On a Mission for Realism: Michael Devitt
Is the outside world--the world of observable things such as tables, horses, and mountains--really there? It seems to be, but how do we know, since we can't get outside our own minds? This problem has bothered philosophers for thousands of years, and coping with it has led to a school of thought known as "antirealism"--the view that the familiar world of cats, stones, and trees, as well as unobservable things such as atoms, are in some way constituted by us in our minds. Although this view is widely held, perhaps by the majority of philosophers, Michael Devitt thinks it is bunk.
"This doctrine [of antirealism] has always struck me as rather scandalous," says Devitt, a proponent of scientific realism, who is a distinguished professor in the philosophy Ph.D. program. "So I write against it, and travel the world giving talks against it--mocking it. I describe this as my 'missionary work.'"
According to Devitt, this "rather bizarre view" has been held by many eminent philosophers in the 20th century, including the influential historian of science, Thomas Kuhn; structuralists; and postmodernists. Even some of the great philosophers of the past, including Berkeley, Kant, and Hegel, denied that the external world exists independent of the mind.
"Berkeley had a rather extraordinary view," says Devitt. "He didn't deny the existence of stones and trees and cats and stuff like that, but he thought they were actually made up of ideas...either in our own minds or the mind of God. So that was very odd."
But the philosopher who was the most instrumental in denying the mind-independent existence of the known world is Kant. According to Kant, the known world is a world that is partly constituted by the knowing mind, by our concepts of it. This view has been enormously popular, and, more recently, it has been wedded to relativism, which Devitt refers to as "the intellectual disease of the 20th century." When Kantianism and relativism are taken together, the result is that groups with different views--hence different concepts to impose--live quite literally in different worlds.
"It's a very popular and very bad metaphysics," says Devitt of antirealism. "I think it's preposterous."
Devitt--who was a student of the famous American empiricist Willard Van Orman Quine at Harvard--has argued his realist position steadily over the years in books, articles, and papers. His Realism and Truth is now in its third printing. He was also recently chosen as the spokesman for naturalism (opposition to the a priori, or knowledge not derived from experience) in the forthcoming volume, "Contemporary Debates in Epistemology," part of a series published by Blackwell that pits prominent philosophers with opposing views against one another. While his papers have stumped for realism in the technical language of philosophic discourse, they also include terse and impassioned pleas, such as this one:
[Realism] is almost universally held outside intellectual circles. From an early age we come to believe that such objects as stones, cats, and trees exist. Furthermore, we believe that these objects exist even when we are not perceiving them, and that they do not depend for their existence on our opinions nor on anything mental. This Realism about ordinary objects is confirmed day by day in our experience. It is central to our whole way of viewing the world, the very core of common sense. Given this strong case for Realism, we should give it up only in the face of powerful arguments against it and for an alternative. There are no such arguments (from "Worldmaking Made Hard," 2003)
Besides being "bad metaphysics," Devitt believes that antirealism is harmful to critical debate in general. "The fearful consequence is, it shackles criticism," he says, the problem being that, "since you move in some other group than me, and your world view is different from mine, then your world view is impervious to criticism...There's no common reality."
Fighting for scientific realism is just one of Devitt's preoccupations as a philosopher--he is also an incredibly prolific scholar in the areas of cognitive science and the philosophy of language. He has a book, "Ignorance and Language," which criticizes Chomskian views of the place of language in the mind, forthcoming from Oxford University Press, and he has recently published papers on the problems of "mental states and the language that describes them." Devitt has been embroiled for thirty years in a revolution in the "theory of reference." (To give a hint at what that means, he asks the question, "What is it about the name Aristotle that makes it refer to the ancient Greek philosopher?") This revolution was instigated by the world-famous philosopher and logician Saul Kripke, who is now a colleague of Devitt's, since he recently joined the philosophy faculty of The Graduate Center.
Indeed, The Graduate Center, and New York City in general, is an exciting place for philosophy nowadays. New York has been called "Athens on the Hudson," with the top three philosophy programs in America--Princeton, Rutgers, and NYU--in the vicinity. "Our program is a serious player," says Devitt, as it recently acquired several renowned faculty members, and it holds weekly colloquia that draw top philosophers from the area's institutions. "It's an extraordinary place to be philosophically...certainly the richest place to be for the areas I'm interested in--mind and language."
New York is also the world center of the kind of naturalistic philosophy that Devitt practices--philosophy that sees itself as a continuation of science, with no a priori knowledge necessary. But you can bet that, whatever city he is in, he would argue strongly that the place exists, independent of his own mind. To do otherwise is to defy common sense, and, for Devitt, this means undermining the foundations of human knowledge. "Realism is the place to stand as we seek empirical explanations of puzzling parts of our world," he has said in one of his papers.
Or, as he has said in another, "How could dinosaurs and stars be dependent on the activities of our minds?"
