Retrieving Realism

by Hubert L. Dreyfus, Charles Margrave Taylor

A picture held us captive, writes Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations, describing the powerful image of mind that underlies the modern epistemological tradition from Descartes onward. Retrieving Realism offers a radical critique of the Cartesian epistemic picture that has captivated philosophy for too long and restores a realist view affirming our direct access to the everyday world and to the physical universe.

According to Descartes, knowledge exists in the form of ideas in the mind that purportedly represent the world. This mediational epistemology (internal ideas mediating external reality) continues to exert a grip on Western thought, and even philosophers such as Quine, Rorty, and Davidson who have claimed to refute Descartes remain imprisoned within its regime. As Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor show, knowledge consists of much more than the explicit representations we formulate. We gain knowledge of the world through bodily engagement with it by handling things, moving among them, responding to them and these forms of knowing cannot be understood in mediational terms. Dreyfus and Taylor also contest Descartes' privileging of the individual mind, arguing that much of our understanding of the world is necessarily shared.

Once we deconstruct Cartesian mediationalism, the problems that Hume, Kant, and many of our contemporaries still struggle with trying to prove the existence of objects beyond our representations fall away, as does the motivation for nonrealist doctrines. We can then begin to describe the background everyday world we are absorbed in and the universe of natural kinds discovered by science.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Psychology

184 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2015

About the author

Hubert Lederer Dreyfus was professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where his interests include phenomenology, existentialism, the philosophy of psychology and literature, and the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence.

Reviews

[Todd · Rating 4 out of 5]

One thing I really enjoy about late 20th and early 21st century philosophy and social science is the convergence of traditions. There is a dialogue and debate between traditions that grew up in occasional contact with one another but were at the same time quite foreign. It’s like they are distant cousins separated by distance and geography. Then, thanks to globalization, these distant cousins are in close touch again. However, differences have developed over the separation in time, space, culture, and context. Meaning, these traditions need to navigate, sort through, and debate the differences that have developed over the intervening decades and centuries.

This is clearly one of the keys in navigating the terrain between analytic philosophy and pragmatism as practiced in the Anglo world and America on the one hand and continental philosophy in the versions of existentialism, phenomenology, and hermuenetics as practiced and developed in 20th century France and Germany on the other hand. In this book Dreyfus and Taylor as two leading North American inheritors of continental philosophy, vis-à-vis Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, are resuming their debate and conversation with the leading lights and inheritors of analytic philosophy through dialogue and confrontation with the thinking of Davidson, McDowell, Rorty, and the likes.
 
There was always something about linguistic philosophy that I refused to buy wholesale. It's like the tradition keyed in on something that is there and certainly a part of our understanding and communication with the world and then proceeded to exaggerate the level and scope of human experience and our engagements with the world where that one explanation is operative. This could be parodied with deconstruction's own motto that everything is a text. Dreyfus and Taylor can be credited for taking their response to this argument seriously. Their articulation of the levels of experience, starting with the perceptual prelinguistic using the illustration of the little boy walking through the woods with his dog, jumping over a creek using stepping stones, without yet having words for all of these experiences put paid to this picture pretty definitively.

It is in this context that Dreyfus and Taylor engage in their dialogue with Davidson and Rorty. One of the moves that Dreyfus and Taylor have done is recasting Davidson and Rorty into the camp of dualist analytic philosophy, out of which they thought they had broken out and moved beyond. Dreyfus and Taylor’s move, seeing that they have the last word, is to recast them back into that camp, under the redirection that they may have pushed the boundaries of the camp but never really escaped. In a certain very real sense, this is the last word in this debate - of the interlocutors at the time of the writing Davidson and Rorty were deceased for a decade and this book turned out to be Dreyfus's last.

To their advantage, Dreyfus and Taylor's argument doesn’t stop there. They have developed a full taxonomy of experience by and for the agent. It proceeds up from the experiential through development to the linguistic, conceptual, and critical levels. At the highest levels, it allows for a practice of science (research) which is accessed through disengagement with everyday experience and allows from the view from nowhere access to things as they really are.

With that said, the book would have functioned just as well, perhaps even stronger, without the prolonged engagements with Davidson and Rorty. Owing in part to the strength of their position, but owing in part to having the last word and using the confrontations as props to propel themselves, Dreyfus and Taylor come out with momentum and looking no worse for the wear. It's something of a mock skirmish that they have invited upon themselves to sharpen their own positions. There is to some extent setting up a straw man opponent here. Is there anyone, after Bishop Berkeley and Derrida at his most provocative moments, who thinks we only have contact with something beyond ourselves by means of representations or mediations?  In addition, as Peter Godfrey-Smith argues in the Boston Review, Dreyfus and Taylor have missed perhaps the real key interlocutor, leaving Dewey out of their argument. In the give and take between idealism and realism, Dewey thought both sides had erred too much; idealists in making mysterious the effect of thought on the world, realists in talking as if the world were independent of the mind. Dewey's treatment is one in which we live in a structured world and are part of the world’s structure; our actions shape events, in a constrained manner. Dreyfus and Taylor's phenomenology, by contrast, is all about our encounter with things and our lifeworld. 

At the end of the day, there is something very liberating about bringing the agent point of view back into the conversation. It feels like we now have gone full circle from pre-Socratic everyday experience to Dreyfus and Taylor's realism. If we recall Plato‘s allegory of the cave is his story of taking flight from the point of view of the common sense and the every day experiences into the rarefied air of his idealism of forms. Only now are we reengaging the view of the agent taking the first person point of view, and this time we are reengaging it having the proceeds of the conceptual and critical levels at our disposal. There is a very strong and real element of fresh air that this realism brings into the room. What I appreciate in their point of view is the articulation of the levels of experience, starting with in situ en vivo experience that is shared by us, even with children and animals. There is a real denial of this in philosophy running from Plato to Derrida. 

We really have to be careful of knocking down straw men and tilting after windmills here. The philosophical landscape has indeed shifted over the last century. The pragmatic, phenomenological, realist, and modern idealist traditions each want to embed thought and knowledge in a broader context of human experience and social life. The key is now to get from describing and understanding experience to enabling, promoting, and advancing action in the world.

[Bruce · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first 60 % of this book is very strong, especially where the focus is to clarify conceptual underpinnings of embodied mind / extended cognition, and the now largely acknowledged inadequacy and inaccuracy of brute computational cognitivism. The authors' incorporation of Samuel Todes' work into what I already knew from Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Merleau-Ponty is very helpful for my own current research and writing on related topics. For the most part I am in close agreement with the review by Steven L., so will concentrate on my concerns.

Ultimately, it seems to me that the authors are not willing to take their work to its natural conclusions, which I gather may be a consequence of their personal beliefs. There is a tension in the writing (that borders on contradiction) between their clinical dissection of Davidson / Rorty (much of which I am in agreement with) and the delicacy with which they protect their own inclinations. At times this borders on special pleading, a kind of reverse engineering from an answer they very much want to be true back to an initial conceptual analysis that will guarantee the desired outcome. I found the final chapter on plural realism weak and incomplete. The authors can't do what needs to be done without the prop of religious belief. The thesis would be powerful if sustained without resort to a kind of essentialism about and appeasement across variations of religious belief, which can only stand as a contingent aspect and not as scaffolding. Regardless of what lies beyond our experience, man creates the gods he has. In other words, even if God is there, it's results from coincidence, not our knowing. The account we need should work without the dilutions of chapter 8. This is why the final page reads like an introduction to the really interesting and necessary work, which would be fine if the tone up to that point had not been so triumphant.

Beyond that

[Jack Hayne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was a pleasant surprise. Dreyfus and Taylor paint a convincing argument why representational and meditational views fail to account for knowledge since we rely on embodiment and knowledge that exists against a steady background. Furthermore, Taylor and Dreyfus offer an interesting insight that both critical methods or the need to remove oneself from the world to the inward self and dialectic have been improperly ontologized. In the end, they offer a “pluralistic robust realism” which provides multiple ways to interrogate reality and reveals truths that are independent of us but acknowledges there is no one united way to bring different ways of reasoning into one system. Though reality is unified.

94% Maybe there are different ways to skin a kiwi

[Doctor Moss · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dreyfus and Taylor present a unique solution to the problems of knowledge and realism, “retrieving” both from a skepticism that seems inherent and inescapable in traditional western philosophy.

There are two big arguments in the book. The first is an epistemological argument and attacks what the authors call “mediational” theories of knowledge — ones in which our access to reality is in one way or another “mediated” rather than direct. The second is a metaphysical argument that takes a non-mediated, direct account of access to and knowledge of the world farther, to a “realist” claim about the status of our knowledge with respect to a world independent of our involvement in it or our making sense of it.

The anti-mediational argument is relatively familiar. Dreyfus and Taylor characterize “mediational” accounts of knowledge as adhering to four characteristics: (1) that our knowledge of reality outside us is obtained “only through” some features (ideas, representations, percepts) within us, (2) that our knowledge of external reality can be decomposed into some sort of discrete elements (e.g., ideas, beliefs, sentences), (3) that justifying those elements of knowledge cannot rely on anything outside of them — e.g., that beliefs only follow from other beliefs — that there is no transcendent Archimedean point from which to justify the system of beliefs or representations per se, and (4) a “dualist sorting” or, for short, the distinction between mind and reality (where “mind” needn’t be individual, but could refer to the theoretical knowledge or socially generated ideas of a community). The most familiar “mediational” accounts are representationalist, although Dreyfus and Taylor mean to generalize the view they oppose as “mediationalism” to encompass a broader scope of views.

They then draw on Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty to construct an alternative account in which our relationship to the world is pointedly unmediated. It is through our bodily orientation that we come to experience the world — our touching, gripping, and reaching, our orientation in up, down, near, far, our involvement in practical tasks . . . These are the ways in which we first or “primordially” come to terms with the world, not through observation at a distance and construction of representations or theories.

Their opponent here is a “picture,” in Wittgenstein’s sense of a picture that holds us captive. Once we escape this picture of the knower as observer and theorizer, the picture that has long dominated western philosophy, the involved, embedded knower can emerge.

So long as knowledge of the world is “mediated”, i.e., so long as we only know of the world through some intermediate (ideas, representations, etc.), the question of skepticism can arise. Do those intermediates provide us with reliable access? How could we know, since we have no independent way of checking their reliability in toto? This is the strength of Cartesian skepticism.

Eliminate the intermediary, and you disarm the skeptic. We know the world because we are already in it. There just is no separation, no mediation, to feed the skeptic’s doubt.

The response to skepticism then is not so much a solution as a dissolving, again in a Wittgensteinian sense. The skeptic cannot get his argument off the ground, because that separation, the question of how the “internal” (the idea, belief, representation, etc.) relates to the “external” (the world in itself) never arises in the first place.

Given that dissolution, the traditional philosopher may still ask, what of our theories, beliefs, ideas, representations? What is the status of the world they give us access to? Is it the world of traditional realists, or idealists, or something in-between? Kantian epistemology, for example, upheld knowledge but not realism, at least in the traditional metaphysical sense.

This is where the second argument of the book kicks in. Dreyfus and Taylor stake a “realist” claim. Roughly, their argument is that, beginning with our direct access to the world, our scientific undertaking, i.e., our investigation into what accounts for the behavior of the world we directly interact with, is a valid investigation into the world as it is in itself. In our direct interactions, we meet resistance from the world. The world has an independence against our will and understanding — objects in it are too hard, too soft, too distant, etc. And we seek an account of that resistance or independence. This is science, or at least protoscience.

The real crux of the argument comes in Chapter Seven, where Dreyfus and Taylor distinguish “deflationary realism” from “robust realism”. Deflationary realism is where we seem to end up when we admit that the world we live in is co-produced by us, providing sense and intelligibility, and “the world itself”. That “world itself” is never, according to this deflationary realism, available to us in its pristine, unalloyed state, only via our ways of making it intelligible. And in fact Dreyfus and Taylor seemed to be headed toward such a “deflationary realism” in their account of the world as we know it as a product of our interaction with it — a “co-production”.

If Dreyfus and Taylor stopped at deflationary realism, they would have still made a valuable contribution, in insisting that the ways in which we make the world intelligible are primarily bodily — via interaction-laden, orienting projects, movements and positions such as up, down, near, far, heavy to the hand, etc. This is in opposition to the, to my mind, Kantian notion of intelligibility that is intellectual and observer-driven.

But Dreyfus and Taylor want to claim “robust realism” — which in their terms reclaims a sense of truth as correspondence to an independently existing reality — the very terms of traditional realist epistemology that have been under attack.

They claim that in fact it is this “independence” of reality that scientific theories are capturing, in accounting for the resistance that we meet — the very fact that, while how we perceive and act may be up to us, but what we perceive and what we act with or against is not. Science gives us exactly an account of those very qualities of hardness, nearness, distance, etc. — the independence of reality that we meet in our direct access to it.

It’s important to see that these two big arguments — the epistemological and the metaphysical — are linked. Otherwise, a Cartesian response to “robust realism” would simply call classical doubts into play — dream or deceiver arguments. But those arguments themselves presume a lack of direct access. Skeptical arguments depend upon a problematic relationship between beliefs, theories, ideas, representations, etc. on one side (the “internal” for Drefyus and Taylor) and reality itself on the other (the “external”). But, if Dreyfus and Taylor have been successful in their first big argument, that problematic relationship never is able to get off the ground.

I have to admit reticence to accept their conclusions. As Dreyfus and Taylor conceive science, it is the result of a Heideggerian “deworlding” — an abstraction from the context of everyday life in which direct access is grounded. I haven’t yet seen the argument that this abstraction isn’t also a distortion of that direct access — a withdrawing into abstraction and an explicit construction of “theory”. Explicit beliefs, statements, even representations are the lifeblood of science — in the abstraction and withdrawal that generate them, is there room again for the skeptic’s distinction between world and account to grow? More to think about.

[Steven Peck · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating addition to long-standing arguments between the authors and Donald Davidson and Rorty about the task of getting at the thing-in-itself and what can be said beyond our ideas of a thing. I liked the book a great deal although my engagement with continental philosophy is slight. They have a nice argument for what they call Plural Realism which is as they say,

"Thus, pluralist robust realism can avoid reductive realism, which holds that science explains all modes of being, and scientific realism, which holds that there is only one way the universe is carved up into kinds so that every user of such terms must be referring to what our natural-kind terms refer t, while yet rejecting deflationary realims's claim that we cannot make sense of true statements in science corresponding to the way things are in themselves."

What the book failed to engage with however are more recent attempts at anti-realism, like Bas van Fraassen's. It seemed stuck in a long-standing debate that in some ways has moved in other directions. They draw abundantly on the thought of Merleoau-Ponty and Todes, but to my mind what made those thinkers so important, engaging, and relevant was their sustained commitment to the science of their day. I don't sense that from these authors.

That said, this is an important book that gave me new ways to think about the realism/anti-realism debate and it is very much worth reading.

[Ram Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

This books seems to present a nonconventional and nonpopular view of experience and reality.

Though science considers the disengaged stance (of the scientist, the philosopher) as primary and dismisses engaged stances, this book emphasises “we have to see that this disengaged mode is in an important sense derivative. The engaged one is prior and pervasive, as we mentioned earlier. We always start off in it, and we always need it as a base from which we from time to time disengage.”
So, if this is correct, I conclude, (even) science should not ignore engaged modes of human experience. Or rather: science cannot afford to ignore engaged mode of human experience.

The stance propagated in this books seems to hold a middle position between two extremes: one which states ‘reality cannot be properly-truthfully objectified’ and one which states ‘the objectifications of reality themselves are what reality is’ (there is no distinction between ‘representation’ and ‘what is represented’).
Honestly, I am amazed that the two mentioned extremes are more prominent in (popular) western culture then this middle position, which may be indicated by this quote: "our grasp of the world cannot be entirely representational; that is, it certainly involves representations, but these are not the whole story."

[Antonia Faccini · Rating 5 out of 5]

«Against the grain of the whole Cartesian tradition, it is important to recognize that the underlying causal processes don't stand between us and the world, but are what makes possible our direct contact with it.

And in fact, it appears more and more likely that the sufficient conditions for this direct encounter with reality are to be found in the whole organism-world interaction, as the phenomenology we have presented here suggests.
As Michael Wheeler puts it, "In its raw form, the embodied-embedded approach revolves around the thought that cognitive science needs to put cognition back into the brain, the brain back into the body, and the body back in the world."»

Excelente. Sobre cómo escapar la imagen mediacional del conocimiento y sobre la fenomenología y el realismo como alternativa al cientificismo. Combina además posturas de una tradición más anglo en la que sobresalen Rorty y Davidson y una tradición más continental en la que la importancia de Merleau-Ponty es inigualable.

[MM · Rating 4 out of 5]

The last two chapters were quite confusing for me.. It seems to me that the authors were trying to justify an approach - pluralistic robust realism - that is not contradictory. In particular:

1) science does give us an understanding of an independent (to our embodied) reality - robust realism - "things in themselves"

2) there are many ways of investigating and knowing the things we encounter, and those ways are essential to that POV but may differ across POVs and may even be ultimately incompatible - "essential for us" - plural realism

3) science is one of these types of views where the essential aspect is taken to be the causal relations in a peculiar view from nowhere

But it seems to me that these are contradictory statements:
- science is not "for us" (ie it is independent, robust realism)
- but it is still "essential for us" (ie it is subject to plural realism)

[Larry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great starting point for philosophy today. Solid couple of pages on preunderstanding. Asks all the right questions, airballs some of the answers. The final pages on politics were particularly unconvincing.

[Levy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting take on the philosophical tradition since descartes. Worth a read for sure.

[Tom Pepper · Rating 5 out of 5]

A cogent argument for recovering realism from the popular postmodern relativism of today, without resorting to reductivism. They argue that the “mediationalist picture,” which assumes we are screened from the “thing in itself” by language or the structure of our perceptual abilities, or some such thing, must be overcome.

I’m unconvinced that they have overcome it, though. They still make a distinction between what they call “primordial” or pre-conceptual experience of the world, and the correct understanding of things as they are we can build up in language afterwards. This seems to me to just shift the point of mediation. I am not persuaded by the argument here that we can ever have any such thing as a preconceptual experience. As humans, concepts are just how we experience the world.

They seem attached to this possibility, though, because without it there is no way to attach our cultural values to things as they are. That is, it might be possible that there just are many different possible cultures with no reason to choose between them, even if there are some culture we can say are bad. If this were true, there would be a strong possibility that there is no God at all—and this seems to unthinkable to Taylor and Dreyfus.

A better solution, it seems to me, is to realize that we can know the thing-in-itself, even if we know it within an ideology which always assigns it value. To use their example, we can know what gold is in itself, even if our culture places a particular value on it that exceeds that essential quality.

[Mills College Library]

121 D778 2015