Antirealism

Definition

A first direction in defining antirealism, associated with the Anglo-American analytical tradition, lies with the bewildering range of meanings realism takes upon itself. For instance, where Plato argued for ideas being real, naïve realists may take, even mistake, appearance for reality. Again, while positivists insist on the observable existence of phenomena, many scientific realists treat their theories as real. Thus an issue for different types of realists can be over what forms the building blocks of the world take, with, say, electrons having predictive force but being otherwise unobservable. In their form of antirealism, instrumentalists allow electrons to exist within theory as long as the theory works, but think nothing more can be said about them ontologically (see Lakatos's 1981 writing), that is, about their innate and true nature. In rescuing phenomenalism (a philosophical theory stating that knowledge of the external world is limited to appearances so that we know only what our senses tell us about things; sense-data) from reductionism (the argument that proposes the proper task of analysis to reduce things to their simplest constituent parts in order to explain or understand them), Michael Dummet has also drawn attention to links between antirealism and the intuitivist position, whereby the truth of a mathematical statement subsists in its proof, not in its correspondence to some external structure.

A second direction, taken by European philosophers, lies with rejections of realist claims becoming ever more sophisticated. Martin Heidegger in particular deploys his skepticism to deconstruct the tradition of meta-physics, and so avoids the two the most familiar counterpositions to realism: nominalism (the philosophical doctrine that no realities exist other than concrete individual objects) and idealism (the philosophical belief that material things do not exist independently but only as constructions in the mind). Questions of the real are split between (1) the question of whether it is necessary to prove the existence of reality and (2) the project to show this reality to be external. Inasmuch as the method of doubt since Heidegger is nuanced toward challenging the integrity of the latter project, antirealists can be more or less agnostic about the first issue. In respecting commonsense stories as part of “world-making,” Nelson Goodman, for example, might be said to hold an analogous position to scientific antirealists, that our stories of reality will do as long as the world works in the way we think. Irrealism is an alternative tag suggested by Goodman for those who want to put aside the entire set of issues associated with realism, but this would then hardly include the work of cultural anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz, social thinkers such as Georg Simmel, Alfred Schutz, or Harold Garfinkel, who all take the social construction of everyday life seriously.

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