Realism for agents with unconditional beliefs, desires and intentions (BDI agents) has been analyzed in modal logic. This paper provides a logical analysis of realism for agents with conditional beliefs and desires in a rule based approach analogous to Reiter’s default logic. We distinguish two types of realism, which we call ‘a priori’ and ‘a posteriori’ realism. We analyze whether these two n...

This essay deals with the concept of truth in the context of a version of internal realism. In §1 I define some variants of realism using a set of realistic axioms. In §2 I will argue that for semantical reasons we should be realists of some kind. In §3 I plead for an internalistic setting of realism starting from the thesis that truth is, at least, not a non-epistemic concept. We have to bear ...

No realist project in and about economics is close to completion. There are many open issues that remain to be addressed and resolved. Simon Deichsel (2011) has written a healthy challenge that should offer some useful inspiration to anyone interested in assessing and perhaps contributing to the realist projects. He argues against realism and in support of some sort of anti-realism. My response...

Over the last 20 years or so, Hilary Putnam has developed a series of arguments which use basic theorems of model theory to undermine semantic realism. Here, I discuss two generalizations of these arguments. The first employs some new forms of model theory to generate substantially stronger conclusions than Putnam’s original arguments generated. The second illustrates a method for replacing the...

We introduce the concept of different orders (microthrough to macro-) of local realism. ``Macroscopic local realism'' states that events occurring at a location B cannot induce (immediate) macroscopic changes to a system at a location A spatially separated from B. ``Local realism'' in its entirety excludes all sizes of change. ``Local realism'' in its entirety is used by Einstein, Podolsky, and...

In the paper the proof of the non-locality of quantum mechanics, given recently by H. Stapp and D. Bedford, and appealing to the GHZ example, is analyzed. The proof does not contain any explicit assumption of realism, but instead it uses formal methods and techniques of the Lewis calculus of counterfactuals. To ascertain the validity of the proof, a formal semantic model for counterfactuals is ...

Aristotelian, or non-Platonist, realism holds that mathematics is a science of the real world, just as much as biology or sociology are. Where biology studies living things and sociology studies human social relations, mathematics studies the quantitative or structural aspects of things, such as ratios, or patterns, or complexity, or numerosity, or symmetry. Let us start with an example, as Ari...

Critical Realism (CR) states that knowledge (epistemology) is different from being or existence (ontology). There is a reality (unobservable structures) which exists independent of human thought. Critical realists believe that these unobservable structures cause observable events. Therefore, the social world can be understood only if people understand the structures that generate events. This i...

Many recent articles from within the information systems (IS) arena present an old-fashioned view of realism. For example, Iivari, Hirschheim, and Klein (1998) saw classical realism as seeing “data as describing objective facts, information systems as consisting of technological structures (‘hardware’), human beings as subject to causal laws (determinism), and organizations as relatively stable...