CONSTRUCTIVISM

Constructivism accepts many of the themes of pragmatism, especially its doctrines of meaning and truth. It also borrows some themes from Kant, especially his notion that the mind constructs the basic features of the world that we experience. In addition, constructivism also holds a version of relativism, both about knowledge and reality. Let us examine each of these three elements as a way to understand how the constructivist thinks about reality.

Constructivism and Pragmatism

The Pragmatic Theory of Meaning

A theory of meaning explains how words acquire meaning. The pragmatic theory of meaning differs sharply from theories of meaning previously accepted by most philosophers. According to the view rejected by pragmatism, words get their meaning by standing for something in the mind, a sense impression or a concept or a belief, for example. Some of these mental objects, in turn, are taken to stand for things in the world. For empiricists, it is especially sense impressions that accurately mirror the world; for rationalists, a priori concepts do the job best. In both cases, statements about the world supposedly acquire meaning by standing for mental representations of things or events in the world. Something like this account appears to be our ordinary view of meaning, as well, as we see in our use of such statements as, “Words are expressions of thoughts (beliefs)”.

According to this theory of meaning which is rejected by pragmatists, there is a two-level “picturing” of the world. On one level is our knowledge, where knowledge is thought of as mental representations or “pictures” of the world. On another level is language, where language is thought of as representing or “picturing” our knowledge. As labels on jars refer to their contents, words are supposed to get their meaning by referring to our knowledge which, in turn, mirrors objects in the world. Pragmatism rejects this view of meaning. The meaning of a particular word or statement about the world is not the concept or belief that it stands for. If it were, there would be little basis for a common language, one whose meanings were shared by all. This is because the meaning of words would vary from person to person, as the contents of their minds varied. Even worse, as pointed out previously by Wittgenstein, words used to express private mental states would fail to have meaning even for the person using them. Who is to know if we all use the words to refer to the same beliefs?

For the pragmatist, statements about the world do not get their meaning by standing for, or referring to private bits of knowledge. Instead, the meaning of a statement has more to do with the consequences that result when the belief

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that it expresses is acted upon. To see how the meaning of a statement is determined by consequences, and not by mental events that words stand for, consider the statement “It is raining.” The meaning of this statement is not a private belief, composed of private concepts, reducible to private sensations, as Hume might say. Instead, what it means may be expressed by describing the consequences of holding and acting upon such a belief. To believe that it is raining means that if you go outside without an umbrella, you will get wet. If you look out the window, you will have certain sorts of “rain-falling” visual impressions. If you open the door, you will hear the sounds of raindrops, and so on. The statement, “It is raining out,” is best thought of as a hypothetical statement, an “if--then”” statement, where the “if” part specifies an action, and the “then” part predicts some consequence of performing the action. For the pragmatist, the meaning of a statement is the set of all the consequences of acting upon the belief which it expresses.

The reason that statements about the world are best understood as statements about the consequences of acting in certain ways, is because the beliefs that they express are best thought of as predictions about future experiences. Pragmatists were very much influenced by science in general, and especially by the work of Charles Darwin. Because of Darwin’s influence, pragmatists believed that humans evolved from lower forms of animal life. In particular, they believed that our ways of knowing were shaped by natural selection, and that human knowledge should be understood as having a similar function as animal knowledge. To say that an animal has a belief is not to make a claim about how well its conscious experience mirrors reality. Rather, it is to make a claim about a habit of behaving that the animal possesses, and a claim about its expectations.

We know that chimps, for example, believe that berries grow high in the forest treetops, because they climb those trees to get the berries, and because they expect the berries to be there. These sorts of beliefs, acquired through experience or instinct, reside as habits of action within chimps, and serve to guide their behavior. In a similar manner, pragmatists understand beliefs in humans to be predictions, and thus to serve as guides to their behavior. As predictions, beliefs tell us what lies ahead, what we are to expect if we do something. As predictions, beliefs are rules for action. Statements that express our beliefs express predictions about what will happen in the future. As such, the meaning of a statement is the sum total of all the consequences that are to be expected from acting on the belief.

The Pragmatic Theory of Truth

The pragmatic theory of truth is closely related to the pragmatic theory of meaning. According to pragmatism, the meaning of a belief is the set of all the observable consequences that will occur if it is true. If this is so, then the belief in question is true if, in fact, such consequences do occur. When I say, “This

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apple is sweet,” I am making a prediction that, “If I bite into it, then I will experience sweet taste sensations.” If I do have such experiences, then the belief is true; if not it is false. If it tastes sour, for example, my belief was false. It was false because the actions I took (biting into it) did not yield the expected results.

According to the pragmatic theory of truth, ‘true’ is defined as ‘useful predictions about future observations’. A statement is true if it is useful, if it works to make successful predictions. This is the nature of truth. True beliefs are successful guides for action. The way we test for the truth of a belief, the way that we justify it, is to verify by observation whether or not the predicted results actually do occur, and thus to verify that that the belief was useful. As you can see, the pragmatic definition of truth is practically the same as the pragmatic test for truth.

One of the consequences of this view of truth seems to be that contrary beliefs may both be true. Since two completely opposed beliefs may each be successful for different people, they may both be true . Theism, for example, may work for me, while atheism works for you. We examined this view of William James in Part Two. 13. Similar remarks may be made if we understand the pragmatic test for truth not so much as a test for the truth of individual beliefs, but as a claim about systems of belief and the languages which express them. If we take this more global view, then the pragmatic concept of truth amounts to this. Any language may be accepted as true, as long as it is successful. There is no one language, such as common sense or science, that “mirrors” reality best. So as long as a language works successfully as a way to name and describe our experience; so long as it allows us to explain events and to make successful predictions, it may be accepted as an adequate account of reality.

Constructivism and Relativism

If the constructivist accepts the pragmatic theories of meaning and truth, then it would appear that he is headed down the path to relativism. To understand in what sense the constructivist is a relativist, let us begin by distinguishing between two forms of relativism, epistemological relativism, and metaphysical relativism.

Epistemological Relativism

Everyone can agree that there are many ways to know the world. Within each language used to describe the world there is an implicitly accepted epistemology which is assumed to be the correct way to know the world. In particular, each language, each way of thinking about the world, has its own standards for justifying beliefs. Some people may take dreams as revealing truth, for example, especially if the dreams are quite vivid and detailed. Mystics may accept their mystical experiences as justifying their belief in God. Others

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may take their intuitions that something is true or false to be more reliable than their observations, while scientists will not accept beliefs unless they are verified by experience. For most of us in our daily lives, “seeing is believing” is the principle of justification that we follow.

Epistemological relativism goes beyond the recognition that there are various ways to decide if a belief is true, to make the claim that each of these ways of justifying beliefs are just as good as any other. There is no such thing as “the” truth for the epistemological relativist, only truth relative to the various epistemological standards that are used to accept or reject beliefs as true of the world. If you and I use different standards to select which beliefs we accept , then what is true for you may not be true for me.

Someone who is not an epistemological relativist will agree that there are different ways to test the reliability of our beliefs, but claim that there is one standard of justification that is superior to the others. If this is correct, then beliefs that are not true according to this “correct” standard are simply not true, despite the fact that they may be accepted as true by others using different standards. While the mystics’ belief in God may true for him, for example, it is not a scientific truth. The scientific realist, who believes that science contains “the” correct method for knowing what exists, will at best be skeptical about the mystics’ claims. Surely he will not count them as true simply because the mystic has reported having certain experiences. For the scientific realist, the standards of truth do not include accepting beliefs as true on the basis of private, non-repeatable experiences.

For the epistemological relativist, however, the mystics’ report is every bit as true as a belief confirmed by science. Beliefs that pass through the scientific method are true for science, while the belief of a mystic that she has experienced God is true for her. Epistemological relativists believe that there is no one best way to know that a belief is true. There are only different epistemologies, with their different ways of testing beliefs; there not correct epistemologies. We simply cannot say that scientific beliefs are much more likely to be true than the reports of experiencing God made by a mystic. If we think of the process of justifying beliefs as a process of providing evidence for them, and if we think of this as what it means to be rational, then epistemological relativism may be described as the claim that there are different standards of rationality, no one of which is “the” correct one.

Metaphysical Relativism

Someone could be an epistemological relativist and still believe that reality has a definite structure of its own. They would be epistemological relativists because they believe that all of our various ways of understanding reality fail to capture its true nature. This is the only reason that they believe no one way of understanding reality is any better than another. If there was a way to

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know the world as it really is, epistemological relativism would have to be abandoned. Any way of understanding the world that actually did capture its real nature would have to serve as “the” way of knowing the world.

Metaphysical relativism goes beyond epistemological relativism. It does not simply deny that the structure of reality is unknown, it also denies that there is a structure to reality. Metaphysical relativism claims not simply that our various attempts to describe reality all fail to grasp its true nature, but that there is no such thing as “the” nature of reality. There is only reality as understood by you, or reality as understood by me. There is no such thing as reality itself. In denying the claim that the world has a structure of its own, metaphysical relativism makes the very radical claim that reality is relative to the way that it is known. Since reality may be understood in different ways, then what is real for me may not be what is real for you.

Most contemporary constructivists have taken the linguistic turn. They believe that how we understand the world is best discovered by how we describe it in language. From this perspective, metaphysical relativism may be expressed by saying that reality is relative to the language that we use to describe it. There is scientific reality, common sense reality, metaphysical reality, supernatural reality, and so on. There is no structure to reality apart from language. Reality does not exist in neat meaningful packages. It has no meaning apart from the meaning which we give it in the process of coming to understand it.

A good way to understand metaphysical relativism is to compare it to its opposite, metaphysical realism. The first two possible solutions that we have defended in chapter four, common sense realism and scientific realism, are both forms of metaphysical realism. They believe that the world which exists outside of our minds has a particular sort of structure, a way of being that is independent of our perceptions and our ways of thinking and speaking about it. They further believe that there is only one way for this world which we call reality to be. Common sense realism and scientific realism, as we have seen, disagree about which language most accurately represents the nature of this reality, but they both agree that it has a nature. They both embrace metaphysical realism.

Constructivists does not deny that some sort of material “stuff” exists independently of the mind, but they do deny that whatever exists has specific features apart from our interaction with it. That is, they deny that reality has one meaningful structure, that it has one way to be. Instead, they claim that in the process of perceiving what exists, in the process of forming ideas about it, in the process of forming systems of beliefs about it that get expressed in language, we “construct” the structure and meaning of the world. As a ball of clay has no structure of its own, only the structure that we mold into it, reality has no structure of its own, only what we imposed upon it when we experience it, understanding it, and describe it.

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Further, constructivists do not think that how we construct the meaning of the world is limited to one option, one single way of understanding, one language. As the ball of clay may be molded into many shapes, so the world may be understood in many different ways. For example, there are many scientific theories, many mathematical theories, many religions, many metaphysical systems, and many value systems. In addition, there are many cultures that differ radically from one another in their general view of the world.

Each of the many languages we use to describe the world contains its own conceptual system, its own view of reality. For the metaphysical relativist, each of these “realities” is a valid as each of the others. The world as understood by science, for example, is no more real than the world of common sense or the mystic’s world, and no more real than the Buddhists’ conception of reality. They are just different ways to think about the world, all of which are equally valid. There is no one correct language whose conceptual system corresponds more correctly to what exists than any other. There are many realities, depending on which language is being used to describe what we experience. Because constructivism denies the existence of one definite structure to reality, it has often been referred to as antirealism. 14.

Constructivism and Kant

We may also learn more about constructivism by examining the ways that it resembles Kantian views about reality, and especially how it differs from Kant.

All Meaning and Structure is Constructed

Constructivists think of what exists apart from our understanding as similar to Kant’s noumenal world. Such a world has no meaning or structure that human beings could ever fathom. In itself, a reality independent of our perceptions and ideas and beliefs and language is just an undifferentiated mass of existence, a “ball of unformed clay”. Following Kant, the constructivist agrees that it is what we do to the data which we receive from the environment that makes our experience meaningful. It does not come packaged as containing its own structure or its own divisions into particular and general kinds of things. For the constructivist, the world that we know is like Kant’s phenomenal world. Such a world exists as a result of the interaction of our cognitive equipment---our sense organs, ideas, beliefs and systems of beliefs---with the information received from the noumenal world.

To newborn babies, for example, experience makes no sense right away. It makes no sense until they begin to interpret it in certain ways. They interpret it by forming hypotheses about what to expect, and testing these hypotheses. For example, if a baby is hungry it cries. Milk suddenly appears, so the baby learns to get milk by crying. Crying is a form of action that successfully satisfies its

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desires. Now the baby begins to form an hypothesis: cry if you want milk. It is only by forming hypotheses like these about the world, ones that may be tested by their success or failure, that we begin to form beliefs about what the world is like. Now the world begins to take on meaning. Having agreed that we construct the meaning and structure of the world, constructivism and Kant now quickly part company.

Constructivism: Kant Plus Relativism

For Kant, there was only one way of understanding the world, a way that was built into our minds from birth. For constructivism, however, there are many ways to think about and describe our experience. Constructivism may be thought of as “Kant plus relativism”. That is, it agrees that in the process of understanding what we perceive, we force experience into the mold of our belief systems, but it disagrees that there is only one such system according to which experience may be molded. Instead, we may learn any number of ways of thinking about the world, each expressible in its own language, with its own conceptual system, its own view of reality. Our minds are not “hard-wired” to understand reality in only one way as Kant believed, but they may acquire many different “programs” (languages) to do so in many different ways.

Because there are many ways to understand the world, and because none of them is the “correct” way to understand “the” structure of reality, then what is real is relative to the language we use to interpret our experience. There is not one phenomenal world, but as figure 4.3 illustrates, there are as many “worlds” as there are different languages to describe them.

Figure 4.3

The idea that the noumenal world possesses no structure or meaning of its own makes the antirealism of the constructivist a sensible position to hold. If we must construct our world, and if there are many ways to do this, then there is not just one reality, as Kant thought, but many. By comparing constructivism with pragmatism, Kant and relativism, we have learned something about its main

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claims. It is now time to see more clearly what constructivism is by examining what it does not claim.

Meaning, Not Existence, Is Constructed

Constructivists have been accused of holding the absurd view that the use of a language to talk about the world creates the existence of the entities referred to by its descriptions. According to this interpretation of constructivism, as a novel creates its characters and settings and its story line, so too, does language create the entities it describes. We will reject this interpretation of constructivism without argument. What constructivism claims is that language creates for us the meaning of the entities it describes, not their existence.

If the existence of an object is not constructed by language, it nevertheless does appear that its meaning for us is. For example, how we understand what rocks are---how we group them into types, distinguish them from non rocks, identify their essential properties and so on, is determined by the ideas we acquired in learning our common sense language. This understanding may change when we employ a different language. Our common sense ideas about rocks will change when we study geology, for example, when we learned new ways to classify them. Perhaps originating from molten lava beneath the Earth’s crust becomes essential to a scientific understanding of rocks, while hardness is the basic property of rocks in our common sense understanding of them. In either case, the fact that our understanding of what rocks are is relative to a language, does not mean that rocks are created by language. It is the meaning of ‘rocks’ that is created by language--not rocks themselves. Reality Is Not Different For Each of Us:Reality As a Social Construct

Constructivists do not claim that each individual has a unique manner of perceiving, understanding, and describing the world. Various conceptions of reality and different standards for judging their adequacy are not relative to each individual. In our everyday lives, we do not have different concepts of reality than our neighbors. Constructivists believe that ideas of what is real are determined by groups. Because language is a social construct, and because our conceptions of what is real are embedded in the conceptual framework of a language, our concept of reality is itself a social construct. Groups construct languages, live as though the world really is the way that their conceptual frameworks describe it, and accept the rules of evidence embedded in that language which allow particular beliefs to be accepted as true or not.

But that does not mean that there is one universally accepted concept of reality either. Instead, there are as many ideas of reality as there are languages used to refer to and describe the world. But if “reality” is a social construct, then what counts as real now it becomes relative to the group, not to the individual.

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This still undermines any attempt to find “the” standards of knowledge---the program pursued by Modern philosophy; and it still undermines the program of metaphysicians to discover “the” true nature of reality; but it does allow some room for objectivity. Not everyone’s idea of what is real is as good as everyone else’s. Constructivism does not say that there is a “reality for you” and a “reality for me”. Instead, in saying reality is what my group says it is, constructivism allows for shared standards of what is to count as real---standards which hold at least within the group. Conceptions of reality may vary from group to group, but within groups there are shared worlds and shared ideas of what counts as knowing them.

Your “common sense” would soon be under attack if you claimed to know that invisible spirits make certain things happen, spirits of which no one else is conscious. Your membership in the scientific group would be precarious if you claimed to confirm hypotheses by dreaming that they were true. You would be drummed out of the moral community of most modern industrialized societies if you believed that murder was morally required, especially if you acted on that belief. If we think of our belief systems as constructed collectively, then it turns out that there is not much variation in how we think about reality within the language of a particular group.

Some Languages Are More Adequate Than Others

If constructivism does not claim that we create the existence of reality, or that reality differs for each and every one of us, it also claims that not every language is as adequate as every other one. In saying this the constructivist is not claiming that the various conceptions of reality created by different groups can be ranked as more or less accurate representations of an independent reality. Just as various songs are simply different from each other, so various constructed “worlds” are just different from each other. The Buddhist idea that reality is One, for example, is just a different way to understand reality from common sense or science. It is no more true than either, and no less true than either.

However, because no one particular way of thinking about reality can be shown to be more accurate than any other, does not mean that some ways of thinking about reality are not to be preferred over others. We prefer some songs to others at different times and for different purposes, depending on our moods, our interests, and our desires. Sometimes we prefer sad songs, sometimes happy ones, sometimes romantic ones, and sometimes ones that rock. In the same way, for some purposes it is helpful to think of the world as we do in our everyday lives, while for others it is helpful to think of the world as portrayed in contemporary physics; for still other times, thinking of the world as One is most helpful.

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You will not get a man to the moon if you think of the world in common sense terms. And in your day to day behavior, you cannot act if you think of reality as subatomic energy packets of some sort. In a similar manner, for purposes of spiritual fulfillment, searching for the experience of a unified reality in deep meditation may best suit your purposes. So the various ways of thinking about reality, ways that are embedded in various languages, are to be accepted as “true” insofar as they are “useful” to satisfy particular purposes. If it works to think of the world in a particular way, then the language that describes it that way is an adequate account of reality. In effect, to say that a particular conception of reality is the most adequate one, for the constructivist, is not to say that it best corresponds to or “mirrors” reality, but is simply to endorse it as the most useful way to achieve what happens to be desired.

THE ARGUMENT FOR CONSTRUCTIVISM

Constructivism is often not so much argued for as it is simply asserted to be the correct way to view things. At the heart of constructivism is especially its commitment to both epistemological relativism and metaphysical relativism (antirealism). These are its basic beliefs from which all else follows. To argue for constructivism is to argue for these claims, as follows:

(1) If the different languages which we use to understand the world contain different standards for accepting beliefs as true or false, then all beliefs are true or false relative to these different standards.

(2) The different languages which we use to understand the world do contain different standards for accepting beliefs as true or false.Therefore, (3) All beliefs are true or false relative to these different standards.

The conclusion, of course, is just epistemological relativism. Does this argument work to establish (3)? Premise (2) seems to be true. After all, there are many different standards for judging truth or falsity, some of which are accepted in one language but not in others. Each of these reflects a different idea of what it means to be rational, to accept beliefs on the basic of evidence. Think, for example, of observation, memory, inductive and deductive inference---all accepted in ordinary language and science. Then there is the hypothetico-deductive method of science, which includes many of these. In addition, there are rational intuitions, mystical insights, dreams, hunches, Tarot cards, Ouija boards, prophets, deep meditation and so on.

Premise (1), however, seems to be questionable. Just because there are differing standards of reasonableness does not mean that they are all correct. It could be that all but one are not correct, as the common sense and scientific

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realists claim. We will question (1) in the next chapter when we evaluate our possible solutions. For now, the argument for constructivism continues:

(4) If there are different languages which contain different conceptions of reality, then these various

conceptions of reality are all correct.(5) There are different languages which contain different

conceptions of reality.Therefore, (6) These various conceptions of reality are all correct.

The conclusion, (6), is just antirealism. Although premise (5) is denied by common sense realism, it surely seems plausible. After all, there are many different ways that reality has been and may be described. Think of all the scientific theories that have come and gone over the past few hundred years, for example; or all of the various metaphysical theories of the past twenty-five hundred years just in Western philosophy. In addition, there are innumerable accounts of reality in works of fiction, religions and poetry. If the argument has a problem it lies with premise (4). Just because there are many ways to think about what is real does not preclude the possibility that only one of them is correct. We will question (4) along with (1) in the next and final chapter.

CHAPTER FIVE: EVALUATION

The question before us in this chapter is, What is the nature of reality? This question expresses the problem for which common sense realism, scientific realism and constructivism are possible solutions. It will be helpful to begin the process of evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of these three possible solutions by first saying a few words about their points of agreement. In our attempt to form a reasoned judgment about which of them is the best possible solution, we shall then examine their areas of disagreement.

Areas of Agreement

First, all three views accept the epistemological turn . Reality is not something that we know directly, apart from the ways that we represent it. They also accept the linguistic turn. Of the many ways that we represent the external world---in our sensations, in our concepts, in our beliefs---the primary way that we represent it is in our languages. We know reality in a meaningful way only through the medium of a language.

Second, each language that we use to describe the world contains its own conceptual framework. Our concept of what is real and how we know it is acquired by us in the process of learning a language. As we learn to see the

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world through the lens of a particular language, we come to understand the world as the sort of place that our descriptions of it presuppose it to be.

Third, ordinary language is our basic way of understanding the world. It is basic in the sense of being the first language that we use to describe the world, and as containing the first conceptual framework that we accept. It is also basic in the sense that it is the language upon which all other languages used to describe the world are constructed. We might express this by saying that ordinary language is epistemologically basic. Whether it is expressed in French, English, Russian or any other form that the ordinary language of a particular group takes, this language has epistemological priority over all others.

Areas of Difference

In addition to their points of agreement, there are also three major areas of difference between our possible solutions.

First, there are differences about epistemology, and especially about how beliefs ought to be justified. The common sense realist accepts the standard that experience is the best guide to truth, while the scientific realist thinks that the hypothetico-deductive method is the best standard by which to judge our beliefs. The constructivist, on the other hand, is an epistemological relativist. He thinks that no one standard of rationality is superior to others. Whatever works, be it magic or mysticism, science or common sense, is an acceptable way to distinguish between those beliefs which we accept as true of the world, and those which we reject. Knowledge is not a more or less accurate “picture” of reality; it is a tool to be judged as an adequate guide or not, depending upon how useful it is in fulfilling our needs and helping us to accomplish our purposes.

Second, all three possible solutions differ dramatically about the nature of reality. They differ both about whether or not reality has a fixed nature, and about what that nature is. Common sense realism is a realism. It claims that there really are things with features of their own. Reality consists of just those sorts of things, with just those sorts of features, that it is described as having in ordinary language. The concepts contained in ordinary language classify our experience into just those types that actually exist. According to common sense realism, the conceptual framework of ordinary language corresponds to the way that the world really is.

Scientific realism also believes that reality has a specific nature, but it claims that the structure of reality is best described in the language of science, not ordinary language. Ordinary language is an accurate description only of the world as it appears to us---what Kant called the phenomenal world. Scientific theories, on the other hand, especially those of contemporary physics, describe the world as it really is. Assuming that reality is the sort of place that science says it is has resulted in the success of science to describe, explain, predict and

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control the natural world. Such success would be impossible if reality were not the sort of place that science says it is. Scientific realism holds that ultimately reality is an ideal that scientific theories are describing more and more accurately each day. The categories of the final scientific theory will mirror perfectly the structure of reality.

For constructivism, the belief shared by common sense realism and scientific realism that reality has a certain sort of structure is misguided. Reality has no nature of its own. It has no meaningful parts or patterns that may be discovered and mirrored by language. The sorts of entities that exist, the properties that they possess, and the patterns that hold among them are all constructed by us. As we create various ways of understanding and describing what we experience, we create its various meanings and structure. In itself, reality has no one sort of intelligibility, no one structure that is best captured in one language or another. Rather, the world that exists apart from our experience and understanding is capable of being understood in any number of ways. Some of these ways of understanding may be superior to others for certain practical purposes, as tools of one sort may be more useful for some purposes than tools of another sort. But none is superior as the way of understanding reality. They are all just different ways of understanding, judged to be true or false by their success, and not whether or not they correspond to reality.

Common Sense Realism

Let us evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of common sense realism by evaluating the arguments presented in its favor, as well as the criticism of it presented by the other two possible solutions, especially by the scientific realist. The case for common sense realism began with the recognition that we all start out in life as common sense realists, and that there is no good reason to replace this view of reality with any other. The egocentric perspective adopted by Modern philosophers was supposed to be a good reason to abandon common sense realism, but it was shown to be an incorrect perspective by the various “linguistic arguments” presented by ordinary language philosophers.

Another argument for common sense realism was presented by John Austin, who claimed that ordinary language has evolved over a very long time better and better to “fit” reality. If it did not, we could not use it as successfully as we do. The scientific realist has an explanation for the success of ordinary language, however. While it is an accurate representation, it only represents the world of appearances, not reality. The common sense world is the world as experienced by us, not the world as it really is. Ordinary language is only about this “phenomenal world, not reality itself.

Peter Strawson had the final say for the common sense realist, arguing from the epistemological priority of ordinary language to its metaphysical priority.

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His claim was that because we acquire ordinary language first, and because other languages are simply extensions of it, then we have to think of reality as it is described in the conceptual framework of ordinary language. If ordinary language describes the most basic way to think about reality, then this must be so because it describes the nature of reality itself. Once again, scientific realism has a credible response to his argument. Scientific accounts of reality may begin with common sense, but they go beyond it to create more successful ways of understanding the world than common sense allows. Scientific theories describe, explain and predict better than common sense, and thus enable us better to control the world to suit our purposes. Science may depend on common sense to get its start, but in the end it offers a more penetrating understanding of what exists.

Scientific Realism

Scientific realism was defended by rejecting common sense realism and by appealing to the success of science. Among the many ways that we have of understanding the world, science does the best job of describing the world, of explaining how and why things happen, of predicting what will occur next, and of controlling nature by the immense technological progress its discoveries have allowed. It is even beginning to do a good job of explaining how it is that reality as described by science, when it interacts with our cognitive equipment, is experienced by us as the common sense world. The success of science is a good reason to accept its view of reality. If the world were not the way that science conceives of it, then science would not be as successful as it is.

The major threat to scientific realism comes from the constructivist. The constructivist can agree with part of the above argument for scientific realism. The success of science is what leads us to accept its account of reality. If scientific descriptions were not accurate, if it explanations were not satisfactory, if its predictions were unreliable, and if it spawned no technology, then we would dismiss its conception of reality as a fiction.

The conclusion drawn from this by the scientific realist, however, is not acceptable to the constructivist. The success of science does not mean that the conceptual framework of science represents reality. Instead, it only means that scientific accounts of reality are “true” only in the pragmatic sense of truth. The fact that science works simply means that it provides a successful way to guide our actions, not that it accurately reflects the nature of reality. It is, along with common sense, just another way---though an extremely successful way, for us to construct a meaningful world. In the face of this objection, scientific realism must give us an additional reason besides it success, if we are to be convinced that its theories actually correspond to reality.

Constructivism

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From the constructivist perspective, reality is relative to the language that we use to refer to and describe it. If this is true, then both common sense and science are correct ways to think about reality. It is just that neither is “the” correct way. They are both correct, not because their conceptual frameworks correspond to reality, but because both are successful within their own realm. The common sense way of thinking about reality reigns supreme in our daily lives, while science is where we turn to explain, predict and control the world. We may accept any views of reality as correct as long as it is successful in guiding our actions. Since their are many ways of thinking about the world that may be successful, there are many “realities”.

Here we have both the grandeur and the misery of constructivism. While constructivism is open to more than one way to think about reality, its openness comes at the expense of denying the usual meaning of ‘reality’. Reality is now simply something that each of us constructs. If reality is something that we construct in various ways by using various ways of understanding and describing what we experience, then it appears that by accepting constructivism we are destined to remain awash in a sea of metaphysical relativism. To say that any successful idea of reality is as good as any other, seems much too subjective to be plausible. In evaluating constructivism, let’s see if we can keep its strengths, especially its Kantian inspired insight about the constructive powers of the mind, but eliminate it main weakness, its extreme subjectivism. In so doing we may be able to narrow the differences between all three possible solutions.

The arguments presented so far in defense of constructivism amount to claiming that because there are diverse conceptions of reality, all of which may pass the pragmatic test for truth, then there are diverse realities or “worlds”. Let us pretend that this argument is acceptable for the moment, and that the metaphysical relativism (antirealism) at the heart of constructivism is a correct position to take. Now let us see if we can strip this view of some of its subjectivism. In particular, let us see if it makes any sense to say both that reality is constructed by us, and at the same time to say that some concepts of reality are better than others.

The first thing we can say is that even the constructivist believes that some concepts of reality are more adequate than others, at least for certain purposes. Not just “any” idea of what is real will do in all circumstances. The psychotics’ concept of reality, for example, is not going to be a successful guide to daily living for most of us, just as our ordinary concepts of space and time will not do for space travel.

Next, remember that reality is a social construct. It is not something created differently by each individual. How reality is thought of is something constructed by groups in the long process of developing the particular language that they use to describe their world. While the concept of reality may vary from

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group to group, within the group there is no deviation allowed. Everyone using the same language shares the same conceptual framework and the same standards of knowledge which are built into it. For all practical purposes, when operating within a particular language, the concept of reality found in that language is taken to be “the” concept of reality.

Finally, it is important to see that there really is not that much diversity in how various groups conceptualize reality. It seems apparent that most of us, in whatever culture we were raised, have a common sense conception of reality, for example. It also seems clear that contemporary scientific concepts of reality are identical across cultures. In short, there seems to be a great deal of consensus about what is real in science and daily life. Even if the constructivist is right that reality is a social construct, this claim alone does not lead to extreme subjectivism. In fact, for most of us, there are only two acceptable competing ideas of reality---the one accepted by the latest science, and the one found within ordinary language.

Social Entities and Natural Entities

Surely, however, there is a great deal of diversity between groups. Examples abound which describe the diversity of opinion that exists from culture to culture. One group holds one value system, while others hold another; one follows certain religious practices, while others have quite different ones; one group cures their sick by prayer, another by herbs, and still another by antibiotics, and so on. This no one doubts. However, this sort of diversity is about how we act, not about what exists. To see that there is less diversity in how various groups think about reality, it is important to make this distinction. Many of the examples that offered in support of the belief that there are as many different realities as there are ways of describing the world, focus on beliefs about what we do, not on what we believe about reality. It is these sorts of social constructs that vary widely among groups, not their social constructions of reality.

A social entity is an entity that is invented by human beings to describe ways of behaving. They include such things as football, chess, moral decision-making, and religious practices. Some social entities are simply concepts which we invent to better understand behavior---concepts like “average man”, “teenagers”, “families”, and “bachelor’s degree”. A list of social constructs might also include the various sorts of political and social groups invented by us to understand how we organize our lives. Entities such as “the middle class” and “democratic societies” are social entities. We may also wish to include other items on this list, including works of art, literature, science and even philosophy.

Social entities include ways of behaving, ways of organizing and expressing the important parts of our lives. They do not include natural entities---things such as rocks and trees and humans. The point that all three of our possible solutions should agree to is that there is room for relativism among our

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beliefs about social entities. Another way to put this is to say that the inferential jump from “different cultures have different beliefs about reality”, to “therefore, there are different realities”, is less controversial when the beliefs in question are about social “realities” than when they concern natural entities.

All three views ought to be able to agree that different beliefs about social entities are relative to each group, and thus that different forms of these beliefs may be accepted as “true” in different cultures. If it works for members of one group to follow certain practices, then it is true for them to hold such beliefs. Some who are realists about moral values, who believe that there is only one best way to live despite what various groups believe, will not agree with this assessment. We will argue this point later in the text when we discuss “moral relativism”. The point for now is that all three views should be able to agree that relativism at least about some social entities is acceptable. Let us assume that they do, and focus our attention now on relativism about natural entities.

Here relativism seems much harder to sustain. The relativism of constructivism was based on the belief that reality is a structureless world, a world with no nature of its own. Such a view, however, suffers from many difficulties. How do we think of such a world if it has no structure? While Kant may tell us that we cannot think about it, we must be able to in order to hold some of the beliefs about it that the relativist claims to be true? It makes no sense, for example, to talk about such a world causing experience, since the belief that one event causes another requires us to think of events in the structureless “noumenal” world. Even if we use more modern terms and think of whatever exists outside of our minds as providing “information” , this also requires that we give it some intelligibility as well. That something counts as information and not just unintelligible “stuff”, presupposes some structure on its part.

If reality had no nature, then there would be no constraints on how we might choose to understand and describe our experience. While it is true that we may create many languages that impose various classificatory systems on experience, not all such systems of beliefs work as well as others in guiding our actions in the real world. When a language does not work well, it is because reality does not answer to its classifications. The common sense and scientific “worlds” are successful guides to action because they correspond to ways that reality is.

Final Recommendations

There is a great deal more to be said about all three possible solutions, all of which continue to have their adherents. The current philosophical debate about the nature of reality is far from over. It is time to end our discussion for now, however, by suggesting one way for you to think about the nature of reality.

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Constructivism

As an account of the reality of social entities, constructivism and the pragmatic theory of truth are right on target. Since social entities are our inventions, and since they make sense only within the language which defines them, the existence and nature of such “realities” is relative to language. The social world is a world of our making, and there are many ways to make it. There is no best way to do so, only ways that are more or less successful for various groups.

For natural entities, however, constructivism fails. While it is true that there are many ways to describe reality, it does not mean that there are many “realities”. The antirealism which lies at the heart of constructivism is simply not true for natural entities. Reality does have a nature. It is not just a featureless “ball of clay”. The reason that natural entities may be understood in many ways is not because natural entities have no structure of their own. Rather, it is because reality has many various sorts of features, and thus more than one way of understanding it may correspond to what it is really like. This is why ordinary language and science are successful---because they capture some of these basic features in their basic categories.

Common Sense Realism

The common sense realist is correct in his belief that ordinary language is the first and best way to understand the world . Common sense realism has it right, that the conceptual framework of ordinary language bests “fits” the world. However, what ordinary language corresponds to is not reality, but rather the way that reality appears to us. This is why ordinary language works so well to guide our actions, because thinking of the world as its conceptual framework requires us to do, captures perfectly the world of our experience.

An examination of the scientific facts, however, shows that secondary qualities arise only after we are conscious of the information received from the environment. Such qualities do not exist in natural entities themselves. The same is true for primary qualities as well, and for all the basic relations of our ordinary world---especially space, time and causality. Kant was right. The common sense world is a phenomenal world. Today we might say that it is simply the way that evolution has programmed members of the human species to represent reality.

Scientific Realism

Scientific realism is right about reality, about the mind-independent world of natural entities. For this world, what is real is what science says is real, at least what the final scientific theory says is real. The conceptual framework of the final scientific theory will describe the entities that really exist. In this sense, reality is

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an ideal to strive for, an ideal that current scientific theories are getting closer and closer to discovering.

The proper study of reality is science, not common sense and surely not metaphysics. The role of discovering what is real is not played any more by philosophers, but is now carried on by scientists. Science constructs a world of theoretical entities, entities known to us by their observable effects. This unobservable world is used to explain why the one that we can observe---the common sense world of appearances, behaves as it does and appears to us as it does. It is within the theories of the natural sciences, and especially of theoretical physics, that this more precise language of reality is being developed today.

Metaphysics

If the road to reality is now paved by scientific theories, and no longer by metaphysics, then what, if anything, is left for metaphysics to do? There are several ways to think about metaphysics today.

First, if metaphysics is thought of as speculating about the nature of reality independently of any empirical testing of its claims, then metaphysics is truly dead. Merely thinking about what is real may produce interesting ideas and splendid theories of reality, but without the ability to test such ideas and theories there is no good reason to believe that such speculation tell us anything about what really exists. If philosophy is to be involved in the search for reality, then it cannot be as a competitor to science. It cannot be assumed that the mind on its own can penetrate into the heart of a reality that is inaccessible to science and common sense. Such a priori knowledge may be beautiful, but there is no way to know if it is true.

Second, metaphysics may be thought of as descriptive metaphysics. Following Strawson, descriptive metaphysics is an uncovering of the conceptual frameworks of languages that we use to describe reality. Here metaphysics is thought of as a second order discipline, as a study of the ways that reality is conceived of by disciplines which study it directly, such as the various sciences. According to this view, metaphysics is a clarification of the basic ways of thinking about reality taken for granted by us in our everyday lives, and by scientists in their scientific studies. Philosophy may also present arguments, as we have done above, as to why one conceptual framework should be preferred over another.

As descriptive metaphysics, the role of philosophy is not to discover reality, but to clarify the concepts used by others who are about that business. Common sense realism would be happy with this role of the philosopher. Scientific realism would be especially pleased. If metaphysics is simply the analysis of concepts used by others, the philosopher may be seen as someone involved in a cooperative venture with science.

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Third, metaphysics may be thought of as the activity of constructing new languages, new ways of understanding reality. Although this sounds like old-fashioned metaphysics, it is based on very different assumptions about reality. I will call this approach to metaphysics constructivist metaphysics, because it accepts much that constructivism has to say about reality and knowledge. From this perspective, philosophers and poets and scientists do not have essentially different tasks. Each constructs languages that purport to describe the world, and each should be judged by its success at fulfilling some human interest or purpose or desire.

According to this conception of metaphysics, all knowledge, even scientific knowledge, is seen as a sort of poetry. Languages are all just different ways to interpret experience, all just attempts to get us to see things differently than we have before. Philosophical systems, scientific theories, poetry, literature, religion, and so on, are all various sorts of hypotheses for understanding experience. Philosophers should join with artists and scientists, inventing new ways to see the world, new ways to understand and describe it, new ways to appreciate and enjoy it. According to this view, there is no pretense on the part of philosophy to arrive at “the” truth, a truth deeper than science or common sense. Instead, constructivist metaphysics seeks to generate new systems of thought, new languages. These new ways of thinking will be offered for general acceptance, and accepted or rejected on the basis of how well they succeed in improving our lives. 15.

It is my belief that metaphysics should retain the role of descriptive metaphysics, and to see itself as cooperating, not competing, with science. Philosophers can really make a contribution to our collective understanding of reality by clarifying the concepts and methods of science, and by helping to make clear the relationships between the various sciences, common sense and religion. But philosophers should also pursue constructivist metaphysics as well. Perhaps there is more under the sun than science can discover. Perhaps there are ways other than science to understand our experience of natural entities, ways that reveal deeper mysteries present in this world. Perhaps philosophers should join in the creative enterprise and construct new languages that attempt to describe reality in various ways so that we may better see all sides of it.

In my view, the spirit of metaphysics will never die. We will always yearn for an understanding of reality that surpasses our present understanding, an understanding that finally gets it right. Perhaps this is a reflection of a deeper desire to be like God, to understand things perfectly, to bring an end to questioning, to quench once and for all our thirst for knowledge. While this spirit, whatever its source, will never die, the form that the metaphysical enterprise will take is still open to discussion. Perhaps you will make a serious contribution to this discussion some day.

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NOTES FOR PART FOUR

1. See especially Hume’s account of causality as found in the “Deeper Level” section of Part Three. 2. Saint Augustine discusses the concept of time in his Confessions, translated by Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.3. For Kant’s discussion of space see his The Critique of Pure Reason, the section on the “Transcendental Aesthetic”, translated by Norman Kemp Smith. London: Macmillan, 1964.4. This name was taken from an anthology by the same name, The Linguistic Turn, ed. Richard Rorty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967. 5. For a spirited defense of common sense realism see Michael Devitt, Realism and Truth. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991. 6. John Austin, Sense and Sensibilia, ed. G. J.Warnock. NY: Oxford University Press, 1964. 7. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. NY: Macmillan, 1953.8. Austin, op. cit.9. Peter Strawson, Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics. NY: Doubleday, 1963, p. xiv.10. This notion of reality as an ideal to strive for was championed by the founder of pragmatism, Charles Sanders Peirce. 11. The argument in defense of scientific realism, that ordinary language describes the world of appearances, while scientific theories describe reality, was forcefully made by Wilfrid Sellars in his Science Perception and Reality. NY: Humanities Press, 1963. In the first chapter he refers to the common sense concept of reality as the “manifest image”, and the scientific concept of reality as the “scientific image”.12. The common sense realist has a response to this criticism that science can know more types of entities than common sense. He claims that science does not know unobservable entities, because there are no such things. They claim that scientific entities, especially the strange, unobservable entities of theoretical physics, are merely fictions of science. Entities such as black holes, strings, various sorts of subatomic particles, and many other such unobservable things, exist only in the minds of scientists. But what sort of “fictions” are these, and why would science invent them?

The unobservable entities of science, the entities that supposedly replace the familiar entities of common sense, are simply convenient ways of thinking about common sense objects. As such, they are ways of thinking that aid science in making predictions, but they do not really correspond to anything that exists. Just as thinking of “the average man” may be a convenient way to discuss

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statistical reports about many men, so the theoretical entities of science are just convenient ways to discuss observable facts which may be described in ordinary language.

Talking about unobservable subatomic particles, for example, is just a convenient way to discuss observable data, such as electricity, or tracks in a Wilson cloud chamber, or nuclear decay. This view, that the unobservable entities of science are simply instruments to help scientists predict what is going to happen in the common sense world, is called instrumentalism. It claims that the unobservable entities described in the scientific view of reality are not real, and thus that the conceptual framework of theoretical physics refers to entities that are, like the characters in a novel, simply fictitious. Science invents useful fictions, to be sure, but does not discover a reality over and above those described in our ordinary conceptual framework.13. For a good, if brief, account of pragmatism and its relation to traditional empiricism, see Bruce Aune, Rationalism, Empiricism, and Pragmatism: An Introduction. NY: Random House, 1970.14. A good example of a constructivist is Richard Rorty. See especially his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Oxford: Blackwell, 1980. While it is clear that Rorty accepts epistemological relativism, there is some difference of opinion about whether or not he accepts metaphysical relativism. For a discussion of additional versions of constructivism, see Devitt, op. cit., pp. 135-291.15. An example of constructivist metaphysics is found in the writings of Martin Heidegger, and in the works of other phenomenological existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Philosophical Buddhism also fits this description of constructivist metaphysics.

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