Fundamentalism versus the patchwork of laws

Abstract

For realism A number of years ago I wrote How The Laws of Physics Lie . That book was generally perceived to be an attack on realism. Nowadays I think that I was deluded about the enemy: it is not realism but fundamentalism that we need to combat. My advocacy of realism – local realism about a variety of different kinds of knowledge in a variety of different domains across a range of highly differentiated situations – is Kantian in structure. Kant frequently used a puzzling argument form to establish quite abstruse philosophical positions (Φ): We have X – perceptual knowledge, freedom of the will, whatever. But without Φ (the transcendental unity of the apperception, or the kingdom of ends) X would be impossible, or inconceivable. Hence Φ. The objectivity of local knowledge is my Φ; X is the possibility of planning, prediction, manipulation, control and policy setting. Unless our claims about the expected consequences of our actions are reliable, our plans are for nought. Hence knowledge is possible. What might be found puzzling about the Kantian argument form are the Xs from which it starts. These are generally facts which appear in the clean and orderly world of pure reason as refugees with neither proper papers nor proper introductions, of suspect worth and suspicious origin. The facts which I take to ground objectivity are similarly alien in the clear, well-lighted streets of reason, where properties have exact boundaries, rules are unambiguous, and behaviour is precisely ordained.

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