Epilogue: Relative Realism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
Realism Restored
“To say that self-sufficient thought always refers to a thought enmeshed in language,” says Merleau-Ponty, “is not to say that thought is alienated or that language cuts thought off from truth and certainty.” If we have done nothing else in the foregoing pages, we have offered a rich series of amplifications of that teasing remark. Analytic philosophers, though, are apt to take a dim view of talk of thought being enmeshed in language. The atmosphere of many departmental coffee-rooms when that sort of thing comes up is nicely caught by J. A. Fodor in a passage which we have found occasion to quote already (Chapter 11 §ⅶ n. 20).
The upshot is a familiar sort of postmodern Idealism according to which science speaks only of itself: “Il n'y a rien beyond the geology text”, and all that. There are traces, in [Chomsky's] New Horizons, of incipient sympathy with this Wittgenstein-Goodman-Kuhn-Derrida sort of picture, but it is one that I think a respectable Realist should entirely abjure. Science is not just another language-game; and, no, Virginia, we didn't make the stars. Pray god that no miasmal mist from Harvard has seeped up the Charles to MIT.
Philosophers since Russell have, broadly speaking, taken a commitment to Referential Realism, in one or other of its many forms, to be essential to the preservation of the sort of “respectable Realism” Fodor here invokes.
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- Word and WorldPractice and the Foundations of Language, pp. 347 - 382Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003