11 quotes
The positive argument for realism is that it is the only philosophy that doesn't make the success of science a miracle.
No sane person should believe that something is 'subjective' merely because it cannot be settled beyond controversy.
The Many Faces of Realism (1987)
It was Rudolf Carnap’s dream for the last three decades of his life to show that science proceeds by a formal syntactic method; today no one to my knowledge holds out any hope for that project.
in: James Conant, Urszula M. Zeglen (2012)
Truth and falsity are the most fundamental terms of rational criticism, and any adequate philosophy must give some account of these, or failing that, show that they can be dispensed with.
Philosophical Papers Volume 2: Mind, Language and Reality (1975)
The physicist who states a law of nature with the aid of a mathematical formula is abstracting a real feature of a real material world, even if he has to speak of numbers, vectors, tensors, state-functions, or whatever to make the abstraction.
Philosophical Papers Volume 1: Mathematics, Matter, and Method (1975)
To require that all of these must be reducible to a single version is to make the mistake of supposing that 'Which are the real objects?' is a question that makes sense independently of our choice of concepts.
The Many Faces of Realism (1987)
Philosophers today are as fond as ever of apriori arguments with ethical conclusions. One reason such arguments are always unsatisfying is that they always prove too much; when a philosopher 'solves' an ethical problem for one, one feels as if one had asked for a subway token and been given a passenger ticket valid for the first interplanetary passenger-carrying space ship instead.
Realism with a Human Face (1992)
In sum, a theory is only accepted if the theory has substantial, non-ad hoc, explanatory successes. This is in accordance with Popper; unfortunately, it is in even better accordance with the 'inductivist' accounts that Popper rejects, since these stress support rather than falsification.
Philosophical Papers Volume 1: Mathematics, Matter, and Method (1975)
The problem with all this--the problem I discussed in the first lecture--is that if the causes/background conditions distinction is fundamentally subjective, not descriptive of the world in itself, then current philosophical explanations of the metaphysical nature of reference are bankrupt.
The Many Faces of Realism (1987)
Even though the model referred to satisfies the theory, etc., it is 'unintended'; and we recognize that it is unintended from the description through which it is given (as in the intuitionist case). Models are not lost noumenal waifs looking for someone to name them; they are constructions within our theory itself. and they have names from birth.
Philosophical Papers Volume 3: Realism and Reason (1983)
The similarity between Marxism and neoconservativism might be expressed in the following way: both perspectives say that certain injustices can't be cured under our present system of political democracy and mixed economy. The Marxist concludes that we have to overthrow the present system and the neoconservative concludes that we have to live with the injustices. But they are both wrong.
Realism with a Human Face (1992)