Ontology and realism about modality

Scientific realism and ontology

Economists customarily talk about the ‘realism’ of economic models and of their assumptions and make descriptive and prescriptive judgements about them: this model has more realism in it than that, the realism of assumptions does not matter, and so on. This is not the way philosophers mostly use the term ‘realism’ thus there is a major terminological discontinuity between the two disciplines. T...

Naive Realism about Operators

A source of much difficulty and confusion in the interpretation of quantum mechanics is a “naive realism about operators.” By this we refer to various ways of taking too seriously the notion of operator-as-observable, and in particular to the all too casual talk about “measuring operators” that occurs when the subject is quantum mechanics. Without a specification of what should be meant by “mea...

Realism about Behavior

Behavior analysis emphasizes the study of overt animal (human and nonhuman) behavior as a subject matter in its own right. This paper provides a metaphysical foundation for such an emphasis via an elucidation of a thesis that I generically call “realism about behavior,” where by “realism” I mean an assertion of mindindependent existence. The elucidation takes the form of a conceptual framework ...

Some Realism About Empiricism

Realism and Anti-Realism about experiences of understanding

Strawson (1994) and Peacocke (1992) introduced thought experiments that show that it seems intuitive that there is, in some way, an experiential character to mental events of understanding. Some (e.g., Siewert 1998, 2011; Pitt 2004) try to explain these intuitions by saying that just as we have, say, headache experiences and visual experiences of blueness, so too we have experiences of understa...