Perception, Empiricism, and Pragmatist Realism

Some Realism About Empiricism

Structural Realism or Modal Empiricism?

Structural realism has been suggested as the best compromise in the debate on scientific realism. It proposes that we should be realist about the relational structure of the world, not its nature. However it faces an important objection, first raised by Newman against Russell: if relations are not qualified, then the position is either trivial or collapses into empiricism, but if relations are ...

Realism and Explanation in Perception

Suppose that we identify physical objects, in the first instance, by extension, as things like stones, tables, trees, people and other animals: the persisting macroscopic constituents of the world in which we live. Of course, there is a substantive question of what it is to be like such things in the way relevant to categorization as a physical object. So this can hardly be the final word on th...

From Grand Paradigm Battles to Pragmatist Realism: towards an Integrated Class Analysis*

When I began writing about class in the mid-1970s, I saw Marxism as a comprehensive paradigm confronting positivist social science. 1 I argued that Marxism had distinctive epistemological premises and distinctive methodological approaches which were fundamentally opposed to the prevalent practices of mainstream social science. While I argued that this battle should be engaged on an empirical as...

Pragmatist and Non-pragmatist Knowledge Practices in American Law