I think my characterization is accurate, but maybe guilty of weak-manning: I’m recounting a salient recent (long) conversation with laypeople, rather than attempting a representative survey of non-realists or trying to find the best proponents.
I had in mind a small social gathering I attended (without any conscious effort to seek out and find non-realists) where most of the people in the room voiced disagreement with my claim that truth is a coherent idea, that some entities aren’t social or psychological constructs, that some methods for learning things are more objective/reasonable/justified than others, and so on.
I tried to find common ground on the most basic claims I could think of, like “OK, but we can at least agree that something is real, right? There’s, like, stuff actually going on?” I wasn’t successful. And I think I’m pretty good at not straw-manning people on these issues; I’m used to drawing pretty fine distinctions between pretty out-there ontological and epistemological views. (E.g., I’m perfectly happy to try to tease apart the nuances of thinkers like Parmenides, Nagarjuna, Zhuangzi, Sextus, William James, Dharmakirti, Schopenhauer, Jonathan Schaffer, Graham Priest, Sartre, Berkeley. This stuff is interesting, even if I put no stock in it.)
To my ear, “it pays to think in terms other than reality/truth sometimes” sound too weak on its own to count as ‘anti-realism’. If I think it’s ever (cognitively?) useful to read fiction, or explore fake frameworks, or just take a nap and clear my head, that already seems to qualify. I’m happy to hear more about what you have in mind, though, regardless of what labels fit best.
And I think I’m pretty good at not straw-manning people on these issues; I’m used to drawing pretty fine distinctions between pretty out-there ontological and epistemological views.
To have a conversation where you can draw fine distinctions both parties of the discussion need to be willing to have that conversation. You might have approached the issue as a mistake theorist while they were more in the conflict theorist mindset and didn’t want to yield any possible ground.
I remember in a book about applied ontology by a author who saw himself as a realist while the statement that “homo sapiens is a species” was seen as a statement about reality while “Alice sake” in the sense of “He did X for Alice’s sake” is not something that really exists. ( I think it was in Applied Ontology: An Introduction by Katherine Munn and Barry Smith)
In contrast to that non-realist ontologists consider the idea of a species to be constructed and not one about reality. What’s real about the statement “homo sapiens is a species” is not something that’s directly made up of atoms and physics but the realist position by applied ontologists like Barry Smith is still that it’s real.
I think my characterization is accurate, but maybe guilty of weak-manning: I’m recounting a salient recent (long) conversation with laypeople, rather than attempting a representative survey of non-realists or trying to find the best proponents.
I had in mind a small social gathering I attended (without any conscious effort to seek out and find non-realists) where most of the people in the room voiced disagreement with my claim that truth is a coherent idea, that some entities aren’t social or psychological constructs, that some methods for learning things are more objective/reasonable/justified than others, and so on.
I tried to find common ground on the most basic claims I could think of, like “OK, but we can at least agree that something is real, right? There’s, like, stuff actually going on?” I wasn’t successful. And I think I’m pretty good at not straw-manning people on these issues; I’m used to drawing pretty fine distinctions between pretty out-there ontological and epistemological views. (E.g., I’m perfectly happy to try to tease apart the nuances of thinkers like Parmenides, Nagarjuna, Zhuangzi, Sextus, William James, Dharmakirti, Schopenhauer, Jonathan Schaffer, Graham Priest, Sartre, Berkeley. This stuff is interesting, even if I put no stock in it.)
To my ear, “it pays to think in terms other than reality/truth sometimes” sound too weak on its own to count as ‘anti-realism’. If I think it’s ever (cognitively?) useful to read fiction, or explore fake frameworks, or just take a nap and clear my head, that already seems to qualify. I’m happy to hear more about what you have in mind, though, regardless of what labels fit best.
To have a conversation where you can draw fine distinctions both parties of the discussion need to be willing to have that conversation. You might have approached the issue as a mistake theorist while they were more in the conflict theorist mindset and didn’t want to yield any possible ground.
I remember in a book about applied ontology by a author who saw himself as a realist while the statement that “homo sapiens is a species” was seen as a statement about reality while “Alice sake” in the sense of “He did X for Alice’s sake” is not something that really exists. ( I think it was in Applied Ontology: An Introduction by Katherine Munn and Barry Smith)
In contrast to that non-realist ontologists consider the idea of a species to be constructed and not one about reality. What’s real about the statement “homo sapiens is a species” is not something that’s directly made up of atoms and physics but the realist position by applied ontologists like Barry Smith is still that it’s real.