'Not Empiricism and Yet Realism in Philosophy, that is the Hardest Thing'

Schönbaumsfeld, Genia (2023) 'Not Empiricism and Yet Realism in Philosophy, that is the Hardest Thing'. In, Gori, Pietro and Serini, Lorenzo (eds.) Practices of Truth in Philosophy: Historical and Comparative Perspectives. 1 ed. Routledge.

Record type: Book Section

Abstract

Radical scepticism is the thought that we might know nothing about the so-called ‘external’ world – either what it is like or whether it exists. Most contemporary epistemological proposals are concessive to scepticism in that they grant to the sceptic that unless we can demonstrate that we are not massively deceived, we can, at best, have knowledge of how things appear to us. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, thinks that radical scepticism is an illusion. My paper has two main aims: 1) to explain why Wittgenstein believes this; 2) to show that Wittgenstein’s rejection of the idea that it makes sense to ‘ground’ the background does not imply that Wittgenstein is a friend of anti-realism. Rather, Wittgenstein is endorsing a ‘realism without empiricism’ – a modest form of realism that eschews various empiricist dogmas, such as the Reasons Identity Thesis – the thought that one’s perceptual reasons in both the good epistemic case and the bad one are the same and can never give one access to how things actually are. This will enable us to see why accepting that what stands fast cannot itself be either true or false, does not threaten to undermine our epistemic practices.

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