Online research in philosophy

This paper offers an intellectual history of the scientific realism debate during the twentieth century. The telling of the tale will explain the philosophical significance and the prospects of the scientific realism debate, through the major turns it went through. The emphasis will be on the relations between empiricism and scientific realism and on the swing from metaphysics-hostile to metaphysics-friendly versions of realism.

This is a book about the nature of film: about the nature of moving images, about the viewer's relation to film, and about the kinds of narrative that film is capable of presenting. It represents a very decisive break with the semiotic and psychoanalytic theories of film which have dominated discussion over the last twenty years. The central thesis is that film is essentially a pictorial medium and that the movement of film images is real rather than illusory. A general theory of pictorial representation is presented, which insists on the realism of pictures and the impossibility of assimilating them to language. It criticises attempts to explain the psychology of film viewing in terms of the viewer's imaginary occupation of a position within the world of film. On the contrary, film viewing is nearly always impersonal.

Horwich argues that we should reject metaphysical realism, but that we can preserve semantic realism by adhering to a redundancy theory of truth and a confirmationist account of linguistic understanding. But the latter will give us semantic realism only if it allows that the truth-values of sentences may transcend our recognitional capacities, and this is possible only insofar as we covertly reintroduce metaphysical realism. In spite of its intuitive appeal, we should not endorse semantic realism, but this need not bear upon the tenability of scientific realism.

In this paper, I hope to provide an account of the conditions of moral realism whereby there are still significant metaphysical commitments made by the realist which set the view apart as a distinct position in the contemporary meta-ethical landscape. In order to do so, I will be appealing to a general account of what it is for realism to be true in any domain of experience, whether it be realism about universals, realism about unobservable scientific entities, realism about artifacts, and so forth.

Certain simple thoughts about pictures suggest that the contents of pictures are closely bound to vision. But how far can the striking features of depiction be accounted for merely in terms of the especially visual contents which belong to pictures, without considering, for example, any issues concerning the nature of the visual experiences with which pictures provide us? This article addresses that question by providing an account of the distinctively visual contents belonging to pictures, and by using that account to explain many notable general facts about depiction. Some implications of the resulting framework for the main stream of current theorizing about pictorial representation are also discussed.

My aim is to show that the accounts of depiction offered by Christopher Peacocke and Robert Hopkins assume rather than explain one of the central features of depiction. This feature is pictorial realism. It is a constraint upon any adequate theory of depiction that it be able to explain pictorial realism; however, Peacocke and Hopkins seek to meet this constraint by employing the notion of resemblance. I raise three problems with Peacocke's account and point out an error in Hopkins's use of solid angles (upon which his notion of resemblance rests). It is suggested that while these theories must be rejected, there are various non-resemblance theories, including that proposed by Gombrich, which might prove adequate.

This paper examines a form of pictorial realism that has epistemic import. Gombrich and Schier claim that some pictures are realistic because they convey accurate information. The difficulty is that judgments of realism vary across cultural and historical contexts. Goodman counters that pictures belong to different systems and realistic pictures belong to familiar systems. However, this does not explain the revelatory realism' of pictures in novel systems. I propose that two views can be combined: a realistic picture is one which belongs to a system that conveys the kind of information that suits the needs of users in a context.