Realism, Instrumentalism, and the Intentional Stance

The Intentional Stance and Cultural Learning: a Developmental Feedback Loop

In this paper, I propose a developmental explanation of the reliability of the intentional stance as an interpretive strategy, and by doing so counter an objection to Dennett’s intentional stance theory (i.e. the ‘If it isn’t true, why does it work?’ objection). Specifically, young children’s use of the intentional stance enables them to learn from and thereby to become more similar to the adul...

Realism, instrumentalism, and scientific symbiosis: psychological theory as a search for truth and the discovery of solutions.

Scientific realism holds that scientific theories are approximations of universal truths about reality, whereas scientific instrumentalism posits that scientific theories are intellectual structures that provide adequate predictions of what is observed and useful frameworks for answering questions and solving problems in a given domain. These philosophical perspectives have different strengths ...

Gary Hatfield the Reality of Qualia

This paper argues for the reality of qualia as aspects of phenomenal experience. The argument focuses on color vision and develops a dispositionalist, subjectivist account of what it is for an object to be colored. I consider objections to dispositionalism on epistemological, metaphysical, and ‘ordinary’ grounds. I distinguish my representative realism from sense-data theories and from recent ‘...

Realism versus Instrumentalism in a New Statistical Framework*

Scientific symbiosis represents the mutual benefit of iteratively adopting the perspective of realism and instrumentalism.

son and world, scientist and fact, such that one assumes that fish exist a priori and independent of the scientist’s investigation. Organisms, however, shape their worlds as their worlds reciprocally shape them (Lewontin, 2000). Thus, the scientist who clears land on his or her property for a new tennis court will create the circumstances of a world lacking fish as facts for discovery. Cacioppo...