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to write, `The logic of scientific discovery' is to take seriously the y that Lakatos has, like the Greeks,
made the eternal lepend on a mere episode in the history of human
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remains an optimistic version of this worry/ Lakatos was characterize certain objective values of
Western science n appeal to copy theories of truth. Maybe those objective recent enough that his
limitation to the past two or three is exactly right. We are left with no external way to >ur own tradition,
but why should we want that?
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BREAK
Reals and representations
Incommensurability, transcendental nominalism, surrogates for truth, and styles of reasoning are the
jargon of philosophers. They arise from contemplating the connection between theory and the world.
All lead to an idealist cul-de-sac. None invites a healthy sense of reality. Indeed much recent
philosophy of science parallels seventeenth-century epistemology. By attending only to knowledge as
representation of nature, we wonder how we can ever escape from representations and hook-up with
the world. That way lies an idealism of which Berkeley is the spokesman/ In our century John Dewey
has spoken sardonically of a spectator theory of knowledge that has obsessed Western philosophy. If
we are mere spectators at the theatre of life, how shall we ever know, on grounds internal to the
passing show, what is mere representation by the actors, and what is the real thing? If there were a
sharp distinction between theory and observation, then perhaps we could count on what is observed
as real, while theories, which merely represent, are ideal/ But when philosophers begin to teach that
all observation is loaded with theory, we seem completely locked into representation, and hence into
some version of idealism.
Pity poor Hilary Putnam, for example/ Once the most realist of philosophers, he tried to get out of
representation by tacking `reference' on at the end of the list of elements that constitute the meaning
of a word. It was as if some mighty referential sky-hook could enable our language to embed within it a
bit of the very stuff to which it refers. Yet Putnam could not rest there, and ended up as an ` internal
realist' only, beset by transcendental doubts, and given to some kind of idealism or nominalism.
I agree with Dewey. I follow him in rejecting the false dichotomy between acting and thinking from
which such idealism arises. Perhaps all the philosophies of science that I have described are part of a
larger spectator theory of knowledge. Yet I do not think that the idea of knowledge as representation of
the world is in itself the
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source of that evil. The harm comes from a single-minded obsession with representation and thinking
and theory, at the expense of intervention and action and experiment. That is why in the next part of
this book I study experimental science, and find in it the sure basis of an uncontentious realism. But
before abandoning theory for experiment, let us think a little more about the very notions of
representation and reality.
The origin of ideas
What are the origins of these two ideas, representation and reality? Locke might have asked that
question as part of a psychological inquiry, seeking to show how the human mind forms, frames, or
constitutes its ideas. There is a legitimate science that studies the maturation of human intellectual
abilities, but philosophers often play a different game when they examine the origin of ideas. They tell
fables in order to teach philosophical lessons. Locke himself was fashioning a parable when he
pretended to practice the natural history of the mind. Our modern psychologies have learned how to
trick themselves out in more of the paraphernalia of empirical research, but they are less distant from
fantastical Locke than they assume. Let us, as philosophers, welcome fantasies. There may be more
truth in the average a priori fantasy about the human mind than in the supposedly disinterested
observations and mathematical model-building of cognitive science.
Philosophical anthropology
Imagine a philosophical text of about 1850: `Reality is as much an anthropomorphic creation as God
Himself.' This is not to be uttered in a solemn tone of voice that says, `God is dead and so is reality.' It
is to be a more specific and practical claim: Reality is just a byproduct of an anthropological fact. More
modestly, the concept of reality is a byproduct of a fact about human beings.
By anthropology I do not mean ethnography or ethnology, the studies practised in present-day
departments of anthropology, and which involve lots of field work. By anthropology I mean the bogus
nineteenth-century science of `Man'. Kant once had three philosophical questions. What must be the
case? What should we do? For what may we hope? Late in life he added a fourth question: What is
Man? With this he inaugurated (philosophische) Anthropologie and
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even wrote a book called Anthropology. Realism is not to be considered part of pure reason, nor
judgement, nor the metaphysics of morals, nor even the metaphysics of natural science. If we are to
give it classification according to the titles of Kant's great books, realism shall be studied as part of
Anthropologie itself.
A Pure Science of Human Beings is a bit risky. When Aristotle proposed that Man is an animal that
lives in cities, so that the polis is a part of Man's nature to which He strives, his pupil Alexander
refuted him by re-inventing the Empire. We have been told that Man is a tool-maker, or a creature
that has a thumb, or that stands erect. We have been told that these fortuitous features are noticed
only by attending to half of the species wrongly called Man, and that tools, thumbs and erectness are
scarcely what define the race. It is seldom clear what the grounds might be for any such statements,
pro or con. Suppose one person defines humans as rational, and another person defines them as the
makers of tools. Why on earth should we suppose that being a rational animal is co-extensive with
making tools?
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