.

4. To any synesthetes who may be reading: please forgive him, he didn’t know!