Gijsbers On Realism And Antirealism

Dutch philosopher Victor Gijsbers put out a video on 5/8/24 about Truth—realism and antirealism about truth. I took notes on this short video and will write them out below, slightly edited, and comment on them—here is the video: Gijsbers (G after this): “Antirealists are pilloried by the public as not believing in truth, in being anti-truth and being the cause of much falsehood, lying and fake news. The public and some philosophers level this criticism against antirealists about truth. Philosophers and deconstructionists are criticized as being anti-truth, arguing that falsehood is a good as truth.” My response: I agree with critics of antirealists like Gijsbers. Stephen Hicks criticizes Kantians like Gijsbers as getting rid of a belief in the human being’s ability to perceive objects in the world as they actually are, and without an ability to escape our perspectival bias would mean we cannot know reality, and that is an inability to know or offer propositions about either small t truths, or big T truths, and that inability as a bad thing to advocate and conclude, let alone allow to serve as the metaphysical base line for how we conduct our research, our investigations, our very lives. G flatly denies that take that antirealists are disrespecting truth, or calling it unimportant. Philosophers who are antirealist are misunderstood by the public and other philosophers. Antirealism is not a scary anti-truth position, dismissive of truth. G: “What is realism and antirealism about truth? I offer a mathematical analogy to demonstrate what are realism and antirealism about truth, and then I will apply this paradigm to things about the world around us. We have already proved some things in math like 1+1=2. We know there are infinite amount of prime numbers. And, also, in math there are things we don’t know: e.g., something call the Twin Prime Conjecture. This is about pairs, 2 numbers apart, e.g., 3 & 5, 5 & 7, and 11 & 13—all prime pairs. Twin Prime Conjecture conjectures there are an infinite number of prime pairs. We don’t know of Twin Prime Conjecture is true or false. There is no proof that it is true; there is no proof that it is false. There are three scenarios here: One, we can prove Twin Prime Conjecture (TPC) is true. We have not done so yet, and found it yet, but let’s assume for a minute it is true, or it’s possible to prove it is true, so TPC is true, and both realists and antirealists agree here. Two, Maybe we can prove TPC is false, or it is possible to prove it is false than both realists and antirealists agree here. In both these two cases, they are true or false not just because they could be true or false, but we should be able to prove they are true or false (TPC). The mere possibility that we can prove TPC could be true or proved false, even if we do not have the proof captured yet intellectually the potential is enough to guarantee TPC is true or false.” My response: G is trying to show that antirealists liberally allow propositions like TPC to be cognitively identified as true or false, even when we have not capture the proof yet, and this intellectual generosity demonstrates that antirealists are not only against truth, but they they epistemologically go out of their way to give truth-seekers the benefit of the doubt. I think that is fine as far as it goes. G: “Three: Third possibility. Can’t prove TPC is true or false. There exists a well-established math assumption that not all mathematical claims are provable or disprovable. Some mathematical claims—we already know these are not provable or disprovable (third category). With TPC who knows? Yet realists and antirealists do not disagree about the first two categories, but disagree about the third category. Realists: there exists a preexisting, independent realm of mathematical entities. Realists: They are there, the mathematical facts are there independent of our practices of proving. So either there are or are not TPC, an infinite number of them. TPC is either true or false in objective reality, and even if we can’t prove TPC either way, TPC is still going to be true or false.” My response: I agree with the realists more than with the antirealists that TPC is either true or false whether humans practices of proving or disproving can ever solve the puzzle or not. That is my primary ontological outlook, but the moderate in me concedes the though antirealists are mostly wrong, they still have some truth to add with their skeptical, subjectivist constructions proffered. G: “Antirealist mathematical theorists argue that provability is just provability. If we can prove some claim is true, it is true. If we can prove that a claim is false it is false. But if you can prove neither—if you can’t prove the claim true, or disprove it as false about TPC, then there is no fact, and it is neither true or false.” My response: Here is where Gijsbers needs to add that, regarding mathematical proposals which can be proved true or false (now and perhaps ever) the antirealists are noncognitivists, that claims that are neither provable or disprovable are meaningless, not cognitive, not truth apt, just mere opinion or whim. Many traditionalists, like Mark Levin and Dennis Prager, argue that there is a Creator who crafted natural laws to operate and regulate the cosmos created by God. Humans are able to rationally, empirically and intuitively ascertain what is true, what is false, what is right and what is wrong, that there are moral facts, and that studying the natural world and the social world will allow us to generalize what these laws governing the universe and human society are. This is both a cognitivist and realist set of premises. The danger is the noncognitivists and antirealists so depreciate traditional acceptance of Platonic, acceptable Forms or universals like Love, Beauty, Goodness, Evil and God, that humans have lost their traditional values, now with no spiritual, natural, rational or historical standards to lead civilized lives, so evil and barbarism and tyranny will abound were antirealism and noncognitivism to be accepted as the ontological and epistemological tropes guiding our declining into postmodernist Leftism. G: “The realist asserts that that any math claim is true or false independent of if we can prove it. The antirealist counters that if we can’t prove it to be true or disprove it as false, the claim is not having the property of truth. So it is neither true or false. Realists postulate an independent realm of mathematical facts. They accept not that these proofs and disproofs are just our methods of proof, and these define what mathematical truth and falsehood is, and anything that doesn’t fall under our methods of proof are neither true or false. Which of these 2 positions is better? I’ll not try to decide that but I want to point out that there is at least one problem the realist faces that the antirealist doesn’t, and that is the realist has to explain how do we get into contact with this realm of mathematical facts. And how do we know our methods of proof are the right way of investigating this independently existing mathematical world?” My response: I think the realist is able to make contact with the independent world, not only of concrete, solid things, and by inference, imagination, research and intuition, able to make contact with the world of Form, Spirit, Logos, the a priori, infinite world intrinsically sensed by extrasensory means by Aristotle, Plato and many others. I think epistemological direct realism is at work and serves to allow human search for the nature of physical and immaterial reality to be adequately experienced, conceptualized, knowable as cognitively true or false knowledge. G: “The anitrealist does not have to face this challenge. For the antirealist mathematical truth is defined in terms of our methods of proof. And so for the antirealist there is not question of adequacy. Let us apply realism and antirealism now to the world around us. We use a very complicated set of methods involving empirical investigations, theorizing, building instruments to investigate the natural world. And we are sometimes changing, improving our methods of investigation concerning investigation about the world. Realists and antirealists agree about searching for truths. They agree about how to do it, using our best empirical methods, improving empirical methods.” My response: Gijsbers is an antirealist, not a neutral commentator as he pretends to be. He keeps reminding the viewer how much realists and antirealists have in common, but what he fails to realize or at least admit to the reader is that all of these agreeing aspects of studying reality are minor agreements in light of the huge, un-proclaimed disagreement that really is the only debate that matters. Antirealist are epistemological perspectivists, that we can never know objects out there in the world as they are in themselves. If the external world even exists, then it is not knowable, rationally apprehended by our perceptions and conceptions based upon these sensed experiences. This disagreement is unbridgeable and primary with prodigious influence and consequence. Gijsbers in the spirit of intellectual honesty and fair play for his students and the public must acknowledge this disagreement as singularly significant, and that students are being lulled into accepting the real world is ever inaccessible to their consciousness, rendering them into little Kantians and postmodernists. Eric Hoffer has well documented what happens to a people without their tradition of a good deity, traditional culture, values and a way of life predicated on the premises that objective reality is where their morals, values and faith originate from. Once deconstructionists get the young to accept this skeptical nonsense it opens the way for Satan, isms and mass movements, the very utopian dream salivated over and sought after by too many leftist professors and intellectuals. Concerning propositions that seem to be or are actually unprovable for now, or for any pondering human intellect, my response is the realist solution, that the truth or falsity of any or most proposition is known by God and the angels, and perhaps we can only learn these answers as our knowledge grows, as we get smarter as individuators, or if by divine revelation, God imparts the answer or answers to one of us seekers after truth. G: “But they do disagree about the empirical method on one hand, and on the other hand the world (I add for clarification its nature, is knowability, its very existence, Ed Says). If we follow the best imperial methods we have we will discover reality, and on this realists and antirealists agree (Do they, I doubt it, Ed says. But let me suspend judgment and allow Gijsbers to develop his argument,) G: “But there is a philosophical disagreement about which half of this story is more fundamental. The realist says the fundamental thing here is reality. And a good empirical method is one which puts us into touch with reality independently existing. Anti realists respond, yes, good empirical methods bring us into touch with reality because that’s what reality is. The fundamental idea here is a good investigation, a good empirical method or epistemic standard. Reality can be defined as that which gets uncovered when we use the best empirical method that we have. Realists think of reality: a fundamental and good method bring us into touch with reality. Antirealist: Our method, our epistemic norms, are the fundamental point here. Reality is what we come up with or find when we use those methods and norms. So there is a distinction in what is more fundamental. Is reality fundamental (Ed Says, yes!) and our norms have to live up to that. Or: our norms are fundamental and reality is what gets discovered when we follow through on those norms. When we perfectly follow through as best we can come up with. So this is not a distinction between someone who wants to search for the truth and someone who doesn’t.” My response: To be more than a little bit antirealist or quasi-realist beyond a need for both to keep us honest and humble, is to be anti-truth. G: “Both say they want to use our best empirical methods to find out about reality. It is a discussion about what is more fundamental. Our norms, or is it reality? Is reality the authority that determines if our norms are any good? Or are we the authority that determines if our norms are any good and reality is what comes out of that? Those are the two pictures that we have, the realist and the antirealist picture. So in mathematics we have a nice test case where we thought about these unprovable truths like maybe we don’t know if it’s an unprovable truth. But maybe the twin prime conjecture, right, suppose it’s unprovable. You can’t prove it. You can’t disprove it. Is it still true or false, right and the realist says yes and the antirealist says no, it’s neither true or false. I think we can come up with you know vaguely plausible scenarios like that in the empirical realm as well. Let us say there is a particle a do-nothing-on (dno), tiny particles flying through space. They do nothing and do not interact with any other particles. So, by definition they are undetectable. Are there dnos? Do they exist? Obviously we have no evidence for dnos. A realist will postulate about dnos—either they are there or not there, but we will never be able to know. Reality is independent of us, so it is still true or false that dnos exist. The antirealist: No, it is not going to be true or false if dnos exist by definition they are even beyond our best empirical methods. There’s no truth or falsity about them. There is no sense of which they are or are not part of reality. They are just outside the scope of what it is to discuss what is real. The realist declares that all is either true or false. The antirealist dismisses certain ideas as being neither true or false. In terms of authority, where does the authority for our claims come from? Everybody in a sense is going to agree that the authority for our claims come from our norms, our methods of investigation, right. If I want to tell you that this, this and this is true about the world, I’ve got to show you my method, so that’s where the authority comes from. But where do these epistemic norms get their authority? Right, this is where the realist is going to say well, the world, right, the world is going to give its authority to certain epistemic methods namely in the following way: only those epistemic methods that are good at uncovering reality have authority. Only they are good, right, only they count as generating knowledge. It’s possible for the realist to say this because they believe reality is more fundamental than the norms. In fact, it is necessary because they believe reality is the fundamental thing, and norms are trying to latch onto that. The antirealist methods and norms are going to be the primary thing and reality is what comes out of that, what we discover when we follow through on those norms. Antirealists need another story about authority. The normativity of our methods comes from us. It comes from our community, our thinking, maybe from the basic structures of the human mind-on the basic structure of finite thought in general—a Kantian story. Or maybe it comes from more historically general situations in society, our culture, our science. So that would be a more contextual story. We need some kind of story that takes us as the primary locus of authority, not independent reality as the primary locus of authority is what is needed. There is no true object but reality must be the source of our claims, claim realists. Antirealists causes worry for the realist by suggesting that realism is going to lead to skepticism.” My response: This worry, which antirealists seemingly cause for realism suggesting their confidence in their empirical knack for directly encountering the given, or objects in external reality, revealed as they actually are, is not as certain as they presume, that they can never know for sure if they experience things out there as they actually are, is an attempt to discombobulate and stop realists in their tracks that their direct realist epistemological assertion leads to vexing skeptical puzzles, suggests that realists in their objectivist epistemology are beset by skeptical worries and criticism, which antirealists with their subjectivists perspectival epistemology are able to avoid because they encounter reality indirectly as part of their subjective world-encountering experiencing. This claim the skepticism besets realists but not the antirealists themselves contradicts the overarching epistemological facts governing reality in which antirealist function as subjectivists. They are profoundly pessimistic or skeptical that they will ever know the world as it is outside of human consciousness, whereas realists or objectivists are much more optimistic, certain and confident that human can grasp or know reality in effable, clear concepts, words and propositions thereby eschewing and sloughing off skeptical concerns. G; “If reality is independent of our norms, how do we know our norms are actually adequate/ to reality? How do we know our way of investigating that what comes out of that is reality, and not something that has nothing to do with reality? It is not so easy for realism to solve that to avoid a skepticism that suggests there may be an unbridgeable gap between reality and our norms. As we discuss realism and antirealism, we also touch on skepticism, idealism, contextualizaiton. Antirealists about truth are not pro fake news, not dismissing truth, not saying our methods of investigation are perfect. No antirealists say it is just our best methods for now used in the best possible way.