3 ms·
It seems like naive realism is often used as a term of abuse, including in the article. However, I don't think this position is justified and as wikipedia notes
by joe_the_user 4y ago
It seems like naive realism is often used as a term of abuse, including in the article. However, I don't think this position is justified and as wikipedia notes [1], plenty of illustrious philosophers have defended this position (Among contemporary analytic philosophers who defended direct realism one might refer to, for example, Hilary Putnam, John McDowell, Galen Strawson, John R. Searle, and John L. Pollock.).
I don't think defender of naive realism take it as "my ideas are always true" or "I am the center of the universe" (as the article seems to imply).
Rather, I'd take it as saying an immediate perception can remain true even when one expands the discussion of reality in a number of ways. I can say: "there's a fence around that house" and that can remain basically true even in you expand the area and categories of reality considerably - if someone points to minute gaps in the fence, I'd note the effective definition of "fence around the house" would intuitively expand to "a configuration dense enough to help keep something out of the house", etc.
The point isn't that there aren't level divisions in reality. The point is there isn't some magical/theological level that trumps every level of reality below it. Not accepting "Plato's Cave" or proving/asserting "we're not all brains in a vat" [Hilary Putnam].
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Na%C3%AFve_realism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Na%C3%AFve_realism
- teucris 4y agoThat’s a practical way of looking at things that works well until it doesn’t. And it doesn’t work more frequently than we imagine. People ask me what I do and I say I’m a product manager. This is an immediate perception - it says so on my business card - but there is a limit to its truth depending on the definition of product manager in the minds of those hearing my statement. Product management varies wildly across the industry and I am most certainly not a product manager in certain industries. So no, there isn’t a hierarchy. There are several billion different views of how concepts map to reality that often (depending on the circumstances) pragmatically align.
- joe_the_user 4y agoThe thing about your example is you're describing a truth supplanted by more detail. That's completely different from the philosophical position of the truth being fundamentally out of reach. As others have noted, the article substitutes a sort-of pop psychology idea of naive realist for the philosophical idea.