Philosophizing Gene And Body

In a loose way, we can divide contemporary realism into common-sense realism and scientific realism. The latter has been developed on the basis of the former and the difference lies in that they commit different kinds of objects. The core doctrines of common-sense realism go as follows: (1) Most observable objects in ordinary world exist independently of our knowledge; and (2) Sentences (or propositions) are true if they correspond to the state of the world. The main challenges to this kind of realism come from skepticism and the difficulties involved in its correspondence theory of truth. Skeptics may ask such questions as: why should we believe our sensory experience? How can we know from our sensory experience that the world exists independently? As for correspondence theory of truth, the philosophical tradition of body/mind split makes it impossible to bridge the gap between propositions and reality, and consequently the realist maintaining the conception of truth as correspondence has to resolve the problem of 'God's Eye View'. All these problems haven't been well settled in the typical tradition of realism.Scientific realism can be generally characterized as such: (1) its commitment to physicalist ontology; and (2) that scientific theories are claims about reality, and that the best current scientific theories are at least approximately true and their central terms are genuinely referential. Early arguments for scientific realism go mainly with in 'inference to the best explanation' and 'no-miracles argument'. Objections to scientific realism revolve about the relations between reference, truth and success. The history of theoretical terms in science suggests that it is an infeasible strategy to understand the continuity of scientific theories and the progress of science in terms of referential stability while adopting the classic description theory of reference. 'Pessimistic induction' developed by Laudan shows that there is no inherent connection between reference and the success of theories. Scientific realists attempt to set up the connection limited to 'mature' sciences. However, we can find out that this strategy is not a successful due to the vagueness of the notion of 'mature science'. The same difficulties meet the relation between the truthlikeness and the success of a theory. As a consequence, scientific realists have to search for new strategies to support realism.There exist two kinds of strategies designed to cope with the problems of reference. One kind of strategies is to save the concept of reference but along two different lines: (1) replacing description theory of reference with causal theory, which is a simplified way; and (2) developing a complex argument, that is, "the flight to reference" argument, put forward especially by Kitcher. The other strategy is to cancel completely the role of reference in theories, mainly exemplified in Ramsey-sentence realism. In addition to the problems of the correspondence theory of truth, the hardest difficulty these strategies face is the challenge implied in 'magical antirealism' directed to realism's substantive or objective account of the reference. If individual objects or class of objects in the world is constructed out of our conceptual system, and if reality is shaped by our concepts and language, then the idea that words refer to reality is tautological—our language refers to objects posited by our language.Above problems beside, scientific realism encounters challenges from constructivism and post-empiricism, and some of their formidable theses, that is, theory-dependence of methodology, theory-ladenness of observation, and underdetermination. Solutions suggested by such representative realists as Boyd and Kitcher are not able to reject these theses fundamentally. What's more, realism faces challenge in its idea about the aim of science coming from Van Fraasson's constructive empiricism, the conception that science aims to give us theories that are empirically adequate, and that the acceptance of a theory involves merely a belief in its empirical adequacy. With these difficulties, many scientific realists changed their strong stand, a conspicuous example is Putnam's internal realism which states: (1) that reality depends on knowledge to a certain degree; and (2) that referents of the terms weaved in our knowledge are objects constructed by our cognitive capacities. However, Putnam's view about whether a statement is warranted or not is not a coherent position, for he holds that the warrantedness is independent of the judgments of the majority of one's cultural peers, and meanwhile that our norms or criterion of warranted assertibility are historical products. In order not to get immersed in radical relativism, we have to concede that the norms can come only from the attitudes of the majority of one's cultural peers.Yet Putnam's insight into reality can derive its support from his analysis of realities, especially such artificial realities as institutions and artifacts, which are products of human knowledge at least partly. Therefore, traditional realism needs some revisions in its ontological and epistemological dimensions. As for ontology, wecan have knowledge of reality only within this or that conceptual framework which is after all a mental structure, and consequently it is both nonsense and too narrow a viewpoint to talk about mind-independent reality. As for epistemology, 'Ignorance Principle' and 'Error Principle', applied to reality as the sum of natural kinds, are at odds with reality as a whole. Thus, in order to unify our understanding of all kinds of reality we should adopt a weaker version of realism, which claims that all kinds of things existing in the world have different degree of mind-independence and that our access to reality is mediated by our conceptual framework.For realism, the hardest question is one about truth, a question which cannot be answered by traditional realism. Correspondence theory of truth seems to be a target of much attack and alternative explanations of the success of theories have been developed by such anti-realists as Van Fraasson, Fine and Standford. Do we need the notion of truth to account for the success of science? A close inquiry into anti-realist explanations indicates that anti-realist strategies cannot work without presupposing truth. But we should modify Aristotelian definition of truth. Analysis of ordinary use of truth enables us to establish a theory of truth based on the understanding that what we take to be true is simply what most people think to be real. The pragmatics of truth urges us to view as true those theories accepted by most members of a scientific community and to take theoretical terms to be genuinely referential, although they may be rejected and some terms may become non-referential with the development of science, since our most reasonable judgment on what there is, or what the world is like, is to be made on the basis of the best world view, or the best theoretical system we have so far been able to devise.Three problems have to be resolved about this account of truth. The first one comes from recent discussions about the human being's cognitive faculties, which cast doubts on the claim that our faculties are reliable in obtaining truth and evolution can guarantee our adaptive beliefs being true. The 'tempting argument' linking natural selection and truth-reliability of cognitive faculties rests on a much criticized presumption that it is more likely to enhance inclusive fitness to have true beliefs than false ones. However, through a closer inspection, those criticisms can be dismissed and the argument as a whole will not be undermined, and the presumption may be modified to the claim that it is generally more likely to enhance inclusive fitness to have mostly true beliefs than false ones. The second problem is similar to the one encountered by classical correspondence theory of truth, that is, how we can talkabout the correspondence of ideas to reality. Such a problem can be settled by the discoveries of cognitive sciences. Cognitive scientists find that mind and reason are inherently embodied; that reason is shaped by the features of our brains, bodies, and bodily experience; and that the very structure of reason itself results from the details of our embodiment. The same neural and cognitive mechanisms that allow us to perceive and move around also create our conceptual systems and modes of reasoning. Since we touch the reality through our bodies and there is not body/mind split, we needn't worry about the so-called 'gap' between ideas and reality. The most difficult problem is the third one, i.e., that different persons have incompatible understandings of their environments and as a consequence there can never exist any consensus of what is real, what follows is a radical relativism rival to realism. Thus, what we should do is to defend the objectivity of truth.The main factors running against objectivity are cultural and conceptual differences. We shall not be afraid of the threat of relativism to truth if we can show that there is objectivity in our understanding with respect to these two factors. Evidence from Sociobiology, theory of cultural evolution and cognitive science shows that selfish gene guarantees our most important modes of behavior being unanimous, that the conformity of cultural evolution guarantees different cultures having some features fundamentally in common, and that the process of cognition guarantees our conceptual apparatus having a common foundation. Furthermore, the findings in cognitive sciences show that human being have the same physiological mechanisms, as assures us that people from different areas or cultures cut the world in the same way and the entities in the world aren't sheer constructions of our mentalities. Thus, radical constructivism and magical anti-realism have no basis and we can keep going our substantive account of reference. In short we have overcome the hardest difficulty realism has ever faced, that is, relativistic threat to truth, and set the substantive account of reference on a firm basis.