A Clarification of Critical Realism

Extract

What I propose to do in the present paper is to clarify critical realism on some crucial points. While such is my primary purpose, I also entertain the hope that logical positivists and pragmatists may be led to see in this form of realism a necessary supplementation to their emphases and insights. I am persuaded that there has been misunderstanding and prejudice at work partly because of verbal phobias in connection with such phrases as the copy-theory, representative perception, transcendence, the subjective, Cartesian dualism, etc., etc. So strong have these accumulated prejudices been that, in America at least, there has been a tendency to outlaw epistemology. I do not find the same situation in England for instance. Here it seems at times as though pragmatism and positivism have consciously “ganged up” against epistemology—in my opinion to the hurt of philosophy. I have the impression that the younger philosophers in America are bewildered and are largely drifting. Under these conditions it is the duty of any one who believes that he has a clear-cut epistemology capable of rising above these verbal phobias to seek to present it as precisely as possible.