Page 62 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Language, Metaphysics, and Ontology
monsense' vocabulary of terms like 'warm,' 'wet,' 'hard,' 'heavy,' 'bitter,' 'smooth.' Such terms may be applied on the basis of sensory experiences which are vivid enough, yet the rationalists argued that they lacked the transparency and precision of math- ematical terms. 'Sensible properties are in fact occult properties,' wrote Leibniz later in the seventeenth cen- tury, 'and there must be others more manifest which could render them more understandable.'
3. Characteristica UniversaKs
A recurring dream of rationalism was that of a charac- teristica universails—a clear, precise, and universal symbolic alphabet in terms of which the whole of human knowledgemight be represented. It isprobably fair to say that the philosophical consensus nowadays is that any such aspiration is radically misconceived. Briefly, there seem to be two major obstacles in its way. The first is the problem of 'commensurability': it is hard to see how the languages of different
branches of science (and perhaps even of different theories within the same branch) can be readily inter- translatable, or reducible to a common currency of 'neutral' or universal symbols. And the second is the problem of 'justification': it is hard to see how tra- ditional rationalism could defend its claim to have discovered the master vocabulary or canonical lan- guage which describes the universe 'as it really is.' Many of the issues involved here are complex and still unresolved. What is clear is the enduring importance of the rationalist tradition in philosophy, if only because so much contemporary philosophy of lan- guage and theory of meaning defines itself by its oppo- sition to that tradition.
See also: A Priori; Chomsky, Noam; Innate Ideas.
Bibliography
Cottingham J 1984 Rationalism.Paladin Books, London Chomsky N 1966 Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in The History of Rationalist Thought. Harper and Row, New
Y ork
Dictionaries of philosophy tend to define the philo- sophical doctrine of realism along the following lines: realism is the view that the entities one takes to exist, do so independently of our minds and mental powers. Realism thus explicated is then contrasted with ideal- ism, which holds that the items of everyday experience or scientific investigation are in some sense mental constructs.
1. Historical Context
Historically two specific forms of realism are often distinguished: (a) medieval realism regarding the exis- tence of properties; (b) the dispute between direct realists on the one hand and phenomenalists and rep- resentationalists on the other. In the first dispute, realists argued that predicates such as 'is wise' stand for mind-independent correlates—here the property of wisdom, just as names such as 'Socrates' stand for independently existing objects. Their opponents argued that 'is wise' can apply meaningfully and truly to mind-independent objects without it being the case that it too stood for some mind-independent entity.
Insofar as predicates designate anything at all, they designate mind-dependent entities such as concepts.
Direct realists in perception argued for a distinction between first the act of perceiving, second itscon- tent—e.g., that a tree is in front of me—and finally the object of perception. The latter, where it exists, is a mind-independent entity, the direct realist maintains, whereas the act of perceiving and its content are clearly mind-dependent. Opponents of direct realism reject the distinction between act, content, and object in perception and hence maintain that the immediate objects of perception are mind-dependent entities— ideas, sense data, and so forth. Both disputes, then, exemplify the general pattern—realism affirms mind- independence for some sort of entity, idealism or anti- realism denies it.
2. 'Realism'In Philosophy
In analytical philosophy 'realism versus antirealism' seems to be used to cover two somewhat different sets of problems. The first concerns scientific realism which is usually contrasted with forms of instrumentalism.
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Realism A. Weir