8 - Practical Realism writ large

Summary

Part of the power of the Standard View of the attitudes is that it seems the inevitable result of a particular well-entrenched metaphysical outlook that takes science as the arbiter of knowable reality. In challenging the Standard View, I have also challenged some of the background assumptions about the nature of reality and knowledge that generate it. Now I want to locate the conception of unreified belief in an equally comprehensive metaphysics – one importantly different from the metaphysics of proponents of the Standard View but still compatible with various forms of materialism – in which the alternative conception of belief finds a natural home.

Practical Realist metaphysics differs from Standard View metaphysics primarily in its assessment of the cognitive status of what I shall call the ‘commonsense conception of reality’. According to Standard View metaphysics, common sense is a patchwork of folk theories in potential competition with scientific theories. As we saw in Chapter 3, one prominent proponent of the Standard View, Paul Churchland, put it this way: “[T]he network of principles and assumptions constitutive of our commonsense conceptual framework can be seen to be as speculative and as artificial as any overtly theoretical system.” According to Practical Realist metaphysics, the commonsense conception is not theoretical in the same way that the sciences are; yet it is a reliable source of truth. A key feature of Practical Realism is that it strongly resists devaluation of reality as disclosed by everyday life.