Realism against Legitimacy

Against 'realism'

We examine the prevalent use of the phrase “local realism” in the context of Bell’s Theorem and associated experiments, with a focus on the question: what exactly is the “realism” in “local realism” supposed to mean? Carefully surveying several possible meanings, we argue that all of them are flawed in one way or another as attempts to point out a second premise (in addition to locality) on whi...

Against Yagisawa’s Modal Realism

In his book Worlds and Individuals, Possible and Otherwise (2010), Takashi Yagisawa presents and argues for a novel and imaginative version of modal realism. It differs both from Lewis’s modal realism (Lewis 1986) and from actualists’ ersatz accounts (Adams 1974; Sider 2002). Yagisawa draws interesting parallels between tense and modality, and gives a metaphysics of modality which comes close t...

Two Arguments against Realism

Over the last 20 years or so, Hilary Putnam has developed a series of arguments which use basic theorems of model theory to undermine semantic realism. Here, I discuss two generalizations of these arguments. The first employs some new forms of model theory to generate substantially stronger conclusions than Putnam’s original arguments generated. The second illustrates a method for replacing the...

Between Legal Realism and Neutral Principles: The Legitimacy of Institutional Values

21 Realism / Anti - Realism

The main realism/anti-realism issue in the philosophy of science is the issue of scientific realism, concerned with the unobservable entities of science. However, there is also a more general issue, often known as “realism about the external world,” concerned primarily with the observable entities of common sense, but which spreads to scientific entities, both observable and unobservable. The i...