1. Embrace anti-realism. Honestly people, what hope do we have in describing things-in-themselves? There is a sort of Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle involved here. There is no way to take a sort of "God's Eye View" to determine if our immediate experience has any bearing on mind-independent reality.
2. Lean heavily on the unpredictability and lack of individual control on personal experience. Once we have given the axe to Realism, we have to respond to the knee-jerk response. Whining Voice: "So, who is to say that one's subjective reality is not simply a dream controlled by the individual?" Well, we have to admit that it may be a dream created by the subconscious, but that is pragmatically the same as a Berkley-esque experience, or the brain-in-a-vat hypothesis, or, triumphantly, a world of causal phenomena that effects our sensory apparati.
3. Abandon objective truth. With Realism follows Truth. This is where most members of the field (as if I was a member of the field!) will probably laugh. But don't you listen to them. They are cantankerous. And jaded. Trust me. I assert that truth (or the utility of a statement, as i prefer to think of it) should consist only in its temporary and relative cohesion to the individual's--oh, how to say, Neo-Kantian categories of thought? That is to say that if a statement fits in with one's other beliefs cohesively, it is justified as a "true," or useable, statement.
1 comment:
so true. just like tyler
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