Yeah. I’m trying to argue for the view that anti-realism isn’t about denying the existence of the domain at hand. It’s more about “the domain exists and is ambiguous” instead of “the domain doesn’t exist.”
Admittedly, some anti-realists may use eliminativist rhetoric, saying things like “consciousness doesn’t exist.” But even there, I would guess that the explanation of their position goes something like “I understand why people talk as though consciousness is objective, but I think it works differently from how people think it works. There is something going on, but it’s not what people commonly call ‘consciousness.’”
Realists: “There is a reality and some of our concepts, like consciousness or the color blue, directly map to features of this reality.”
Non-Realists: “There is a reality, but we only observe a filtered and transformed reflection and (therefore?) all our concepts are unescapably laden with additional assumptions. Because of this, our concepts can never directly map to features of this reality and should never be called objective or real.”
Not really. In the duck-rabbit illusion, the image itself is clear. (I mean OK, the figure is coarse-grained as far as digital images can go, but that’s not the main reason why the image allows for different interpretations. You could also imagine a duck-rabbit illusion with better graphics.) The argument isn’t about the indirectness of perception.
Maybe a good slogan for the anti-realists would be “reality doesn’t come with labels.” There’s a fact of the matter about how atoms (or 1s and 0s) are allocated, but how we draw categories comes down to subjective judgment calls.
Maybe a good slogan for the anti-realists would be “reality doesn’t come with labels.” There’s a fact of the matter about how atoms (or 1s and 0s) are allocated, but how we draw categories comes down to subjective judgment calls.
But how we draw categories, and what subjective judgement calls we make, directly results from how atoms (or 1s and 0s) are arranged. In other words, we, and our processes for creating labels, are part of reality. (This is at least if we assume certain forms of dualism is false, or something like that; I’m not a philosopher.)
I don’t think that that idea is enough to support moral realism—or at least non-naturalist realism—because such a realism would want to suggest some labels are right, not just that reality comes with them. (Or something like that; I’m definitely confused here.)
But it makes me feel like this “slogan for the anti-realist” might not quite capture what anti-realists are trying to claim? Or at least that I might not be understanding what the slogan is meant to convey?
Does the following statement of the slogan seem to you to capture the anti-realist position: “Reality doesn’t come with objectively correct labels. Humans create labels and draw categories, and how they do this will be determined by physical reality, but there’s no separate criteria determining how humans should do this; there’s nothing more/other than how they will do this.”
Does the following statement of the slogan seem to you to capture the anti-realist position: “Reality doesn’t come with objectively correct labels. Humans create labels and draw categories, and how they do this will be determined by physical reality, but there’s no separate criteria determining how humans should do this; there’s nothing more/other than how they will do this.”
Yeah, that sounds right! It carries more information than my crude proposal.
As you suggest, moral naturalists might agree that reality (obviously) doesn’t carry labels. They might argue that in a way, it kind of screams out at you where you can put the labels. And the anti-realist position is that there’s more ambiguity than “it just screams out at you.”
While the distinction between anti-realism and non-naturalism seems relatively clearcut, I think the distinction between anti-realism and naturalism is a bit loose. This is also reflected in Luke Muehlhauser’s Pluralistic Moral Reductionism post. Luke left it open whether to count PMR as realism or anti-realism. By contrast, my terminological choice has been to count it as anti-realism.
I also feel that “naturalistic moral realism” doesn’t really “capture” what I want from moral realism. So in that sense I think I’d share your view that the distinction between anti-realism and moral naturalism seems loose, and that the latter might be better thought of as anti-realism. (I also think that what I want from “realism” is probably some sort of weird spooky thing that I’d normally reject a desire for on reductionist grounds, so to that extent I’m inclined to agree with much of what you’re writing.)
Hmm, okay, thanks for trying to help me understand. How is “reality doesn’t come with labels” different from the earlier “all interpretations are wrong [but some are useful]”? I still struggle with understanding where my discomfort with the anti-realist stance comes from. I agree that categories are made by us. But what am I missing when I say
“There is a reality that is governed by simple laws that result in complex patterns. We try to understand this reality by imposing coarse and often misleading labels. Some concepts like elan vital are more misleading, some are less misleading, like atoms. For some concepts it’s still very unclear what they correspond to, for example conscious experiences, but it seems premature to conclude that they are so misleading as being worth abandoning.”
Yeah. I’m trying to argue for the view that anti-realism isn’t about denying the existence of the domain at hand. It’s more about “the domain exists and is ambiguous” instead of “the domain doesn’t exist.”
Admittedly, some anti-realists may use eliminativist rhetoric, saying things like “consciousness doesn’t exist.” But even there, I would guess that the explanation of their position goes something like “I understand why people talk as though consciousness is objective, but I think it works differently from how people think it works. There is something going on, but it’s not what people commonly call ‘consciousness.’”
Thanks. Hmm, just to test if I got it right:
Realists: “There is a reality and some of our concepts, like consciousness or the color blue, directly map to features of this reality.”
Non-Realists: “There is a reality, but we only observe a filtered and transformed reflection and (therefore?) all our concepts are unescapably laden with additional assumptions. Because of this, our concepts can never directly map to features of this reality and should never be called objective or real.”
Not really. In the duck-rabbit illusion, the image itself is clear. (I mean OK, the figure is coarse-grained as far as digital images can go, but that’s not the main reason why the image allows for different interpretations. You could also imagine a duck-rabbit illusion with better graphics.) The argument isn’t about the indirectness of perception.
Maybe a good slogan for the anti-realists would be “reality doesn’t come with labels.” There’s a fact of the matter about how atoms (or 1s and 0s) are allocated, but how we draw categories comes down to subjective judgment calls.
But how we draw categories, and what subjective judgement calls we make, directly results from how atoms (or 1s and 0s) are arranged. In other words, we, and our processes for creating labels, are part of reality. (This is at least if we assume certain forms of dualism is false, or something like that; I’m not a philosopher.)
I don’t think that that idea is enough to support moral realism—or at least non-naturalist realism—because such a realism would want to suggest some labels are right, not just that reality comes with them. (Or something like that; I’m definitely confused here.)
But it makes me feel like this “slogan for the anti-realist” might not quite capture what anti-realists are trying to claim? Or at least that I might not be understanding what the slogan is meant to convey?
Does the following statement of the slogan seem to you to capture the anti-realist position: “Reality doesn’t come with objectively correct labels. Humans create labels and draw categories, and how they do this will be determined by physical reality, but there’s no separate criteria determining how humans should do this; there’s nothing more/other than how they will do this.”
Yeah, that sounds right! It carries more information than my crude proposal.
As you suggest, moral naturalists might agree that reality (obviously) doesn’t carry labels. They might argue that in a way, it kind of screams out at you where you can put the labels. And the anti-realist position is that there’s more ambiguity than “it just screams out at you.”
While the distinction between anti-realism and non-naturalism seems relatively clearcut, I think the distinction between anti-realism and naturalism is a bit loose. This is also reflected in Luke Muehlhauser’s Pluralistic Moral Reductionism post. Luke left it open whether to count PMR as realism or anti-realism. By contrast, my terminological choice has been to count it as anti-realism.
That makes sense.
I also feel that “naturalistic moral realism” doesn’t really “capture” what I want from moral realism. So in that sense I think I’d share your view that the distinction between anti-realism and moral naturalism seems loose, and that the latter might be better thought of as anti-realism. (I also think that what I want from “realism” is probably some sort of weird spooky thing that I’d normally reject a desire for on reductionist grounds, so to that extent I’m inclined to agree with much of what you’re writing.)
Hmm, okay, thanks for trying to help me understand. How is “reality doesn’t come with labels” different from the earlier “all interpretations are wrong [but some are useful]”? I still struggle with understanding where my discomfort with the anti-realist stance comes from. I agree that categories are made by us. But what am I missing when I say