File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_1997/bhaskar.9711, message 5


Date: Sat, 01 Nov 1997 14:27:01
To: bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
From: Louis Irwin <lirwin1-AT-ix.netcom.com>
Subject: Re: Re(2): BHA: For Ralph?????


Gary Alexander wrote:

>Critical Realism seems to extend the meaning of what is 'real' way
>beyond the bounds of physical existence (i.e. stuff made out of materials)
>which to my naive way of looking at it, would seem to be a good, practical
>definition. If my subjective views are a sub-set of what is real, (as I
>have interpreted some earlier messages) can you give me some examples of
>what isn't real? And more importantly, why do you think it is useful to
>have that kind of definition for 'reality'?

I don't think CR has extended the meaning of "real" in the manner you
suggest.  Realism has long been viewed as broader than materialism by
thinkers of many stripes.  (1) Many, such as Descartes, have long held the
real existence of ideas without reducing them to matter, whether or not
they posit a special mental substance.  (2) A ship or a university has long
been recognized (at least since Hobbes) to be irreducible to its physical
materials: a ship remains the same even if all its planks over time are
completely replaced, similarly for a university.  A ship could be regarded
as a complex relation involving its parts and the society that built it,
but those real relations are not matter.  The reality of relations goes
back a very long way, at least to Plato.

One important focus of CR is the independence of things from our ideas
about them, and what is unique is the way that view is argued, based on
presuppositions of scientific and other experience.

Louis Irwin



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