The debate of realism and anti-realism

Gottlob Frege

The secular debate between realism and nominalism (or anti-realism, its now preferred name), has been expressed in a few new theories of the so-called analytical philosophy, whose origin dates from the early twentieth century, with Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Circle of Vienna and several philosophers of the last fifty years, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world.

Currently, the two camps, realist and anti-realist, agree on one thing: science works. But although this is considered an incontrovertible fact, very divergent positions are posed to explain it.

As it has always happened throughout history, neither of the two fields is united. Both realism and anti-realism are divided into two branches, at the least.

Let us start by describing the realist position:

The unreasonable effectiveness of science

Paul Davies

Paul Davies is an British physicist, expert in cosmology and quantum mechanics, well known for his activity in scientific popularization. In one of his articles [1], with the same title as this post, he wrote the following:

The fact that this rich and complex variety emerges from the featureless inferno of the Big Bang… as a consequence of laws of stunning simplicity and generality… has a distinct teleological flavor.

And in his most famous book, The Mind of God (1992), written in response to Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, Davies wrote the following words:

The success of the scientific method at unlocking the secrets of nature is so dazzling it can blind us to the greatest scientific miracle of all: science works.

What Davies poses here has much to do with one of the most pressing problems of our time, the debate between realism and anti-realism, if we use the terms of analytical philosophy. This debate can be summarized in the following words:

The Chinese on the Moon

The hidden face of the moon

On January 2, a Chinese spacecraft landed on the opposite side of the moon.

The fact that the moon rotates around its axis in the same time that it revolves in an elliptical orbit around the Earth has the consequence that our satellite always shows us the same face. For several centuries, the hidden face of the moon was an enigma. In 1870, the science-fiction novel Around the Moon, by Jules Verne, leaves open the possibility that in the hidden face of the moon there could be air, water, life, and even intelligent inhabitants. While the three travelers pass over the hidden face during the lunar night, unable to see anything on the surface, a sudden flash of light caused by a meteor shower illuminates for a moment the hidden area and shows them clouds, seas, forests... or at least that’s what the dazzled observers think they have seen.

The ecological ignorance of ecologists

Ernst Haeckel, usually considered
the founder of Ecology

Ecology is the science that studies the mutual relationships between living beings that inhabit a given territory. Scientists who practice and research in this science are called ecologists.

As its name suggests (the -ism ending is very clear) ecologism is not a science, but an ideology. The people who practice this ideology (also called ecologists in English) are not scientists, but socio-political activists. Why did the creators of this ideology choose a name that can lead to confusion with that of a science, especially in English? No doubt they did it on purpose, to take advantage of the social prestige of science; so that ill-informed people would believe that ecologism is scientific; in short, to win votes.

Obviously there always are honorable exceptions, but it is not difficult to see that many socio-political ecologists are quite ignorant about the ecological science that they are supposed to apply in their practical policies, whenever they reach power positions. As a result, such policies are often counterproductive and even tragic.

Let us look at an example:

We know little about the world situation

Hans Rosling

Hans Rosling (1948-2017) was a Swedish doctor in medicine, who worked in the Karolinska Institute and investigated certain rare tropical diseases such as konzo, which proved to be a food contamination with cyanide. He was one of the founders of the Gapminder Foundation, which specializes in the analysis and dissemination of little-known data and in carrying out surveys to discover the degree of popular knowledge about economic, sociological, and highly topical worldwide issues.

In 2018 appeared his posthumous book, Factfulness, dedicated to explaining some of the discoveries of the Gapminder Foundation about the ignorance of many people on important issues, an ignorance which has spread a vision of reality very different from that provided by the data.

Neurons and free will

In another post in this blog I have described the four theories used by philosophers to try and solve the problem of human mind: What is intelligence? What is consciousness? What is free will? Are we actually free, or are we determined, just like meat machines?

At the end of last year, Javier Pérez Castells published a book where he addresses some of these issues from a scientific and philosophical point of view. Its title (in Spanish) is the same as the title of this post. In particular, chapter 8 of the book describes some of the models with which various scientists and philosophers have tried to explain how we make decisions more complex than those studied by the experiments performed by Libet, Fried and Haynes, which don’t go much further that pressing a button or raising a hand. These models are called two-stage, because they try to explain our decisions assuming that they are made in two phases: the first, more or less random, in which the brain generates the available alternatives, followed by a second phase, when we actually make a decision, after weighing those alternatives.

The political correctness of animalists

John Maxwell Coetzee

In an article in the Spanish major newspaper La Vanguardia, the writer Quim Monzó recalls a campaign organized by the City Council of a Catalonian village to move people to collect canine excrements, with a poster where a pig-like dog appeared to tell its master: "I am your dog. Don’t make me look like a pig. Collect my excrements." The poster provoked numerous complaints from local animalists, who considered it an insult to pigs. Quim Monzó adds the following comment:

As expected... we are now hearing the slogan that the time has come to eliminate all phrases that trivialize the suffering of animals. [The animalist association] proposes that we stop using expressions like "kill two birds with one stone" or "be treated as a guinea pig”... We must not say "take the bull by the horns". There is also an English expression "bring home the bacon," which should not be used either.

Monzó has given his article a significant title: Idiots, idiots everywhere.

I would not dare to call animalists idiots, but I must accuse them of irrationality. Do they really believe that some pig was offended by the campaign for the collection of canine excrement, or that whenever we say don’t be a pig (or any of its synonyms) to rebuke a dirty person? I am afraid that pigs are not even aware of our use of language. The only ones who bother about this are animalists, and until proven otherwise, we must assume that they are human beings.