Empirical Realism and the Legitimacy of Ontology: A Dialogue

Abstract

The purpose of this dialogue between an ‘empirical realist’ and a ‘traditional ontologist’ is to clarify and evaluate the presuppositions of the kind of anti-ontological position exemplified by empirical realism. After ontology is defined and the empirical realist's position explained, the traditional ontologist pursues a series of dialectical developments and criticisms of the empirical realist's claim to have a coherently non-ontological position. The eventual conclusion is that the empirical realist's opposition to ontology just arbitrarily assumes ontology to be associated with infallibilism (by way of logically necessary truth) and incompatible with fallibilism instead of conveying the illegitimacy of ontology itself or convincingly explaining the non-ontological standing of their position. The significance of this dialogue for critical realism is that it extends the case against anti-ontological epistemologies in general and empirical realism in particular by demonstrating the problems that result from the attempt to evade the charge of an implicit ontology.

Keywords:

• empirical realism
• epistemology
• fallibilism
• infallibilism
• metaphysics
• ontology
• scepticism

Notes

1 ‘[E]mpirical realism is the doctrine that the world is constituted by the objects of actual (and, sometimes, possible) experiences’ (Bhaskar [1994] 2010, 6). Cf. Hartwig 2007; McWherter 2013, 21–34; Morgan 2007a and 2007b.

2 E.g. Bhaskar [1975] 1978, 43. Though apparently unaware of Bhaskar's work here, this point is exemplified in part of analytic metaphysician E. J. Lowe's response to Kant's critique of metaphysics. Lowe disputes Kant's demand that metaphysical claims be epistemically certain and suggests instead that they be vulnerable to refutation (Lowe 1998, 24, 26–7; Lowe 2002, 9).

3 McWherter 2013, 45–66. I should clarify that my critical engagement with non-ontological interpretations of Kant and empirical realism more generally in previous work and in this article is not so much intended to take an interpretive position in historical scholarship as it is to address those interpretations as potential resources for problematizing Bhaskar's contention regarding the inexorability of ontology.

4 I am indebted to Chris Johns for pressing me on this point in my previous work, which made me consider it again.

5 Here and in the dialogue I use the term ‘ontic’ and its related expressions to refer to things or beings, while ‘ontological’ and its related expressions pertain to the discourse on things or beings (ontology).

6 E.g. Bhaskar [1975] 1978, 16.

7 Heidegger 1962.

8 Heidegger 1962.

9 Sartre 1956.

10 Badiou 2006.

11 Quine 2004; van Inwagen 2009.

12 See Hume [1902] 1975, 151; Hume 1985, 239; Kant 1998, A247/B303 and A366–80 (where the term ‘empirical realism’ is first used); Kant 2004, 93 for representative passages from the ‘founders’ of empirical realism. Also see Norris 2007 for a concise summary of the philosophical context that motivates empirical realism and critical realism's response to it.

13 For this distinction in Kant see Allison [1983] 2004, 120; Caygill 1995, 306; McWherter 2013, 46–9.

14 Which Hume's sceptical empiricism and Kant's transcendental idealism respectively allow. See the passages cited in note 12 above.

15 Jacobi 2000; Kant 1998, Bxx; Kant 2004, 40–1.

16 See the difference between discourse and its object implied by referential detachment in, e.g., Bhaskar [1993] 2008, 212.

17 See the claim about the fallibility of philosophy at Bhaskar [1986] 2009, 15.

18 Compare Bhaskar [1975] 1978, 249–50.

19 For discussion of the epistemic fallacy and its problems, which is relevant to the topic of this dialogue, see Collier 1994, 76–85; Groff 2007, 35–8; McWherter 2013, 41–2. For recent work in metaontology within analytic philosophy, which is more broadly relevant to the topic of this dialogue, see Berto and Plebani 2015; Chalmers et al. 2009.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dustin McWherter

Dustin McWherter is the author of The Problem of Critical Ontology: Bhaskar Contra Kant (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and has previously published articles in Journal of Critical Realism, Kantian Review and Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy. He was previously Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the American University of Beirut.