thesis of realism

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Realism and Anti-Realism

Introduction.

Mind-Independence
Realism and the Idea of a Ready-Made World
Examples of Ontologically Realist Views
Arguments for Ontological Realism
Ontological Realism and Skepticism
Varieties of Ontological Anti-realism
Varieties of Epistemological Realism
Sources of Unknowability
Epistemological Realism and Truth
Arguments for Recognition-Transcendence
Arguments for Epistemological Anti-realism
Epistemological Realism and Bivalence

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Forthcoming articles expand or collapse the "forthcoming articles" section.

Alfred North Whitehead
Feminist Aesthetics
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Realism and Anti-Realism by Sven Rosenkranz LAST REVIEWED: 19 March 2013 LAST MODIFIED: 19 March 2013 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195396577-0098

The realism/anti-realism divide has its proper place in metaphysics, but it also has important implications for epistemology and for the philosophy of thought and language. Anti-realism is defined in opposition to realism, and so it is natural to ask first what realism is and to arrive at a characterization of anti-realism on this basis. Sometimes, however, the positions put forward as competitors to realism provide us with clues as to what realism involves. Realism is not a monolithic doctrine. For one thing, one may be a realist about this but not about that. So there are differences in scope, even if not all scope restrictions allow for sensible combinations of realist and anti-realist views. For instance, realism about chemistry does not sit well with anti-realism about physics. Besides differences in scope, there are also differences in kind. Thus we must distinguish between realism as an ontological thesis and realism as an epistemological thesis. The former is concerned with what there is and how it is and argues that there are certain things that exist mind-independently. The latter is concerned with how far our epistemic powers reach and argues that there may be parts of reality in principle beyond our ken. Note that the latter thesis does not merely say something about our epistemic powers. Like the former, it also says something about reality itself, and so is just as much a metaphysical claim as the former. The need to distinguish between these kinds of realism does not imply that there are no connections between them. On the contrary, under suitable interpretations of mind-independence there may be facts about mind-independent things that are in principle beyond our reach because of the mind-independence of those things.

Realism as an Ontological Thesis

Realism as an ontological thesis always concerns things, particular or universal, of a given category (where “things” is construed broadly so as to subsume states of affairs). It contends that there are things of that category, but that things of that category exist mind-independently. Thus ontological realism combines a claim of existence with a claim of mind-independence ( Devitt 1997 , Brock and Mares 2007 ). To say that things of category C exist mind-independently is systematically ambiguous: one may read it to mean that the things that belong to C exist mind-independently; alternatively, one may read it to mean that whether a thing belongs to C is a mind-independent matter. The same distinction can be applied to the individual kinds into which things of the relevant category C might be classified: natural caves may serve as places of worship, but while, plausibly, natural caves exist mind-independently, nothing would be a place of worship without there being any minds who take it to be such. Similarly, a particular piece of brass may not exist mind-independently insofar as it was manufactured by humans with a specific purpose in mind, and yet, plausibly, its being a piece of brass is not in turn a mind-dependent matter. Even if artifacts may not be the best examples of mind-dependent existents in the intended sense, the first example is already sufficient to show the need to distinguish between two types of claims: that certain portions of reality are not in any relevant sense of our making, and that certain partitions of reality, or groupings into kinds, are not of our making in any such sense. Typically, ontological realists commit themselves to both types of claims, which is why their position naturally generalizes so as to cover the subject matter of statements about a given area or the facts , if any, these statements are apt to state, and not just the referents of the singular terms these statements contain.

Brock, Stuart, and Edwin Mares. Realism and Anti-realism . Durham, UK: Acumen, 2007.

This is one of the many helpful introductions to the realism/anti-realism debate. The authors discuss various ontologically realist views and their anti-realist competitors, concerning, for example, colors, morals, modality, and the unobservable entities posited by science, mathematics.

Devitt, Michael. Realism and Truth . 2nd ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997.

Devitt explicates and defends the central tenets of realism as an ontological thesis and gives an account of mind-independence. Devitt furthermore argues that, quite generally, realism has nothing to do with epistemological matters, thereby denying that there is any genuinely realist position that answers to the label “realism as an epistemological thesis,” contrary to what we have assumed.

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Truth, Meaning and Realism: Essays in the Philosophy of Thought

A. C. Grayling, Truth, Meaning and Realism: Essays in the Philosophy of Thought , Continuum, 2007, 173pp., $19.95 (pbk), ISBN 9781847061546.

Reviewed by Alexander Miller, University of Birmingham

This volume is a collection of revised versions of ten essays apparently written in the 1980s or thereabouts, mainly as invited contributions to conferences. As Grayling admits in his preface, "All the papers are of their time". British philosophy in the 1970s and 1980s was dominated by an approach to the debate between realism and antirealism that was associated with Oxford and championed by Michael Dummett, and according to which the key issue was whether the theory of meaning should take as its central concept the notion of truth or the notion of assertibility , with realism favouring the former and antirealism favouring the latter. Much of the book concerns the realism debate conceived in these terms, and although there are also extended discussions of Putnam's twin-earth examples these are mainly in the context of an exchange with David Wiggins. Grayling's essays are thus also very much "of their place" (Oxford) as well as of their time (1980s).

Although in his early works Dummett had defended the idea that assertibility, and not truth, should be the central concept of the theory of meaning, in later work he -- and Crispin Wright -- suggested that antirealism could after all take the notion of truth to be the central notion of the theory of meaning so long as it was an epistemically constrained notion. Given this way of formulating antirealism there is no need to argue that the notion of assertion can be explained in terms that don't presuppose the notion of truth: even the antirealist can admit that it is a platitude that "to assert is to present as true".

In Essay 1, Grayling puts forward a view of assertion that contrasts with the approach of Wright and the later Dummett. Whereas the Wright-later Dummett view sees the aim of assertion as "the presentation of or laying claim to truth" (p.10), Grayling sees it as "the realisation of certain cognitive and practical goals" (ibid.).

Essay 2 proposes a recasting of the debate between realism and antirealism. Grayling suggests that (a) properly understood realism is not a metaphysical but an epistemological thesis: "that the domains or entities to which ontological commitment is made exist independently of knowledge of them" (p.26); and that (b) it is in fact a second-order debate about whether the realistic commitments of ordinary, first-order discourse are literally true or not, and as such has no implications for "logic, linguistic practice, or mundane metaphysics" (p.30). Grayling returns to these issues in Essays 8 and 9.

An alternative to deflationary and indefinabilist conceptions of truth is offered in Essay 3: "The predicate 'is true' is a lazy predicate. It holds a place for more precise predicates, denoting evaluatory properties appropriate to the discourse in which possession of those properties is valued" (p.32). On this view "there are, literally, different kinds of truth, individuated by subject-matter" (p.36). Grayling backs this up in Essay 4 (which, like Essay 3, is a reworked chapter from Grayling's An Introduction to Philosophical Logic , first published in 1982) with a critique of the indefinabilist position Davidson recommends in "The Folly of Trying to Define Truth". This essay also argues that Davidson's "The Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge" fails to yield a satisfying account of objectivity: in particular "the principle of charity is questionable beyond its heuristic applications" (p.49).

Putnam's famous "twin-earth" argument appears to some to establish that it is essential to Jones's thinking the thought that someone is drinking water in the next room that there is (or has been) some H 2 0 in Jones's environment. In Essay 5 Grayling considers Wiggins's attempt to fuse this construal of Putnam's insight -- "the extension-involvingness of natural kind terms" (p.62) -- with a Fregean theory distinguishing between the sense and reference of such a term. For Wiggins,

Taking the sense of a name as its mode of presentation of an object means that we have two things … : an object that the name presents, and a way in which it is presented. This latter [is] the 'conception' of the object … 'a body of information' -- typically open-ended and imperfect, and hence rarely if ever condensable into a complete description of the object -- in which the object itself plays a role (p.62),

and something similar holds for natural kind terms: "the sense of a natural kind term is correlative to a recognitional conception that is unspecifiable except as the conception of things like this, that and the other specimens exemplifying the concept that this conception is a conception of" (p.65). Grayling suggests that instead of taking senses to be "correlative" to "conceptions" we should instead identify senses with conceptions: "a term's sense is: an open-ended extensible body of information, possession of which enables speakers to identify the term's reference" (p.69). However, this modified account has consequences for the notion of extension-involving sense:

on the minimum specification given for the grasp of the sense of a concept-word, any concept word which applies to nothing retains its sense because what is known by one who understands it is what would count as an exemplary instance of its application if ever one were offered. (p.74)

In consequence, Wiggins was wrong to take it "that the extension-involvingness constraint ensured the realism of the reality-involvingness he took this to entail" (p.75). Related matters are pursued in Essay 6. Grayling rejects Frege's "strong objectivism" about sense, and argues that since the publicity of sense "is essentially a matter of speakers' mutual constrainings of use", it is best construed in terms of "intersubjective agreement in use" (p.85). This has implications for the externalist arguments of Putnam and Burge. Although it is true that meanings are not in the head of any single speaker, "they are in our heads, collectively understood … meaning is the artefact of intersubjectively constituted conventions governing the use of sounds and marks to communicate, and therefore resides in the language itself" (p.89). This shows -- contra Putnam -- that "facts about the physical environment of language-use are not essential to meaning" (p.89). Grayling reaches this conclusion by reflecting on what he calls an "Explicit Speaker", an idealised speaker who knows everything contained in "some best and latest dictionary [which] pooled a community's knowledge of meanings" (p.87). It follows that

when he [an individual speaker with the linguistic community's best joint knowledge at his disposal] says 'water' he intends to refer to water, that is, H 2 0, or if he lives on twin-earth, then to water on twin-earth, that is, XYZ; and so in either case his grasp of the expression's meaning determines its extension, and the psychological state in which his grasp of the meaning consists is broad. But this is not because it is related, causally or in some other way, to water, but rather to theories of water, because he is speaking in conformity with the best dictionary, that is, with the fullest available knowledge of meaning, in accord with the best current theories held by the linguistic community. (p.88)

Grayling does not consider the obvious reply that a defender of Putnam might give: that a 10 th century English peasant's application of "water" to a sample of XYZ is incorrect, and clearly not because of anything to do with the best current theory held by his linguistic community. Moreover, it appears to beg the question against Putnam to assume that, in the late-20 th century scenario that Grayling is concerned with, facts about the physical environment are not essential to grasp the meanings of some of the expressions that appear in "the best current theories held by the linguistic community".

The "Explicit Speaker" reappears in Essay 7. As Grayling advertises in the preface, this chapter suggests that " point is the driving force in interpretation of implicatures by competent speakers of a natural language" (p.vi), and that "this simple insight reveals certain puzzles to be artefacts of inexplictness" (ibid.). According to Grayling:

An Explicit Speaker of his language is one who so uses it whenever he makes an assertion (and mutatis mutandis for other kinds of utterance) he: (1) expresses his intended meaning as fully as, if not more fully than, his audience needs in the circumstances; (2) expresses his intended meaning as exactly as, if not more exactly than, his audience, etc; and (3) is as epistemically cautious as the circumstances do or might require, if not more so, with respect to the claims made or presupposed by what he says. (p.93)

Grayling proposes to deploy this notion of an Explicit Speaker to shed light on the analogues in natural language of the logical constants, presupposition-failure in uses of the likes of "Jones omitted to turn out the light", the distinction between referential and attributive uses of definite descriptions, and Putnam's use of twin-earth type examples. This chapter is difficult to follow. Although it is titled "Explicit Speaker Theory", and although the expression "Explicit Speaker Theory" is mentioned throughout, Grayling never gives a clear and explicit statement of what the theory actually is. The reader is left to work this out from inexplicit hints. We are told, for example, that according to Explicit Speaker Theory "the crux in meaning is the point, which is to be explained in terms of speakers' intentions to mean something on an occasion" (p.92), that "conventional meaning is to be characterised as the dry residue of speakers' meanings, agreed in the language community under constraints of publicity and stability" (ibid.), that "the meanings of expressions in a language are the agreed dry residue of speakers' meanings" (p.105), and that "what the Explicit Speaker does [when he says "the man whom I take to be drinking champagne is happy tonight"] is what all speakers are enthymematically doing anyway" (p.102). (Grayling does not attempt to explain what it is to do something enthymematically: again, the reader is left to work this out for himself.) In the light of this, readers with less sunny temperaments than the present reviewer are likely to be irritated by comments like "One should surely recognise all this as obvious" (p.100).

That Essay 8 is very much of its time and place is evident from its characterisation as "current orthodoxy" of the view that the realism/antirealism dispute is a debate about whether linguistic understanding is a matter of grasp of epistemically unconstrained truth-conditions or a matter of grasp of assertion conditions. For "current orthodoxy" read "orthodoxy in Oxford in the 1980s", and -- accordingly -- the essay is largely taken up with a discussion of Dummett's analysis of realism as the view that grasp of sentence-meaning is grasp of potentially evidence-transcendent truth-conditions. Grayling argues that rather than attempting in this way to bring all realist/antirealist controversies under one label, we should instead "recognise that they are controversies of different kinds" (p.126). This point is now well-taken -- and indeed defended -- even by philosophers out of the Dummettian stable (cf. Crispin Wright, Truth and Objectivity (Harvard University Press 1992)). However, in contrast to Wright, Grayling argues not that we can develop different realism-relevant considerations that can be brought to bear in different combinations as we move across different discourses, but rather that "we do well to restrict talk of realism to the case where controversy concerns unmetaphorical claims about the knowledge-independent existence of entities or realms of entities -- namely, the 'external world' case" (p.126).

Grayling's argument for this surprising claim is unconvincing. Dummett argues that realism is most fundamentally a semantic thesis, "a doctrine about the sort of thing that makes our statements true when they are true" (quoted by Grayling on p.120), since in some cases a straightforwardly ontological characterisation in terms of the existence of entities is not possible because there are no entities for the realist and antirealist to debate about (Dummett mentions realism about the future and realism about ethics as examples). Grayling argues against this that the semantic thesis is actually less fundamental than realism characterised in metaphysical and epistemological terms on the grounds that Dummett "goes on to unpack the expression 'sort of thing' in a way which shows that its being a semantic thesis comes courtesy of something else" (p.120). To display this Grayling quotes the following passage from Dummett:

the fundamental thesis of realism, so regarded, is that we really do succeed in referring to external objects, existing independently of our knowledge of them, and that the statements we make about them are rendered true or false by an objective reality the constitution of which is, again, independent of our knowledge. (Note that this is not, as Grayling refers to it, on p.55 of Dummett's 1982 "Realism" article, but actually on p.104.)

Grayling takes the reference to external objects in this latter characterisation to show that the semantic characterisation of realism presupposes the ontological characterisation rather than, as Dummett has it, vice versa. It then follows from this that "what we should say about those 'realisms' which are not readily classifiable in terms of entities is, simply, and on Dummett's own reasoning, that they are not realisms" (p.125), and it is this that leads in part to Grayling's restriction of talk of realism to the 'external world' case.

But this is an uncharitable interpretation of Dummett. I take it that what Dummett is saying in the passage quoted by Grayling is actually along the following lines: "the fundamental thesis of realism, so regarded, is that in cases where there is a relevant class of entities whose existence can be a matter of debate , the statements we make about them are rendered true or false by an objective reality the constitution of which is independent of our knowledge, so that in this sense we really do succeed in referring to external objects, existing independently of our knowledge of them; and that in cases where there is no relevant class of entities whose existence can be a matter of debate , the canonical statements of the discourse concerned are rendered true or false by an objective reality the constitution of which is independent of our knowledge". Read in this more charitable way it is clear that the class of entities mentioned is secondary to the mention of knowledge-independent truth, and so there is no implication that talk of realism should be restricted to the "external world" case, so that the way is left open for a Wright-style broadening of the realist/antirealist canvass.

Essay 9 is an extended discussion of McGinn, Nagel and McFetridge on the realism debate, while the final Essay 10 offers some brief reflections on evidence and judgement.

It is not straightforward to appraise this collection, as it is not clear what its target audience is. The various debates have moved on quite a way since Grayling's conference papers were written, and I can't help feeling that they should have been updated and submitted to the rigours of peer-review in the journals before being issued in a collection. To be fair to Grayling, though, he does attempt to pre-empt this kind of worry in his preface, where he points to the "exploratory character" of the essays and says that he "in no case take[s] them to be remotely near a final word on the debates they relate to" (p.v). But I'm not sure that this is enough to get Grayling off the hook. My main problem with the book is not that it is exploratory (there's nothing wrong with that), or that its approach is parochial and somewhat dated, but that the writing style displays some of the worst vices of philosophical writing a la 1980s Oxford, where writing clearly and succinctly appears to be regarded as a mark of superficiality, and where as you get nearer to the nub of an argument, the cruder the stylistic barbarities become. The following example -- of a single sentence! -- from Essay 5 is, unfortunately, not atypical:

Generalising from natural kind terms, we might wish to say that concept words which, in Frege's terminology, refer to empty concepts, can nevertheless be understood, because we can be (so to say) lexically exposed to -- it is more accurate to say: given an understanding of what it would be for something to fall into -- the extensions they would, in better or fuller worlds, have. (p.74)

I'm here reminded of Schopenhauer's comment that "when parentheses are inserted into sentences that have been broken up to accommodate them" the result is "unnecessary and wanton confusion" ( Essays and Aphorisms , trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Penguin 1970), p.207). At any rate, the cause of serious philosophy is not furthered by the poor attempt at Henry James impersonation. Grayling writes:

Too many gifted colleagues publish too little for fear of having every nut and bolt tightened into place; those who venture ideas as if they were letters to friends, trying out a way of thinking about something, and knowing that they will learn from the mistakes they make, do more both for the conversation and themselves thereby. (p.v)

Far be it from me to dictate Grayling's epistolary habits, but if his style in this book is typical of the way he writes to his friends, I'll give his collected correspondence a miss.

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Strategies of Realism: Realist Fiction and Postmodern Theory

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Essays on realism.

by Georg Lukács

Edited by Rodney Livingstone

ISBN: 9780262620420

Pub date: May 10, 1983

Publisher: The MIT Press

256 pp. , 6 x 9 in ,

ISBN: 9780262120883

Pub date: May 5, 1981

9780262620420
Published: May 1983
9780262120883
Published: May 1981

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Description

Originally published in the 1930s, these essays on realism, expressionism, and modernism in literature present Lukacs's side of the controversy among Marxist writers and critics now known as the Lukacs-Brecht debate. The book also includes an exchange of letters between LukÃ¡cs, writing in exile in the Soviet Union, and the German Communist novelist, Anna Seghers, in which they discuss realism, the European literary heritage, and the situation of the artist in capitalist culture.

Georg Lukács was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, aesthetician, literary historian, and critic.

Rodney Livingstone, Reader in German at the University of Southampton, has edited and translated numerous works by Lukács, Theodor Adorno, and others.

Considering [his] capacity for historical intervention and personal survival, the least one can say is that Lukács was the most successful Marxist intellectual of the 20th century.... The six essays and one public exchange of letters that David Fernbach's translation makes available to English readers were all written between 1931 and 1940, a period during which Lukács served the Comintern as one of its most formidable (and certainly its most erudite) critical hitmen. J. Hoberman The Village Voice

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The nature and plausibility of realism is one of the most hotly debated issues in contemporary metaphysics, perhaps even the most hotly debated issue in contemporary philosophy. The question of the nature and plausibility of realism arises with respect to a large number of subject matters, including ethics, aesthetics, causation, modality, science, mathematics, semantics, and the everyday world of macroscopic material objects and their properties. Although it would be possible to accept (or reject) realism across the board, it is more common for philosophers to be selectively realist or non-realist about various topics: thus it would be perfectly possible to be a realist about the everyday world of macroscopic objects and their properties, but a non-realist about aesthetic and moral value. In addition, it is misleading to think that there is a straightforward and clear-cut choice between being a realist and a non-realist about a particular subject matter. It is rather the case that one can be more-or-less realist about a particular subject matter. Also, there are many different forms that realism and non-realism can take.

The question of the nature and plausibility of realism is so controversial that no brief account of it will satisfy all those with a stake in the debates between realists and non-realists. This article offers a broad brush characterisation of realism, and then fills out some of the detail by looking at a few canonical examples of opposition to realism. The discussion of forms of opposition to realism is far from exhaustive and is designed only to illustrate a few paradigm examples of the form such opposition can take.

There are two general aspects to realism, illustrated by looking at realism about the everyday world of macroscopic objects and their properties. First, there is a claim about existence . Tables, rocks, the moon, and so on, all exist, as do the following facts: the table's being square, the rock's being made of granite, and the moon's being spherical and yellow. The second aspect of realism about the everyday world of macroscopic objects and their properties concerns independence . The fact that the moon exists and is spherical is independent of anything anyone happens to say or think about the matter. Likewise, although there is a clear sense in which the table's being square is dependent on us (it was designed and constructed by human beings after all), this is not the type of dependence that the realist wishes to deny. The realist wishes to claim that apart from the mundane sort of empirical dependence of objects and their properties familiar to us from everyday life, there is no further sense in which everyday objects and their properties can be said to be dependent on anyone's linguistic practices, conceptual schemes, or whatever.

In general, where the distinctive objects of a subject-matter are a , b , c , … , and the distinctive properties are … is F , … is G , … is H and so on, realism about that subject matter will typically take the form of a claim like the following:

Generic Realism : a , b , and c and so on exist, and the fact that they exist and have properties such as F-ness , G-ness , and H-ness is (apart from mundane empirical dependencies of the sort sometimes encountered in everyday life) independent of anyone's beliefs, linguistic practices, conceptual schemes, and so on.

Non-realism can take many forms, depending on whether or not it is the existence or independence dimension of realism that is questioned or rejected. The forms of non-realism can vary dramatically from subject-matter to subject-matter, but error-theories, non-cognitivism, instrumentalism, nominalism, certain styles of reductionism, and eliminativism typically reject realism by rejecting the existence dimension, while idealism, subjectivism, and anti-realism typically concede the existence dimension but reject the independence dimension. Philosophers who subscribe to quietism deny that there can be such a thing as substantial metaphysical debate between realists and their non-realist opponents.

1. Preliminaries

2. against the existence dimension (i): error-theory and arithmetic, 3. against the existence dimension (ii): error-theory and morality, 4. reductionism and non-reductionism, 5. against the existence dimension (iii): expressivism about morals, 6. against the independence dimension (i): semantic realism.

7. Against the Independence Dimension (II): More Forms of Anti-realism

8. Undermining the Debate: Quietism

9. concluding remarks and apologies, bibliography, other internet resources, related entries.

Three preliminary comments are needed. Firstly, there has been a great deal of debate in recent philosophy about the relationship between realism, construed as a metaphysical doctrine, and doctrines in the theory of meaning and philosophy of language concerning the nature of truth and its role in accounts of linguistic understanding (see Dummett 1978 and Devitt 1991a for radically different views on the issue). Independent of the issue about the relationship between metaphysics and the theory of meaning, the well-known disquotational properties of the truth-predicate allow claims about objects, properties, and facts to be framed as claims about the truth of sentences. Since:

(1) ‘The moon is spherical’ is true if and only if the moon is spherical,

the claim that the moon exists and is spherical independently of anyone's beliefs, linguistic practices and conceptual schemes, can be framed as the claim that the sentences ‘The moon exists’ and ‘The moon is spherical’ are true independently of anyone's beliefs, linguistic practices, conceptual schemes and so on. As Devitt points out (1991b: 46) availing oneself of this way of talking does not entail that one sees the metaphysical issue of realism as ‘really’ a semantic issue about the nature of truth (if it did, any question about any subject matter would turn out to be ‘really’ a semantic issue).

Secondly, although in introducing the notion of realism above mention is made of objects, properties, and facts, no theoretical weight is attached to the notion of a ‘fact’, or the notions of ‘object’ and ‘property’. To say that it is a fact that the moon is spherical is just to say that the object, the moon, instantiates the property of being spherical, which is just to say that the moon is spherical. There are substantial metaphysical issues about the nature of facts, objects, and properties, and the relationships between them (see Mellor and Oliver 1997 and Lowe 2002, part IV), but these are not of concern here.

Thirdly, as stated above, Generic Realism about the mental or the intentional would strictly speaking appear to be ruled out ab initio , since clearly Jones' believing that Cardiff is in Wales is not independent of facts about belief: trivially, it is dependent on the fact that Jones believes that Cardiff is in Wales. However, such trivial dependencies are not what are at issue in debates between realists and non-realists about the mental and the intentional. A non-realist who objected to the independence dimension of realism about the mental would claim that Jones' believing that Cardiff is in Wales depends in some non-trivial sense on facts about beliefs, etc.

There are at least two distinct ways in which a non-realist can reject the existence dimension of realism about a particular subject matter. The first of these rejects the existence dimension by rejecting the claim that the distinctive objects of that subject-matter exist, while the second admits that those objects exist but denies that they instantiate any of the properties distinctive of that subject-matter. Non-realism of the first kind can be illustrated via Hartry Field's error-theoretic account of arithmetic, and non-realism of the second kind via J.L. Mackie's error-theoretic account of morals. This will show how realism about a subject-matter can be questioned on both epistemological and metaphysical grounds.

According to a platonist about arithmetic, the truth of the sentence ‘7 is prime’ entails the existence of an abstract object , the number 7. This object is abstract because it has no spatial or temporal location, and is causally inert. A platonic realist about arithmetic will say that the number 7 exists and instantiates the property of being prime independently of anyone's beliefs, linguistic practices, conceptual schemes, and so on. A certain kind of nominalist rejects the existence claim which the platonic realist makes: there are no abstract objects, so sentences such as ‘7 is prime’ are false (hence the name ‘error-theory’). Platonists divide on their account of the epistemology of arithmetic: some claim that our knowledge of arithmetical fact proceeds by way of some quasi-perceptual encounter with the abstract realm (Gödel 1983), while others have attempted to resuscitate a qualified form of Frege's logicist project of grounding knowledge of arithmetical fact in knowledge of logic (Wright 1983, Hale 1987, Hale and Wright 2001).

The main arguments against platonic realism turn on the idea that the platonist position precludes a satisfactory epistemology of arithmetic. For the classic exposition of the doubt that platonism can square its claims to accommodate knowledge of arithmetical truth with its conception of the subject matter of arithmetic as causally inert, see Benacerraf (1973). Benacerraf argued that platonism faces difficulties in squaring its conception of the subject-matter of arithmetic with a general causal constraint on knowledge (roughly, that a subject can be said to know that P only if she stands in some causal relation to the subject matter of P ). In response, platonists have attacked the idea that a plausible causal constraint on ascriptions of knowledge can be formulated (Wright 1983 Ch.2, Hale 1987 Ch.4). In response, Hartry Field, on the side of the anti-platonists, has developed a new variant of Benacerraf's epistemological challenge which does not depend for its force on maintaining a generalised causal constraint on ascriptions of knowledge. Rather, Field's new epistemological challenge to platonism arises from his reasonable observation that ‘we should view with suspicion any claim to know facts about a certain domain if we believe it impossible to explain the reliability of our beliefs about that domain’ (Field 1989: 232-3). Field's challenge to the platonist is to offer an account of what such a platonist should regard as a datum—i.e. that when ‘ p ’ is replaced by a mathematical sentence, the schema (2) holds in most instances :

(2) If mathematicians accept ‘ p ’ then p . (1989: 230)

Field's point is not simply, echoing Benacerraf, that no causal account of reliability will be available to the platonist, and therefore to the platonic realist. Rather, Field conceives what is potentially a far more powerful challenge to platonic realism when he suggests that not only has the platonic realist no recourse to any explanation of reliability that is causal in character, but that she has no recourse to any explanation that is non-causal in character either. He writes:

(T)here seems prima facie to be a difficulty in principle in explaining the regularity. The problem arises in part from the fact that mathematical entities as the [platonic realist] conceives them, do not causally interact with mathematicians, or indeed with anything else. This means we cannot explain the mathematicians beliefs and utterances on the basis of the mathematical facts being causally involved in the production of those beliefs and utterances; or on the basis of the beliefs or utterances causally producing the mathematical facts; or on the basis of some common cause producing both. Perhaps then some sort of non-causal explanation of the correlation is possible? Perhaps; but it is very hard to see what this supposed non-causal explanation could be. Recall that on the usual platonist picture [i.e. platonic realism], mathematical objects are supposed to be mind- and language-independent; they are supposed to bear no spatiotemporal relations to anything, etc. The problem is that the claims that the [platonic realist] makes about mathematical objects appears to rule out any reasonable strategy for explaining the systematic correlation in question. (1989: 230-1)

This suggests the following dilemma for the platonic realist:

Platonic realism is committed to the existence of acausal objects and to the claim that these objects, and facts about them, are independent of anyone's beliefs, linguistic practices, conceptual schemes, and so on (in short to the claim that these objects, and facts about them, are language- and mind-independent).
Any causal explanation of reliability is incompatible with the acausality of mathematical objects.
Any non-causal explanation of reliability is incompatible with the language- and mind-independence of mathematical objects.
Any explanation of reliability must be causal or non-causal.
There is no explanation of reliability that is compatible with platonic realism.

Whether there is a version of platonic realism with the resources to see off Field's epistemological challenge is very much a live issue (see Hale 1994, Divers and Miller 1999. For replies to Divers and Miller see Sosa 2002 and Shapiro 2006).

What does Field propose as an alternative to platonic realism in arithmetic? Field's answer (1980, 1989) is that although mathematical sentences such as ‘7 is prime’ are false, the utility of mathematical theories can be explained otherwise than in terms of their truth. For Field, the utility of mathematical theories resides not in their truth but in their conservativeness , where a mathematical theory S is conservative if and only if for any nominalistically respectable statement A (i.e. a statement whose truth does not imply the existence of abstract objects) and any body of such statements N , A is not a consequence of the conjunction of N and S unless A is a consequence of N alone (Field 1989: 125). In short, mathematics is useful, not because it allows you to derive conclusions that you couldn't have derived from nominalistically respectable premises alone, but rather because it makes the derivation of those (nominalistically respectable) conclusions easier than it might otherwise have been. Whether or not Field's particular brand of error-theory about arithmetic is plausible is a topic of some debate, which unfortunately cannot be pursued further here (see Hale and Wright 2001).

According to Field's error-theory of arithmetic, the objects distinctive of arithmetic do not exist, and it is this which leads to the rejection of the existence dimension of arithmetical realism, at least as platonistically conceived (for a non-platonistic view of arithmetic which is at least potentially realist, see Benacerraf 1965; for incisive discussion, see Wright 1983, Ch.3). J. L. Mackie , on the other hand, proposes an error-theoretic account of morals, not because there are no objects or entities that could form the subject matter of ethics (it is no part of Mackie's brief to deny the existence of persons and their actions and so on), but because it is implausible to suppose that the sorts of properties that moral properties would have to be are ever instantiated in the world (Mackie 1977, Ch.1). Like Field on arithmetic, then, Mackie's central claim about the atomic, declarative sentences of ethics (such as ‘Napoleon was evil’) is that they are systematically and uniformly false. How might one argue for such a radical-sounding thesis? The clearest way to view Mackie's argument for the error-theory is as a conjunction of a conceptual claim with an ontological claim (following Smith 1994, pp.63-66). The conceptual claim is that our concept of a moral fact is a concept of an objectively prescriptive fact, or, equivalently, that our concept of a moral property is a concept of an objectively prescriptive quality (what Mackie means by this is explained below). The ontological claim is simply that there are no objectively prescriptive facts, that objectively prescriptive properties are nowhere instantiated. The conclusion is that there is nothing in the world answering to our moral concepts, no facts or properties which render the judgements formed via those moral concepts true. Our moral judgements are all of them false. We can thus construe the error-theory as follows:

Conceptual Claim: our concept of a moral fact is a concept of an objectively prescriptive fact, so that the truth of an atomic, declarative moral sentence would require the existence of objectively and categorically prescriptive facts. Ontological Claim: There are no objectively and categorically prescriptive facts. So, Conclusion: there are no moral facts; atomic, declarative moral sentences are systematically and uniformly false.

This argument is clearly valid, so the question facing those who wish to defend at least the existence dimension of realism in the case of morals is whether the premises are true.

Mackie's conceptual claim is that our concept of a moral requirement is the concept of an objectively, categorically prescriptive requirement. What does this mean? To say that moral requirements are prescriptive is to say that they tell us how we ought to act, to say that they give us reasons for acting. Thus, to say that something is morally good is to say that we ought to pursue it, that we have reason to pursue it. To say that something is morally bad is to say that we ought not to pursue it, that we have reason not to pursue it. To say that moral requirements are categorically prescriptive is to say that these reasons are categorical in the sense of Kant's categorical imperatives. The reasons for action that moral requirements furnish are not contingent upon the possession of any desires or wants on the part of the agent to whom they are addressed: I cannot release myself from the requirement imposed by the claim that torturing the innocent is wrong by citing some desire or inclination that I have. This contrasts, for example, with the requirement imposed by the claim that perpetual lateness at work is likely to result in one losing one's job: I can release myself from the requirement imposed by this claim by citing my desire to lose my job (perhaps because I find it unfulfilling, or whatever). Reasons for action which are contingent in this way on desires and inclinations are furnished by what Kant called hypothetical imperatives.

So our concept of a moral requirement is a concept of a categorically prescriptive requirement. But Mackie claims further that our concept of a moral requirement is a concept of an objectively categorically prescriptive requirement. What does it mean to say that a requirement is objective? Mackie says a lot of different-sounding things about this, and the following is by no means a comprehensive list (references are to Ch. 1 of Mackie 1977). To call a requirement objective is to say that it can be an object of knowledge (24, 31, 33), that it can be true or false (26, 33), that it can be perceived (31, 33), that it can be recognised (42), that it is prior to and independent of our preferences and choices (30, 43), that it is a source of authority external to our preferences and choices (32, 34, 43), that it is part of the fabric of the world (12), that it backs up and validates some of our preferences and choices (22), that it is capable of being simply true (30) or valid as a matter of general logic (30), that it is not constituted by our choosing or deciding to think in a certain way (30), that it is extra-mental (23), that it is something of which we can be aware (38), that it is something that can be introspected (39), that it is something that can figure as a premise in an explanatory hypothesis or inference (39), and so on. Mackie plainly does not take these to be individually necessary: facts about subatomic particles, for example, may qualify as objective in virtue of figuring in explanatory hypotheses even though they cannot be objects of perceptual acquaintance. But his intention is plain enough: these are the sorts of conditions whose satisfaction by a fact renders it objective as opposed to subjective. Mackie's conceptual claim about morality is thus that our concept of a moral requirement is a concept of a fact which is objective in at least some of the senses just listed, while his ontological claim will be that the world does not contain any facts which are both candidates for being moral facts and yet which play even some of the roles distinctive of objective facts.

How plausible is Mackie's conceptual claim? This issue cannot be discussed in detail here, except to note that while it seems plausible to claim that if our concept of a moral fact is a concept of a reason for action then that concept must be a concept of a categorical reason for action, it is not so clear why we have to say that our concept of a moral fact is a concept of a reason for action at all. If we deny this, we can concede the conditional claim whilst resisting Mackie's conceptual claim. One way to do this would be to question the assumption, implicit in the exposition of Mackie's argument for the conceptual claim above, that an ‘ought’-statement that binds an agent A provides that agent with a reason for action. For an example of a version of moral realism that attempts to block Mackie's conceptual claim in this way, see Railton (1986). For defence of Mackie's conceptual claim, see Smith (1994), Ch.3. For exposition and critical discussion, see Miller (2003a), Ch.9.

What is Mackie's argument for his ontological claim? This is set out in his ‘argument from queerness’ (Mackie has another argument, the ‘argument from relativity’(1977: 36-38), but this argument cannot be discussed here).The argument from queerness has both metaphysical and epistemological components. The metaphysical problem with objective values concerns ‘the metaphysical peculiarity of the supposed objective values, in that they would have to be intrinsically action-guiding and motivating’(49). The epistemological problem concerns ‘the difficulty of accounting for our knowledge of value entities or features and of their links with the features on which they would be consequential’(49). Let's look at each type of worry more closely in turn.

Expounding the metaphysical part of the argument from queerness, Mackie writes: “If there were objective values, then they would be entities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe.”(38) What is so strange about them? Mackie says that Plato's Forms (and for that matter, Moore's non-natural qualities) give us a ‘dramatic picture’ of what objective values would be, if there were any:

The Form of the Good is such that knowledge of it provides the knower with both a direction and an overriding motive; something's being good both tells the person who knows this to pursue it and makes him pursue it. An objective good would be sought by anyone who was acquainted with it, not because of any contingent fact that this person, or every person, is so constituted that he desires this end, but just because the end has to-be-pursuedness somehow built into it. Similarly, if there were objective principles of right and wrong, any wrong (possible) course of action would have not-to-be-doneness somehow built into it. Or we should have something like Clarke's necessary relations of fitness between situations and actions, so that a situation would have a demand for such-and-such an action somehow built into it (40).

The obtaining of a moral states of affairs would be the obtaining of a situation ‘with a demand for such and such an action somehow built into it’; the states of affairs which we find in the world do not have such demands built into them, they are ‘normatively inert’, as it were. Thus, the world contains no moral states of affairs, situations which consist in the instantiation of a moral quality.

Mackie now backs up this metaphysical argument with an epistemological argument:

If we were aware [of objective values], it would have to be by some special faculty of moral perception or intuition, utterly different from our ways of knowing everything else. These points were recognised by Moore when he spoke of non-natural qualities, and by the intuitionists in their talk about a faculty of moral intuition. Intuitionism has long been out of favour, and it is indeed easy to point out its implausibilties. What is not so often stressed, but is more important, is that the central thesis of intuitionism is one to which any objectivist view of values is in the end committed: intuitionism merely makes unpalatably plain what other forms of objectivism wrap up (38).

In short, our ordinary conceptions of how we might come into cognitive contact with states of affairs, and thereby acquire knowledge of them, cannot cope with the idea that the states of affairs are objective values. So we are forced to expand that ordinary conception to include forms of moral perception and intuition. But these are completely unexplanatory: they are really just placeholders for our capacity to form correct moral judgements (the reader should here hear an echo of the complaints Benecerraf and Field raise against arithmetical platonism).

Evaluating the argument from queerness is well outwith the scope of the present entry. While Railton's version of moral realism attempts to block Mackie's overall argument by conceding his ontological claim whilst rejecting his conceptual claim, other versions of moral realism agree with Mackie's conceptual claim but reject his ontological claim. Examples of the latter version, and attempts to provide the owed response to the argument from queerness, can be found in Smith (1994), Ch.6, and McDowell (1998a), Chs 4-10 .

There are two main ways in which one might respond to Mackie's argument for the error-theory: directly, via contesting one of its premises or inferences, or indirectly, pointing to some internal tension within the error-theory itself. Some possible direct responses have already mentioned, responses which reject either the conceptual or ontological claims that feature as premises in Mackie's argument for the error-theory. An indirect argument against the error-theory has been developed in recent writings by Crispin Wright (this argument is intended to apply also to Field's error-theory of arithmetic).

Mackie claims that the error-theory of moral judgement is a second-order theory, which does not necessarily have implications for the first order practice of making moral judgements (1977: 16). Wright's argument against the error-theory takes off with the forceful presentation of the opposing suspicion:

The great discomfort with [Mackie's] view is that, unless more is said, it simply relegates moral discourse to bad faith. Whatever we may once have thought, as soon as philosophy has taught us that the world is unsuited to confer truth on any of our claims about what is right, or wrong, or obligatory, etc., the reasonable response ought surely to be to forgo the right to making any such claims …. If it is of the essence of moral judgement to aim at the truth, and if philosophy teaches us that there is no moral truth to hit, how are we supposed to take ourselves seriously in thinking the way we do about any issue which we regard as of major moral importance? (1996: 2; see also 1992: 9).

Wright realises that the error-theorist is likely to have a story to tell about the point of moral discourse, about “some norm of appraisal besides truth, at which its statements can be seen as aimed, and which they can satisfy.”(1996: 2) And Mackie has such a story: the point of moral discourse is—to simplify—to secure the benefits of social co-operation (1973: chapter 5 passim; note that this is the analogue in Mackie's theory of Field's notion of the conservativeness of mathematical theories). Suppose we can extract from this story some subsidiary norm distinct from truth, which governs the practice of forming moral judgements. Then, for example, ‘Honesty is good’ and ‘Dishonesty is good’, although both false, will not be on a par in point of their contribution to the satisfaction of the subsidiary norm: if accepted widely enough, the former will presumably facilitate the satisfaction of the subsidiary norm, while the latter, if accepted widely enough, will frustrate it. Wright questions whether Mackie's moral sceptic can plausibly combine such a story about the benefits of the practice of moral judgement with the central negative claim of the error-theory:

[I]f, among the welter of falsehoods which we enunciate in moral discourse, there is a good distinction to be drawn between those which are acceptable in the light of some such subsidiary norm and those which are not—a distinction which actually informs ordinary discussion and criticism of moral claims—then why insist on construing truth for moral discourse in terms which motivate a charge of global error, rather than explicate it in terms of the satisfaction of the putative subsidiary norm, whatever it is? The question may have a good answer. The error-theorist may be able to argue that the superstition that he finds in ordinary moral thought goes too deep to permit of any construction of moral truth which avoids it to be acceptable as an account of moral truth. But I do not know of promising argument in that direction (1996: 3; see also 1992: 10).

Wright thus argues that even if we concede to the error-theorist that his original scepticism about moral truth is well-founded, the error-theorist's own positive proposal will be inherently unstable. For an attempt to respond to Wright's argument, on behalf of the error-theorist, see Miller 2002.

Although some commentators (e.g. Pettit 1991) require that a realistic view of a subject matter be non-reductionist about the distinctive objects, properties, and facts of that subject matter, the reductionist/non-reductionist issue is really orthogonal to the various debates about realism. There are a number of reasons for this, with the reasons varying depending on the type of reduction proposed.

Suppose, first of all, that one wished to deny the existence claim which is a component of platonic realism about arithmetic. One way to do this would be to propose an analytic reduction of talk seemingly involving abstract entities to talk concerning only concrete entities. This can be illustrated by considering a language the truth of whose sentences seemingly entails the existence of a type of abstract object, directions. Suppose there is a first order language L, containing a range of proper names ‘ a ’, ‘ b ’, ‘ c ’, and so on, where these denote straight lines conceived as concrete inscriptions. There are also predicates and relations defined on straight lines, including ‘ … is parallel to …’. ‘ D ( )’ is a singular term forming operator on lines, so that inserting the name of a concrete line, as in ‘ D ( a )’, produces a singular term standing for an abstract object, the direction of a . A number of contextual definitions are now introduced:

(A) ‘ D ( a ) = D ( b )’ is true if and only if a is parallel to b . (B) ‘Π D ( x )’ is true if and only if ‘ Fx ’ is true, where ‘… is parallel to …’ is a congruence for ‘ F ( )’. (To say that ‘… is parallel to …’ is a congruence for ‘ F ( )’ is to say that if a is parallel to b and Fa , then it follows that Fb ). (C) ‘(∃ x )Π x ’ is true if and only if ‘(∃ x ) Fx ’ is true, where ‘Π’ and ‘ F ’ are as in (B).

According to a platonic realist, directions exist and have a nature which is independent of anyone's beliefs, linguistic practices, conceptual schemes, and so on. But doesn't the availability of (A), (B), and (C) undermine the existence claim at the heart of platonic realism? After all, (A), (B), and (C) allow us to paraphrase any sentence whose truth appears to entail the existence of abstract objects into a sentence whose truth involves only the existence of concrete inscriptions. Doesn't this show that an analytic reduction can aid someone wishing to question the existence claim involved in a particular form of realism? There is a powerful argument, first developed by William Alston (1958), and recently resuscitated to great effect by Crispin Wright (1983, Ch.1), that suggests not. The analytic reductionist who wishes to wield the contextual definitions against the existence claim at the heart of platonic realism takes them to show that the apparent reference to abstract objects on the left-hand sides of the definitions is merely apparent: in fact, the truth of the relevant sentences entails only the existence of a range of concrete inscriptions. But the platonic realist can retort: what the contextual definitions show is that the apparent lack of reference to abstract objects on the right-hand sides is merely apparent. In fact, the platonic realist can say, the truth of the sentences figuring on the right-hand sides implicitly involves reference to abstract objects. If there is no way to break this deadlock the existence of the analytic reductive paraphrases will leave the existence claim at the heart of the relevant form of realism untouched. So the issue of this style of reductionism appears to be orthogonal to debates between realists and non-realists.

Can the same be said about non-analytic styles of reductionism? Again, there is no straightforward connection between the issue of reductionism and the issue of realism. The problem is that, to borrow some terminology and examples from Railton 1989, some reductions will be vindicative whilst others will be eliminativist . For example, the reduction of water to H 2 0 is vindicative: it vindicates our belief that there is such a thing as water, rather than overturning it. On the other hand:

… the reduction of ‘polywater’—a peculiar form of water thought to have been observed in laboratories in the 1960's—to ordinary-water-containing-some impurities-from-improperly-washed-glassware contributed to the conclusion that there really is no such substance as polywater (1989: 161).

Thus, a non-analytic reduction may or may not have implications for the existence dimension of a realistic view of a particular subject matter. And even if the existence dimension is vindicated, there is still the further question whether the objects and properties vindicated are independent of anyone's beliefs, linguistic practices, and so on. Again, there is no straightforward relationship between the issue of reductionism and the issue of realism.

We saw above that for the subject-matter in question the error-theorist agrees with the realist that the truth of the atomic, declarative sentences of that area requires the existence of the relevant type of objects, or the instantiation of the relevant sorts of properties. Although the realist and the error-theorist agree on this much, they of course disagree on the question of whether the relevant type of objects exist, or on whether the relevant sorts of properties are instantiated: the error-theorist claims that they don't, so that the atomic, declarative sentences of the area are systematically and uniformly false, the realist claims that at least in some instances the relevant objects exist or the relevant properties are instantiated, so that the atomic, declarative sentences of the area are at least in some instances true. We also saw that an error-theory about a particular area could be motivated by epistemological worries (Field) or by a combination of epistemological and metaphysical worries (Mackie).

Another way in which the existence dimension of realism can be resisted is via expressivism about morals. Whereas the realist and the error-theorist agree that the sentences of the relevant area are truth-apt , apt to be assessed in terms of truth and falsity, the realist and the expressivist (alternatively non-cognitivist, projectivist) disagree about the truth-aptness of those sentences. It is a fact about English that sentences in the declarative mood (‘The beer is in the fridge’) are conventionally used for making assertions, and assertions are true or false depending on whether or not the fact that is asserted to obtain actually obtains. But there are other grammatical moods that are conventionally associated with different types of speech-act. For example, sentences in the imperatival mood (‘Put the beer in the fridge’) are conventionally used for giving orders, and sentences in the interrogative mood (‘Is the beer in the fridge?’) are conventionally used for asking questions. Note that we would not ordinarily think of orders or questions as even apt for assessment in terms of truth and falsity: they are not truth-apt. Now the conventions mentioned here are not exceptionless: for example, one can use sentences in the declarative mood (‘My favourite drink is Belhaven 60 shilling’) to give an order (for some Belhaven 60 shilling), one can use sentences in the interrogative mood (‘Is the Pope a Catholic?’) to make an assertion (of whatever fact was the subject of the discussion), and so on. The expressivist about a particular area will claim that the realist is misled by the syntax of the sentences of that area into thinking that they are truth-apt: she will say that this is a case where the conventional association of the declarative mood with assertoric force breaks down. ‘Stealing is wrong’ is no more truth-apt than ‘Put the beer in the fridge’: it is just that the lack of truth-aptness of the latter is worn on its sleeve, while the lack of truth-aptness of the former is veiled by its surface syntax.

So, if moral sentences are not conventionally used for the making of assertions, what are they conventionally used for? According to one classical form of expressivism, emotivism , they are conventionally used for the expression of emotion, feeling, or sentiment. Thus, A.J. Ayer writes:

If I say to someone, ‘You acted wrongly in stealing that money’, I am not stating anything more than if I had simply said, ‘You stole that money’. In adding that this action is wrong, I am not making any further statement about it. I am simply evincing my moral disapproval about it. It is as if I had said, ‘You stole that money’, in a peculiar tone of horror, or written with the addition of some special exclamation marks. The tone, or the exclamation marks, adds nothing to the literal meaning of the sentence. It merely serves to show that the expression of it is attended by certain feelings in the speaker (Ayer 1946: 107, emphases added).

It follows from this that:

If I now generalise my previous statement and say, ‘Stealing money is wrong,’ I produce a sentence which has no factual meaning—that is, expresses no proposition that can be either true or false (1946: 107).

Emotivism faces many problems, discussion of which is not possible here (for a survey, see Miller 2003a Ch.3). One problem that has been the bugbear of all expressivist versions of non-realism, the ‘Frege-Geach Problem’, is so-called because the classic modern formulation is by Peter Geach (1960), who attributes the original point to Frege.

According to emotivism, when I sincerely utter the sentence ‘Murder is wrong’ I am not expressing a belief or making an assertion, but rather expressing some non-cognitive sentiment or feeling, incapable of being true or false. Thus, the emotivist claims that in contexts where ‘Murder is wrong’ is apparently being used to assert that murder is wrong it is in fact being used to express a sentiment or feeling of disapproval towards murder. But what about contexts in which it is not even apparently the case that ‘Murder is wrong’ is being used to make an assertion? An example of such a sentence would be ‘If murder is wrong, then getting little brother to murder people is wrong’. In the antecedent of this ‘Murder is wrong’ is clearly not even apparently being used to make an assertion. So what account can the emotivist give of the use of ‘Murder is wrong’ within ‘unasserted contexts’, such as the antecedent of the conditional above? Since it is not there used to express disapproval of murder, the account of its semantic function must be different from that given for the apparently straightforward assertion expressed by ‘Murder is wrong’. But now there is a problem in accounting for the following apparently valid inference:

(1) Murder is wrong. (2) If Murder is wrong, then getting your little brother to murder people is wrong. Therefore: (3) Getting your little brother to murder people is wrong.

If the semantic function of ‘Murder is wrong’ as it occurs within an asserted context in (1) is different from its semantic function as it occurs within an unasserted context in (2), isn't someone arguing in this way simply guilty of equivocation? In order for the argument to be valid, the occurrence of ‘Murder is wrong’ in (1) has to mean the same thing as the occurrence of ‘Murder is wrong’ in (2). But if ‘Murder is wrong’ has a different semantic function in (1) and (2), then it certainly doesn't mean the same thing in (1) and (2). So the above argument is apparently no more valid than:

(4) My beer has a head on it. (5) If something has a head on it, then it must have eyes and ears. Therefore: (6) My beer must have eyes and ears.

This argument is obviously invalid, because it relies on an equivocation on two senses of ‘head’, in (4) and (5) respectively.

It is perhaps worth stressing why the Frege-Geach problem doesn't afflict ethical theories which see ‘Murder is wrong’ as truth-apt, and sincere utterances of ‘Murder is wrong’ as capable of expressing straightforwardly truth-assessable beliefs. According to theories like these, moral modus ponens arguments such as the argument above from (1) and (2) to (3) are just like non-moral cases of modus ponens such as

(7) It is raining; (8) If it is raining then the streets are wet; Therefore, (9) the streets are wet.

Why is this non-moral case of modus ponens not similarly invalid in virtue of the fact that ‘It is raining’ is asserted in (7), but not in (8)? The answer is of course that the state of affairs asserted to obtain by ‘It is raining’ in (7) is the same as that merely hypothesised to obtain in (8). In (7) ‘It is raining’ is used to assert that a state of affairs obtains (it's raining), and in (8) it is asserted that if that state of affairs obtains, so does another (the streets being wet). Throughout, the semantic function of the sentences concerned is given in terms of the states of affairs asserted to obtain in simple assertoric contexts. And it is difficult to see how an emotivist can say anything analogous to this with respect to the argument from (1) and (2) to (3): it is difficult to see how the semantic function of ‘Murder is wrong’ in the antecedent of (2) could be given in terms of the sentiment it allegedly expresses in (1).

The Frege-Geach challenge to the emotivist is thus to answer the following question: how can you give an emotivist account of the occurrence of moral sentences in ‘unasserted contexts’—such as the antecedents of conditionals—without jeopardising the intuitively valid patterns of inference in which those sentences figure? Philosophers wishing to develop an expressivistic alternative to moral realism have expended a great deal of energy and ingenuity in devising responses to this challenge. See in particular Blackburn's development of ‘quasi-realism’, in his (1984) Chs 5 and 6, (1993) Ch.10, (1998) Ch.3 and Gibbard's ‘norm-expressivism’, in his (1990) Ch.5. For criticism see Hale (1993) and (2002), and Kölbel (2002) Ch.4. For an overview, see Miller (2003), Chs 4 and 5.

Challenges to the existence dimension of realism have been outlined in previous sections. In this section some forms of non-realism that are neither error-theoretic nor expressivist will be briefly introduced. The forms of non-realism view the sentences of the relevant area as (against the expressivist) truth-apt, and (against the error-theorist) at least sometimes true. The existence dimension of realism is thus left intact. What is challenged is the independence dimension of realism, the claim that the objects distinctive of the area exist, or that the properties distinctive of the area are instantiated, independently of anyone's beliefs, linguistic practices, conceptual schemes, and so on.

Classically, opposition to the independence dimension of realism about the everyday world of macroscopic objects took the form of idealism , the view that the objects of the everyday world of macroscopic objects are in some sense mental . As Berkeley famously claimed, tables, chairs, cats, the moons of Jupiter and so on, are nothing but ideas in the minds of spirits:

All the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth, in a word all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence without a mind (Berkeley 1710: §6).

Idealism has long been out of favour in contemporary philosophy, but those who doubt the independence dimension of realism have sought more sophisticated ways of opposing it. One such philosopher, Michael Dummett, has suggested that in some cases it may be appropriate to reject the independence dimension of realism via the rejection of semantic realism about the area in question (see Dummett 1978 and 1993). This section contains a brief explanation of semantic realism, as characterised by Dummett, Dummett's views on the relationship between semantic realism and realism construed as a metaphysical thesis, and an outline of some of the arguments in the philosophy of language that Dummett has suggested might be wielded against semantic realism.

It is easiest to characterise semantic realism for a mathematical domain. It is a feature of arithmetic that there are some arithmetical sentences for which the following holds true: we know of no method that will guarantee us a proof of the sentence, and we know of no method that will guarantee us a disproof or a counterexample either. One such is Goldbach's Conjecture:

(G) Every even number is the sum of two primes.

It is possible that we may come across a proof, or a counterexample, but the key point is that we do not know a method, or methods, the application of which is guaranteed to yield one or the other. A semantic realist, in Dummett's sense, is one who holds that our understanding of a sentence like (G) consists in knowledge of its truth-condition, where the notion of truth involved is potentially recognition-transcendent or bivalent . To say that the notion of truth involved is potentially recognition-transcendent is to say that (G) may be true (or false) even though there is no guarantee that we will be able, in principle, to recognise that that is so. To say that the notion of truth involved is bivalent is to accept the unrestricted applicability of the law of bivalence, that every meaningful sentence is determinately either true or false. Thus the semantic realist is prepared to assert that (G) is determinately either true or false, regardless of the fact that we have no guaranteed method of ascertaining which. (Note that the precise relationship between the characterisation in terms of bivalence and that in terms of potentially recognition-transcendent truth is a delicate matter that will not concern us here. See the Introduction to Wright 1993 for some excellent discussion. It is also important to note that in introducing the idea that a speaker's understanding of a sentence consists in her knowledge of its truth-condition, Dummett is packing more into the notion of truth than the disquotational properties made use of in §1 above. See Dummett's essay ‘Truth’, in his 1978).

Dummett makes two main claims about semantic realism. First, there is what Devitt (1991a) has termed the metaphor thesis : This denies that we can even have a literal, austerely metaphysical characterisation of realism of the sort attempted above with Generic Realism. Dummett writes, of the attempt to give an austere metaphysical characterisation of realism about mathematics (platonic realism) and what stands opposed to it (intuitonism):

How [are] we to decide this dispute over the ontological status of mathematical objects[?] As I have remarked, we have here two metaphors: the platonist compares the mathematician with the astronomer, the geographer or the explorer, the intuitionist compares him with the sculptor or the imaginative writer; and neither comparison seems very apt. The disagreement evidently relates to the amount of freedom that the mathematician has. Put this way, however, both seem partly right and partly wrong: the mathematician has great freedom in devising the concepts he introduces and in delineating the structure he chooses to study, but he cannot prove just whatever he decides it would be attractive to prove. How are we to make the disagreement into a definite one, and how can we then resolve it? (1978: xxv).

According to the constitution thesis , the literal content of realism consists in the content of semantic realism. Thus, the literal content of realism about the external world is constituted by the claim that our understanding of at least some sentences concerning the external world consists in our grasp of their potentially recognition-transcendent truth-conditions. The spurious ‘debate’ in metaphysics between realism and non-realism can thus become a genuine debate within the theory of meaning: should we characterise speakers' understanding in terms of grasp of potentially recognition-transcendent truth-conditions? As Dummett puts it:

The dispute [between realism and its opponents] concerns the notion of truth appropriate for statements of the disputed class; and this means that it is a dispute concerning the kind of meaning which these statements have (1978: 146).

Few have been convinced by either the metaphor thesis or the constitution thesis. Consider Generic Realism in the case of the world of everyday macroscopic objects and properties:

(GR1) Tables, rocks, mountains, seas, and so on exist, and the fact that they exist and have properties such as mass, size, shape,colour, and so on, is (apart from mundane empirical dependencies of the sort sometimes encountered in everyday life) independent of anyone's beliefs, linguistic practices, conceptual schemes, and so on.

Dummett may well call for some non-metaphorical characterisation of the independence claim which this involves, but it is relatively easy to provide one such characterisation by utilising Dummett's own notion of recognition-transcendence:

(GR2) Tables, rocks, mountains, seas, and so on exist, and the fact that they exist and have properties such as mass, size, shape,colour, and so on, is (apart from mundane empirical dependencies of the sort sometimes encountered in everyday life) independent of anyone's beliefs, linguistic practices, conceptual schemes, and so on. Tables, rocks, mountains, seas, and so on exist, and in general there is no guarantee that we will be able, even in principle, to recognise the fact that they exist and have properties such as mass, size, shape, colour, and so on.

On the face of it, there is nothing metaphorical in (GR2) or, at least if there is, some argument from Dummett to that effect is required. This throws some doubt on the metaphor thesis. And there is nothing distinctively semantic about (GR2), and this throws some doubt on the constitution thesis. Whereas for Dummett, the essential realist thesis is the meaning-theoretic claim that our understanding of a sentence like (G) consists in knowledge of its potentially recognition-transcendent truth-condition, for Devitt:

What has truth to do with Realism? On the face of it, nothing at all. Indeed, Realism says nothing semantic at all beyond … making the negative point that our semantic capacities do not constitute the world. (1991a: 39)

Devitt's main criticism of the constitution thesis is this: the literal content of realism about the external world is not given by semantic realism, since semantic realism is consistent with an idealist metaphysics of the external world. He writes:

Does [semantic realism] entail Realism? It does not. Realism … requires the objective independent existence of common-sense physical entities. Semantic Realism concerns physical statements and has no such requirement: it says nothing about the nature of the reality that makes those statements true or false , except that it is [at least in part potentially beyond the reach of our best investigative efforts]. An idealist who believed in the … existence of a purely mental realm of sense-data could subscribe to [semantic realism]. He could believe that physical statements are true or false according as they do or do not correspond to the realm of sense-data, whatever anyone's opinion on the matter: we have no ‘incorrigible knowledge’ of sense-data. … In sum, mere talk of truth will not yield any particular ontology. (1983: 77)

Suppose that Dummett's metaphor and constitution theses are both implausible. Would it follow that the arguments Dummett develops against semantic realism have no relevance to debates about the plausibility of realism about everyday macroscopic objects (say), construed as a purely metaphysical thesis as in (GR2)? Dummett's arguments can retain their relevance to metaphysical debate even if the metaphor and constitution theses are false, and, indeed, even if Dummett's view (1973: 669) that the theory of meaning is the foundation of all philosophy is rejected. For a full development of this line of argument, see Miller 2003b and 2006.

Dummett has two main lines of argument against semantic realism, the acquisition argument and the manifestation argument . Here is the acquisition argument:

Suppose that we are considering some region of discourse D , the sentences of which we intuitively understand. Suppose, for reductio , that the sentences of D have potentially recognition-transcendent truth-conditions. Thus,

(1) We understand the sentences of D . (2) The sentences of D have recognition-transcendent truth-conditions.

Now, from (1) together with the Fregean thesis that to understand a sentence is to know its truth-conditions (see Miller 1998, Chs 1 and 2), we have:

(3) We know the truth-conditions of the sentences of D .

We now add the apparently reasonable constraint on ascriptions of knowledge:

(4) If a piece of knowledge is ascribed to a speaker, then it must be at least in principle possible for that speaker to have acquired that knowledge.

(5) It must be at least in principle possible for us to have acquired knowledge of the recognition-transcendent truth-conditions of D .

(6) There is no plausible story to be told about how we could have acquired knowledge of recognition-transcendent truth-conditions.

So, by reductio , we reject (2) to get:

(7) The sentences of D do not have recognition-transcendent truth-conditions, so semantic realism about the subject matter of D must be rejected.

The crucial premise here is obviously (6). Wright puts the point as follows:

How are we supposed to be able to form any understanding of what it is for a particular statement to be true if the kind of state of affairs which it would take to make it true is conceived, ex hypothesi , as something beyond our experience, something which we cannot confirm and which is insulated from any distinctive impact on our consciousness?(1993: 13).

However, Wright then more or less concedes that the acquisition argument can be neutralised by invoking the compositionality of meaning and understanding:

[T]he realist seems to have a very simple answer. Given that the understanding of statements in general is to be viewed as consisting in possession of a concept of their truth-conditions, acquiring a concept of an evidence-transcendent state of affairs is simply a matter of acquiring an understanding of a statement for which that state of affairs would constitute the truth-condition. And such an understanding is acquired, like the understanding of any previously unheard sentence in the language, by understanding the constituent words and the significance of their mode of combination. (1993: 16)

Dummett's challenge to semantic realism, then, turns on his second argument, the manifestation argument . Suppose that we are considering region of discourse D as before. Then:

(1) We understand the sentences of D .

Suppose, for reductio , that

(2) The sentences of D have recognition-transcendent truth-conditions.

From (1) and and the Fregean thesis that to understand a sentence is to know its truth-conditions, we have:

We then add the following premise, which stems from the Wittgensteinian insight that understanding does not consist in the possession of an inner state, but rather in the possession of some practical ability (see Wittgenstein 1958):

(4) If speakers possess a piece of knowledge which is constitutive of linguistic understanding, then that knowledge should be manifested in speakers' use of the language i.e. in their exercise of the practical abilities which constitute linguistic understanding.

It now follows from (1), (2) and (3) that:

(5) Our knowledge of the recognition-transcendent truth-conditions of the sentences of D should be manifested in our use of those sentences, i.e. in our exercise of the practical abilities which constitute our understanding of D . Since (6) Such knowledge is never manifested in the exercise of the practical abilities which constitute our understanding of D ,

It follows that

(7) We do not possess knowledge of the truth-conditions of D .

(7) and (3) together give us a contradiction, whence, by reductio , we reject (2) to obtain:

(8) The sentences of D do not have recognition-transcendent truth-conditions, so semantic realism about the subject matter of D must be rejected.

The basic point is that, so far as an account of speakers' understanding goes, the ascription of knowledge of recognition-transcendent truth-conditions is simply redundant : there is no good reason for ascribing it. Consider one of the sentences introduced earlier as a candidate for possessing recognition-transcendent truth-conditions ‘Every even number greater than two is the sum of two primes’. The semantic realist views our understanding of sentences like this as consisting in our knowledge of a potentially recognition-transcendent truth-condition. But:

How can that account be viewed as a description of any practical ability of use? No doubt someone who understands such a statement can be expected to have many relevant practical abilities. He will be able to appraise evidence for or against it, should any be available, or to recognize that no information in his possession bears on it. He will be able to recognize at least some of its logical consequences, and to identify beliefs from which commitment to it would follow. And he will, presumably, show himself sensitive to conditions under which it is appropriate to ascribe propositional attitudes embedding the statement to himself and to others, and sensitive to the explanatory significance of such ascriptions. In short: in these and perhaps other important respects, he will show himself competent to use the sentence. But the headings under which his practical abilities fall so far involve no mention of evidence-transcendent truth-conditions (1993: 17).

This establishes (6), and the conclusion follows swiftly.

A detailed assessment of the plausibility of Dummett's arguments is impossible here. For a full response to the manifestation argument, see Miller 2002. See Also Byrne 2005. For the acquisition argument, see Miller 2003c. Wright develops a couple of additional arguments against semantic realism. For these—the argument from rule-following and the argument from normativity—see the Introduction to Wright 1993. For an excellent survey of the literature on Dummett's arguments against semantic realism, see Hale 1997. For an excellent book-length introduction to Dummett's philosophy, see Weiss 2002.

7. Against the Independence Dimension (II): More Forms of Anti-Realism

Suppose that one wished to develop a non-realist alternative to, say, moral realism. Suppose also that one is persuaded of the unattractiveness of both error-theoretic and expressivist forms of non-realism. That is to say, one accepts that moral sentences are truth-apt, and, at least in some cases, true. Then the only option available would be to deny the independence dimension of moral realism. But so far we have only seen one way of doing this: by admitting that the relevant sentences are truth-apt, sometimes true, and possessed of truth-conditions which are not potentially recognition-transcendent. But this seems weak: it seems implausible to suggest that a moral realist must be committed to the potential recognition-transcendence of moral truth. It therefore seems implausible to suggest that a non-expressivistic and non-error-theoretic form of opposition to realism must be committed to simply denying the potential recognition-transcendence of moral truth, since many who style themselves moral realists will deny this too. As Wright puts it:

There are, no doubt, kinds of moral realism which do have the consequence that moral reality may transcend all possibility of detection. But it is surely not essential to any view worth regarding as realist about morals that it incorporate a commitment to that idea. (1992: 9)

So, if the debate between a realist and a non-realist about the independence dimension doesn't concern the plausibility of semantic realism as characterised by Dummett, what does it concern? (Henceforth a non-error-theoretic, non-expressivist style of non-realist is referred to as an anti-realist). Wright attempts to develop some points of contention, (or ‘realism-relevant cruces’ as he calls them) over which a realist and anti-realist could disagree. Wright's development of this idea is subtle and sophisticated and only a crude exposition of a couple of his realism-relevant Cruces can be given here.

The first of Wright's realism-relevant Cruces to be considered here concerns the capacity of states of affairs to figure ineliminably in the explanation of features of our experience. The idea that the explanatory efficacy of the states of affairs in some area has something to do with the plausibility of a realist view of that area is familiar from the debates in meta-ethics between philosophers such as Nicholas Sturgeon (1988), who believe that irreducibly moral states of affairs do figure ineliminably in the best explanation of certain aspects of experience, and opponents such as Gilbert Harman (1977), who believe that moral states of affairs have no such explanatory role. This suggests a ‘best explanation test’ which, crudely put, states that realism about a subject matter can be secured if its distinctive states of affairs figure ineliminably in the best explanation of aspects of experience. One could then be a non-expressivist, non-error-theoretic, anti-realist about a particular subject matter by denying that the distinctive states of affairs of that subject matter do have a genuine role in best explanations of aspects of our experience. And the debate between this style of anti-realist and his realist opponent could proceed independently of any questions concerning the capacity of sentences in the relevant area to have potentially recognition-transcendent truth values.

For reasons that needn't detain us here, Wright suggests that this ‘best explanation test’ should be superseded by questions concerning what he calls width of cosmological role (1992, Ch.5). The states of affairs in a given area have narrow cosmological role if they cannot contribute to the explanation of things other than our beliefs about that subject-matter (or other than via explaining our beliefs about that subject matter). This will be an anti-realist position. One style of realist about that subject matter will say that its states of affairs have wide cosmological role: they do contribute to the explanation of things other than our beliefs about the subject matter in question (or other than via explaining our beliefs about that subject matter). It is relatively easy to see why width of cosmological role could be a bone of contention between realist and anti-realist views of a given subject matter: it is precisely the width of cosmological role of a class of states of affairs—their capacity to explain things other than, or other than via, our beliefs, in which their independence from our beliefs, linguistic practices, and so on, consists. Again, the debate between someone attributing a narrow cosmological role to a class of states of affairs and someone attributing a wide cosmological role could proceed independently of any questions concerning the capacity of sentences in the relevant area to have potentially recognition-transcendent truth values.

Wright thinks that it is arguable that moral discourse does not satisfy width-of-cosmological role. Whereas a physical fact—such as a pond's being frozen over—can contribute to the explanation of cognitive effects (someone's believing that the pond is frozen over), effects on sentient, but non-conceptual creatures (the tendency of goldfish to cluster towards the bottom of the pond), effects on us as physically interactive agents (someone's slipping on the ice), and effects on inanimate matter (the tendency of a thermometer to read zero when placed on the surface), moral facts seem only to contribute to the explanation of the first sort of effect:

[I]t is hard to think of anything which is true of sentient but non-conceptual creatures, or of mobile organisms, or of inanimate matter, which is true because a … moral fact obtains and in whose explanation it is unnecessary to advert to anyone's appreciation of that moral fact (1996: 16).

Thus, we have a version of anti-realism about morals that is non-expressivist and non-error-theoretic and can be framed independently of considerations about the potential of moral sentences to have recognition-transcendent truth-values: moral sentences are truth-apt, sometimes true, and moral states of affairs have narrow cosmological role.

The second of Wright's realism-relevant Cruces to be considered involves the notion of judgement-dependence. Suppose that we are considering a particular region of discourse D in which ‘ P ’ is a representative central predicate. Consider the opinions formed by the practitioners of that discourse, formed under conditions which are, for that discourse, cognitively ideal: call such opinions best opinions , and the cognitively ideal conditions the C-conditions. Suppose we find that the best opinions formed by the practitioners covary with the facts about the instantiation of ‘ P ’. Then, Wright suggests, there are two ways in which we might seek to explain this covariance. On the one hand, we might take best opinions to be playing at most a tracking role: best opinions are just extremely good at tracking independently constituted truth-conferring states of affairs. In such a case, best opinion plays merely an extension-reflecting role, serving merely to reflect the independently determined extensions of the central predicates of D (or equivalently, the independently determined extension of the truth-predicate applicable in D ). On the other hand, we might try to explain the covariance of best opinion and fact by assigning to best opinion an altogether different sort of role. Rather than viewing best opinion as merely tracking the facts about the extensions of the central predicates of D , we can view them as themselves determining those very extensions. Best opinion, on this sort of view, does not serve merely to track independently constituted states of affairs which determine the extensions of the central predicates of D : rather, best opinion serves to determine those extensions and so to play an extension-determining role. When the covariance of best opinion and the facts about the instantiation of the central predicates of a region of discourse admits of this latter sort of explanation, the predicates of that region are said to be judgement-dependent ; when it admits only of the former sort of explanation, the predicates are said to be judgement-independent .

How do we determine whether the central predicates of a region of discourse are judgement-dependent? Wright's discussion proceeds by reference to what he terms provisional equations . These have the following form:

(PE) ∀ x [ C → (A suitable subject s judges that Px ↔ Px )]

where ‘ C ’ denotes the conditions (the C -conditions) which are cognitively ideal for forming the judgement that x is P . The predicate ‘P’ is then said to be judgement-dependent if and only if the provisional equation meets the following four conditions:

The A Prioricity Condition: The provisional equation must be a priori true: there must be a priori covariance of best opinions and truth. (Justification: ‘the truth, if it is true, that the extensions of [a class of concept] are constrained by idealised human response—best opinion—ought to be available purely by analytic reflection on those concepts, and hence available as knowledge a priori ’(Wright 1992: 117)). This is because the thesis of judgement-dependence is the claim that, for the region of discourse concerned, best opinion is the conceptual ground of truth). The Substantiality Condition The C -conditions must be specifiable non-trivially : they cannot simply be described as conditions under which the subject has ‘whatever it takes' to form the right opinion concerning the subject matter at hand.(Justification: without this condition, any predicate will turn out to be judgement-dependent, since for any predicate Q it is going to be an a priori truth that our judgements about whether x is Q , formed under conditions which have ‘whatever it takes' to ensure their correctness, will covary with the facts about the instantiation of Q -ness. We thus require this condition on pain of losing the distinction between judgement-dependent and judgement-independent predicates altogether). The Independence Condition : The question as to whether the C -conditions obtain in a given instance must be logically independent of the class of truths for which we are attempting to give an extension-determining account: for specifying what makes an opinion best must not presuppose some logically prior determination of the extensions putatively determined by best opinions. (Justification: if we have to assume, say, certain facts about the extension of P in the specification of the conditions under which opinions about P count as best, then we cannot view best opinions as somehow constituting those facts, since specifying whether a given opinion is best would then presuppose some logically prior determination of the very facts allegedly constituted by best opinions). The Extremal Condition : There must be no better way of accounting for the a priori covariance: no better account, other than according best opinion an extension-determining role, of which the satisfaction of the foregoing three conditions is a consequence. (Justification: without this condition, the satisfaction of the foregoing conditions would be consistent with the thought that certain states of affairs are judgement-independent even though infallibly detectable,'states of affairs in whose determination facts about the deliverances of best opinions are in no way implicated although there is, a priori, no possibility of their misrepresentation’ (Wright 1992: 123)).

When all of the above conditions can be shown to be satisfied, we can accord best opinion an extension-determining role, and describe the subject matter as judgement-dependent. If these conditions cannot collectively be satisfied, best opinion can be assigned, at best, a merely extension-reflecting role.

Two points are worth making. First, it is again relatively easy to see why the question of judgement-dependence can mark a bone of contention between realism and anti-realism. If a subject matter is judgement-dependent we have a concrete sense in which the independence dimension of realism fails for that subject matter: there is a sense in which that subject matter is not entirely independent of our beliefs, linguistic practices, and so on. Second, the debate about the judgement-dependence of a subject matter is, on the face of it at least, independent of the debate about the possibility of recognition-transcendent truth in that area.

Wright argues (1989) that facts about colours and intentions are judgement-dependent, so that we can formulate a version of anti-realism about colours (intentions) that views ascriptions of colours (intentions) as truth-apt and sometimes true, and truth in those areas as judgement-dependent. In contrast to this, Wright argues (1988) that morals cannot plausibly be viewed as judgement-dependent, so that a thesis of judgement-dependence is not a suitable vehicle for the expression of a non-expressivistic, non-error-theoretic, version of anti-realism about morality.

For discussion of further allegedly realism-relevant Cruces, such as cognitive command, see Wright 1992 and 2003. For critical discussion of Wright on cognitive command, see Shapiro and Taschek 1996. See also Miller 2004.

Some of the ways in which non-realist theses about a particular subject matter can be formulated and motivated have been described above. Quietism is the view that significant metaphysical debate between realism and non-realism is impossible. Gideon Rosen nicely articulates the basic quietist thought:

We sense that there is a heady metaphysical thesis at stake in these debates over realism—a question on a par with the issues Kant first raised about the status of nature. But after a point, when every attempt to say just what the issue is has come up empty, we have no real choice but to conclude that despite all the wonderful, suggestive imagery, there is ultimately nothing in the neighborhood to discuss (1994: 279).

Quietism about the ‘debate’ between realists and their opponents can take a number of forms. One form might claim that the idea of a significant debate is generated by unsupported or unsupportable philosophical theses about the relationship of the experiencing and minded subject to their world, and that once these theses are exorcised the ‘debate’ will gradually wither away. This form of quietism is often associated with the work of the later Wittgenstein, and receives perhaps its most forceful development in the work of John McDowell (see in particular McDowell 1994). Other forms of quietism may proceed in a more piecemeal fashion, taking constraints such as Wright's realism-relevant Cruces and arguing on a case-by-case basis that their satisfaction or non-satisfaction is of no metaphysical consequence. This is in fact the strategy pursued in Rosen 1994. He makes the following points regarding the two realism-relevant Cruces considered in the previous section.

Suppose that:

(F) It is a priori that: x is funny if and only if we would judge x funny under conditions of full information about x s relevant extra-comedic features

and suppose that (F) satisfies (in addition to a prioricity) the various other constraints that Wright imposes on his provisional equations ((F) is actually not of the form of a provisional equation, but this is not relevant to our purposes here). Rosen questions whether this would be enough to establish that the facts about the funny are in some metaphysically interesting sense ‘less real’ or ‘less objective’ than facts (such as, arguably, facts about shape) for which a suitable equation cannot be constructed.

In a nutshell, Rosen's argument proceeds by inviting us to assume the perspective of an anthropologist who is studying us and who ‘has gotten to the point where he can reliably determine which jokes we will judge funny under conditions of full relevant information’(1994: 302). Rosen writes:

[T]he important point is that from [the anthropologist's] point of view, the facts about the distribution of [the property denoted by our use of ‘funny’] are ‘mind-dependent’ only in the sense that they supervene directly on facts about our minds. But again, this has no tendency to undermine their objectivity … [since] we have been given no reason to think that the facts about what a certain group of people would think after a certain sort of investigation are anything but robustly objective (1994: composed from 300 and 302).

How plausible is this attempt to deflate the significance of the discovery that the subject matter of a particular area is, in Wright's sense, judgement-dependent? Argument—as opposed to the trading of intuitions—at this level is difficult, but Rosen's claim here is very implausible. Suppose we found out that facts about the distribution of gases on the moons of Jupiter supervened directly on facts about our minds. Would the threat we then felt to the objectivity of facts about the distribution of gases on the moons of Jupiter be at all assuaged by the reflection that facts about the mental might themselves be susceptible to realistic treatment? It seems doubtful. Fodor's Psychosemantics would not offer much solace to realists in the world described in Berkeley's Principles. Rosen's claim derives some of its plausibility from the fact that he uses examples, such as the funny and the constitutional, where our pre-theoretical attachment to a realist view is very weak: it may be that the judgement-dependence of the funny doesn't undermine our sense of the objectivity of humour simply because the level of objectivity we pretheoretically expect of comedy is quite low. So although there is no knock-down argument to Rosen's claim, it is much more counterintuitive than he would be willing to admit.

Rosen also questions whether there is any intuitive connection between considerations of width of cosmological role and issues of realism and non-realism. Rosen doubts in particular that there is any tight connection between facts of a certain class having only narrow cosmological role and mind-dependence in any sense relevant to the plausibility of realism. He writes:

It is possible to imagine a subtle physical property Q which, though intuitively thoroughly objective, is nonetheless nomically connected in the first instance only with brain state B —where this happens to be the belief that things are Q . This peculiar discovery would not undermine our confidence that Q was an objective feature of things, as it should if [a feature of objects is less than fully objective if it has narrow cosmological role] (1994: 312).

However it seems that, at least in the first instance, Wright has a relatively quick response to this point at his disposal. Waiving the point that in any case the width of cosmological role constraint applies to classes of properties and facts, he can point out that in the example constructed by Rosen the narrowness of Q's cosmological role is an a posteriori matter. Whereas what we want is that the narrowness of cosmological role is an a priori matter: one does not need to conduct an empirical investigation to convince oneself that facts about the funny fail to have wide cosmological role.

Wright thus has the beginnings of answers to Rosen's quietist attack on his use of the notions of judgement-dependence and width of cosmological role. It is not possible to deal fully with these arguments here, let alone with the other quietist arguments in Rosen's paper, or the arguments of other quietists such as McDowell, beyond giving a flavour of how quietism might be motivated and how those active in the debates between realists and their opponents might start to respond.

This discussion of realism and of the forms that non-realist opposition may take is far from exhaustive, and aims only to give the reader a sense of what to expect if they delve deeper into the issues. In particular, nothing has been mentioned about the work of Hilary Putnam, his characterisation of ‘metaphysical realism’, and his so-called ‘model-theoretic’ argument against it. Putnam's writings are extensive, but one could begin with Putnam 1981 and 1983. For critical discussion, see Hale and Wright 1997. Nor have issues about the metaphysics of modality and possible worlds been discussed. The locus classicus in this area is Lewis 1986. For commentary, see Divers 2002 and Melia 2003. And the very important topic of scientific realism has not been touched upon. For an introductory treatment and suggestions for further reading, see Bird 1998 Ch. 4. Finally, it has not been possible to include any discussion of realism about intentionality and meaning. The locus classicus in recent philosophy is Kripke 1982. For a robustly realistic view of the intentional, see Fodor 1987. For a collection of some of the central secondary literature, see Miller and Wright 2002. For good introductory book length treatments of realism, see Kirk 1999 and Brock and Mares 2006.

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Thucydides and modern realism, the third image and the sources of athenian imperialism, structural realism, properly formulated, structural realism, melos, and athens.

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Author's note : The author would like to thank Gerald Mara, Daniel Nexon, the editors at ISQ, and three anonymous reviewers for their assistance with earlier drafts. He would also like to thank the participants in the Realism and Constructivism Workshop sponsored by the Mortara Center for International Studies at Georgetown University in April 2005, and especially Patrick Thaddeus Jackson and Ashley Thomas.

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Jonathan Monten, Thucydides and Modern Realism, International Studies Quarterly , Volume 50, Issue 1, March 2006, Pages 3–25, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2478.2006.00390.x

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This paper makes two main arguments about the relationship between Thucydides, modern realism, and the key conceptual ideas they introduce to situate and explain international politics. First, Thucydides refutes the central claim underlying modern realist scholarship, that the sources of state behavior can be located not in the character of the primary political units but in the decentralized system or structure created by their interaction. Second, however, analyses that discuss Thucydides exclusively with respect to this “third-image” realism do not take into account the most important emendation made to political realism in the last half of the twentieth century, Kenneth Waltz's Theory of International Politics . Waltz reformulates the theory of how anarchic political structures affect the behavior of their constituent units and suggests that the question posed by realism—and to be asked of Thucydides—is not whether states behave according to the Athenian thesis or consistently observe the power-political laws of nature, but whether they suffer “costs” in terms of political autonomy, security, and cultural integrity if they do not. Many scholars are therefore incorrect to assume that demonstrating the importance of non-structural factors in The Peloponnesian War severs the connection between Thucydides and structural realism. Thucydides may in fact be a realist, but not for reasons conventionally assumed.

Captivated by the methodological and substantive nature of Thucydides' initial contention of a “truest cause” based on “the facts themselves,” modern realists and their critics have debated the appropriation of Thucydides as the founder of a continuous line of realist thought, with nothing less at stake than the historical credibility such a patron scholar entails. As Stephen Walt (2002) writes in a recent review of realist research, “the realist tradition has a distinguished lineage, including the works of Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Friedrich Meinecke, Carr, and Morganthau.” Robert Gilpin (1986 :306) writes that “in my judgment, there have been three great realist writers; it is difficult for me to conceive that anyone would deny them inclusion in the tradition. They are Thucydides, Machiavelli, and Carr.” And according to Robert Keohane (1986) , “even as long ago as the time of Thucydides, political realism contained three key assumptions … [that] have furnished a usable interpretive framework for observers from Thucydides onward.”

This paper will make two main arguments about the relationship between Thucydides, modern realism, and the key conceptual ideas they introduce to situate and explain international politics. First, Thucydides refutes what I argue is the central claim underlying modern realist scholarship, that the sources of state behavior can be located not in the character of the primary political units, but in the decentralized system or structure created by their interaction. This “third-image” realism argues that the inherently conflictual and competitive character of international politics is attributable exclusively to the level of the international system, and not to the varying domestic-political characteristics of states. The “Athenian thesis,” the proxy for this style of thought in The Peloponnesian War , is in this regard a structural thesis; by abstracting from the properties of states, including, perhaps most importantly for Thucydides, the process of political–cultural contestation, it specifically rejects the impact of individuals, cultures, and institutions independent of the international circumstances in which they are situated. Through the competing logics framed by the Book I debate between Corinth and Athens over the rise of the Athenian empire, a central theme and the putatively “truest cause” of the war, Thucydides shows how the perspective of international politics offered by this style of realism fails to capture a significant dimension of what drives international politics more generally. In this regard, the contemporary literature that equates Thucydides with a modern realism understood in these terms neglects an important critique of realism offered by his narrative of the Peloponnesian War.

Second, however, analyses that discuss Thucydides exclusively with respect to this “third-image” realism are inadequate in light of the most important emendation made to political realism in the last half of the twentieth century, Kenneth Waltz's Theory of International Politics (1979). In contrast to the determinate predictions about state behavior derived from third-image realism, Waltz reformulates the nature of how an anarchic political structure affects the behavior of its constituent units. Waltz suggests that the question posed by modern realism—and to be asked of Thucydides—is not whether states behave according to Athenian thesis or consistently observe the power-political laws of nature, but do they suffer “costs” in terms of political autonomy, security, and cultural integrity if they do not. Otherwise persuasive critiques of realist claims to The Peloponnesian War often overlook this second dimension; Thucydides may in fact be a realist, but for reasons not captured within the terms of the current debate.

The uncritical induction of Thucydides into the political realist tradition appears to be based on a series of misunderstandings about the manner in which Thucydides portrays the Peloponnesian War, errors that have not gone unnoticed in the discipline. According to David Welch (2003) , for example, there is an “utter lack of empirical support” for key realist arguments in the text and that “identifying realist ‘misreadings’ of Thucydides has become something of a cottage industry.” 1 Similarly, Laurie Johnson Bagby (1994) recommends that Thucydides can “guide us in our studies beyond realism—and especially beyond neorealism.”

These authors are correct that Thucydides and modern realism are at times engaged in very different kinds of projects, and a “Thucydidean” reading of any modern realist work must first address if there is in fact any basis for comparison. Many scholars equate Thucydides with the Athenian perspective presented most notoriously at the Conference of the Peloponnesian League at Sparta in Book I and at Melos in Book V (Waltz 1954:159; Keohane and Nye 1977 :42; Morgenthau 1954:38; Waltz 1979 :127, 186–187; Doyle 1990 ; Frankel 1996 ). In fact, Thucydides presents a variety of perspectives through a variety of actors, and when he interrupts the narrative with his own voice, for example when commenting on the post-Pericles political competition that took place in Athens or on the Corcyran stasis, his comments, as will be shown, are often indirectly critical of certain realist propositions. The Athenian thesis is the clearest representation of realist thought in The Peloponnesian War , and in portraying the history of a system of independent city-states interacting in the absence of an overarching political authority, Thucydides—through actors such as the Corcyrans, the Mytelineans, and most consistently the Athenians—introduces elements of what would become known as the realpolitik tradition. Nonetheless, Thucydides presents this foreshadowing of modern realism as one of many orientations toward international politics.

In addition, Kenneth Waltz's Theory of International Politics , and the school of realist thought that has developed around it, engages in the hypothesizing of positive, explanatory propositions about international politics. As a social scientific theory, modern realism seeks to specify the causal conditions under which certain political outcomes can be expected, and systematically tests these propositions against empirical evidence. But despite his self-professed desire to describe events that “in accordance with human nature will recur in similar or comparable ways” (1.22), 2 Thucydides' political history is not primarily interested in drawing regularized, causal connections between phenomena in the manner of a covering law. As Welch (2003 :303) argues, Thucydides “does not offer us anything that we could immediately recognize as a theory.” Many contemporary authors treat the text of The Peloponnesian War either as a source of political ideas from which one might infer a series of falsifiable, positivist hypotheses, or as a case study or pure historical account against which to test various realist propositions regarding, for example, conditions under which states balance or bandwagon against power, or the conditions under which transitions in power lead to war (Gilpin 1988:591; Lebow and Strauss 1991 ; Copeland 2000 ).

However, there is a basis for comparison in at least two respects. First, Thucydides portrays himself as practicing a certain methodological realism, or a procedural focus on facts and observational accuracy. 3 Post-World War II realism, crafted in deliberate counterpoint to the “utopianism” of the interwar period, advanced itself as the science of international politics, grounded in positive science over normative idealism. E.H. Carr (1939 :10) described this realist turn as the natural evolution of international relations as a social science; realism “represented a reaction against the wish-dreams of the initial stage … placing its emphasis on the acceptance of facts and on the analysis of their causes and consequences.” Thucydides similarly presents his history in contrast to previous works, suggesting that what he foregoes in style he gains in the accuracy of his account, not coincidentally lending his text the attendant moral authority or credibility of impartially portraying the “real” world.

Thucydides explicitly portrays himself in contrast not to utopians, but to poets, who “embellish with their exaggerations … in versions that cannot be checked and for the most part have forfeited any credibility over time a patriotic fiction” (1.21). In contrast, his account, “by avoiding patriotic storytelling, will perhaps seem less enjoyable for listening. Yet if they are judged useful by any who wish to look at the truth about both past events and those that at some future time, in accordance with human nature, will recur in similar or comparable ways, will suffice.” For example, immediately before this methodological statement, Thucydides describes how the Athenians misunderstand key elements of their own history through the uncritical acceptance of erroneous facts regarding the overthrow of Peisistratos, an event he describes in greater detail in Book VI. Thucydides' interest in procedural realism is also illustrated by the importance of the Corcyran stasis in his narration of the war, during which one of the most insidious signs of cultural disintegration was the inversion of language and meaning. Under the conditions of civil war, Corcyra, and later the cities to which civil war spread, underwent a “revolution in thinking … in self-justification men inverted the usual verbal evaluations of actions” (3.82). Gregory Crane (1998) usefully points out that the inability of words to retain stable meanings undermines the conditions necessary for historians like Thucydides to operate, as well as the basis of objective, factual accounts. 4 Whether Thucydides' claim to this procedural or scientific realism, and the moral authority that follows from the perception of impartiality, is for instrumental or artistic purposes, The Peloponnesian War has nonetheless, according to Steven Lattimore (1998), been “long valued for setting an unprecedented standard of objectivity and consequent accuracy.” 5

Second, Thucydides, Waltz, and other modern realists all advance, at minimum, a certain logic of political relations; they identify the central issues and dynamics at stake in international politics, and specifically the character and qualities of political life between autonomous political–cultural groups interacting in the absence of an overarching, centralized political sovereign or public agent with a legitimate monopolization on the use of force. The argument that there are, according to Welch (2003 :308), “no models in Thucydides” follows from an overly narrow understanding of what constitutes a useful theoretical model of political behavior. Crane (1998 :56) describes a “paradigm” as a conceptual scheme that “drags new phenomena into the light [while] pushing other phenomena back into the shadows.” Similarly, Waltz (1979 :8) suggests that “a theory indicates that some factors are more important than others and specifies relations among them.” 6 Thucydides is in this regard loosely paradigmatic or theoretical; although not formulating strict, falsifiable hypotheses that can be rigorously tested against competing explanations, he presents a historical narrative within a conceptual scheme, privileging certain themes while deliberately reducing others. The Peloponnesian War can therefore be used as a source of competing ideas about politics. A basis of comparison is not to test realist hypotheses against empirical evidence, and in this case the “observation” of the events surrounding the war, but to situate facts and events within a broader perspective, and to delineate the key conceptual issues at stake between modern structural realism and the historical narrative of the Peloponnesian war as presented by Thucydides.

The central analytical claim of modern realism, with the exception of the distinction to be drawn later in this paper, is that the sources of state behavior can be located not in the character of the primary political units, but in the decentralized system created by their interaction. Modern realism is positional or situational in logic: independent of the character or properties of political agents, under conditions of anarchy they are uniformly compelled to act in terms of necessity and the pursuit of power-political advantage. It is rooted in the concept of the Primat der Aussenpolitik , or the “primacy of foreign policy,” a term that has come to have two meanings. Originally, it referred to the idea that the international system affected the development of a state's domestic institutions. 7 The second, and the more relevant meaning to this discussion, refers to the line of argument that states conduct foreign policy for “strategic” reasons, or as a consequence of the pressures of the international system; international politics is conceived of as apart from, and not an extension of, domestic politics. Whereas advocates of Primat der Aussenpolitik argue that state behavior is determined by external considerations of material power, advocates of what Fareed Zakaria (1992) labels a competing Innenpolitik school argue that foreign policy can be explained by factors internal to a state, and traditionally, but not limited to, its economic and political organization. 8

In post-World War II realism, this distinction has largely been reframed in terms of the levels of analyses, or “images,” at which state behavior can be explained. Originally a term used as a taxonomy to classify and organize different arguments on the sources of war, Kenneth Waltz's (1954) introduction of three images—the individual, the state, and the international system—has become a framework with which to explain international politics more broadly. 9 This approach has since become almost correlational in logic: a “third image” approach—or one that locates the source of state behavior in the international system—argues that an international environment characterized by anarchy encourages states with varying domestic properties to behave in similar ways when external conditions are held constant, whereas states whose domestic conditions are similar will behave differently when external conditions vary. Alternatively, a “second-image” approach— one that locates the source of state behavior in the state—expects the opposite that: state behavior corresponds more with variation at the domestic than the international level.

This broad division in contemporary international relations theory is strikingly anticipated in the debate between Athens and Corinth at the Conference of the Peloponnesian League at Sparta over the sources of Athenian imperialism (1.67–1.88). Corinthian and Athenian representatives advance competing propositions about Athenian behavior specifically, and the determinants of intercity relations more generally. Athenian Aussenpolitikers argue that Athenian imperial behavior is, given certain constants in human nature, a function of its relative material power position, whereas Corinthian Innenpolikers argue that Athens' empire is a consequence of factors unique to Athens itself, and specifically its vibrant and innovative political culture and institutions. At stake in this debate is not just the content or nature of Athenian political culture, but also the causal impact of a second-image argument relative to the effects of the international system. Because this debate corresponds so closely to the levels-of-analysis distinction drawn between modern realism and domestic-political theories, it is a useful place to begin to evaluate these two competing schools in terms of Thucydides' approach to politics. The remainder of this section will identify the central assumptions of modern realism, discuss how they relate to the view of international politics first articulated by Athens at the Peloponnesian Congress in Book I, and show how a competing domestic-political theory centered around political culture and institutions presented by Corinth—and interestingly, presupposed in Pericles' major speeches—undermines Athenian, third-image realism.

Realist Assumptions

What constitute the fundamental assumptions of the modern realist paradigm, and how do they relate to the realist worldview articulated by Athens? While there are a number of iterations ( Keohane 1986 ; Mearsheimer 2001 ; Walt 2002 ), realist theories tend to share three assumptions regarding the nature of international-political life. First, the international system is characterized by anarchy, in that there is no centralized, sovereign political authority or public agent that commands a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Anarchy is in this sense an ordering principle, and not a description of the quality of international life as chaotic or inherently conflictual. Second, states are the primary actors in international politics, and can be regarded as purposive, unitary actors. Thucydides often relies on this assumption as a simplifying device, referring, for example, to Athenians, Melians, or Spartans as coherent, unitary actors in the international system. Although the primary political unit may change over time, according to Robert Gilpin (1986) , the “essence of social reality is the group.” Third, states are rationally self-interested and generally seek to survive as independent political entities. Political units select strategies that they believe maximize their interests, and at a minimum seek to survive, generally defined in terms of their territorial integrity and the autonomy of their domestic political order and political culture.

Many discussions of Thucydides and modern realism seem to begin by evaluating the extent to which the History accepts or problemetizes these initial assumptions. Crane (1998) finds that central realist assumptions can be traced to Thucydides, which in his particular iteration includes anarchy, the importance of organized social groups, rationality, the drive to maximize power, and the inherent amorality of international politics. Alternatively, Johnson (1994) argues that the prominence of individuals in the narrative and speeches challenges realist assumptions of state centricity, while Peter Ahrensdorf (1997) contests whether the Hellenic international system is in fact anarchic, given the Greeks could not in principle know if there is a divinely enforced moral order. The positing of rationality does not correspond with Stephen Forde's (1995) reading of the behavior of a number of actors in the History ; at some level, states like Melos and Sparta act on the basis of a specific conception of justice or piety, and do not respond rationally to international conditions. According to Gerald Mara, Thucydides shows how Greek political groups, and the cultures that underlie them, are not immutably coherent but are fluid: they can both integrate (a goal pursued, e.g., by Syracuse's Hermokrates with respect to Sicily) and disintegrate (e.g., Corcyra). 10

By using these premises as a dimension of comparison with Thucydides, these authors misunderstand the nature of modern, narrowly analytical assumptions. Many realist assumptions are of the positivist “as if” variety; they are theoretical constructs, intended to be analytically useful, not descriptively accurate ( Friedman 1953 ; Waltz 1979 ). 11 The purpose of assumptions regarding anarchy, the primacy of states, and self-interested rationality is similar to that of assumptions made by modern economics regarding utility-maximizing individuals—acknowledged to be factually inaccurate, but intentionally simplifying for the purpose of constructing theories with some explanatory and predictive power. More significant is the political logic advanced by the terms of the theory, and its ability to situate or give perspective to important events and developments in the History .

From these assumptions, realism derives certain broad expectations regarding state behavior. Because states interact in the absence of an overarching, public authority with a monopoly on the use of legitimate violence to regulate disputes and enforce decisions, states must rely on their own capabilities to achieve their interests and objectives, however defined. Without the presence of a public authority, private force is the ultimate arbiter of disputes; according to Waltz (1954 :238), “force is a means of achieving the external ends of states because their exists no consistent, reliable process of reconciling the conflicts of interest that inevitably arise among similar units in a condition of anarchy.” Although states are not engaged in constant warfare, the possibility that force might be used against their interests compels them to compete for security, and to be concerned for their power position relative to other states. Normative or cultural interests are subordinate to security, because the continued autonomy of the political entity is thought to be a precondition for these other political objectives. And because states value their relative position, political cooperation is difficult to achieve independent of an underlying distribution of power and interests.

These power-political imperatives are incumbent upon states under anarchy; states must provide for their own interests, and thus are of necessity compelled to act on the basis of advantage and expedience. But as games like the Prisoner's Dilemma and the Stag Hunt have demonstrated, the pursuit of individually rational choices can result in collectively suboptimal outcomes. Political units, whether individuals in the state of nature or states under conditions of anarchy, must behave as if other actors are potentially predatory or irrational; as Waltz (1954 :169) wrote, “if harmony is to exist in anarchy, not only must I be perfectly rational but I must be able to assume that everyone else is too … to attempt to act on a rational calculation without allowing [for irrational acts] may lead to my own undoing.” The key concept advanced by third-image realism is thus that insecurity and competition are generated not by properties of the units, but in the situation they collectively face. Concern for relative position, security, and power is a rational response to anarchy; independent of their unique domestic characteristics, states are under uniformly intense systemic pressure to act on the basis of interest and necessity, to engage in security competition, and to attempt to redress imbalances, or anticipate potential imbalances, in their relative power position.

As has already been observed, realism's central analytical claim about the insecurity and fear generated by a system of autonomous, competing political units under anarchy finds apparent expression in Thucydides' statement on the “truest cause” of the Peloponnesian War: the growth of Athenian power necessarily engendered fear and insecurity in Sparta, compelling Sparta to initiate a war. Although Thucydides only occasionally speaks directly in his own name, his account of the “truest cause” at 1.28 is strikingly structural. Following the Conference of Peloponnesian allies in Book I, he extends this explanation by stating that “the Lacedaemonians voted that the treaty had been broken and that they must go to war not so much because they were persuaded by the arguments of their allies because they feared further increase in the power of the Athenians, seeing the greater part of Hellas already under their control” (1.88).

Athenian statements of strength at the Peloponnesian Congress, intended to dissuade Sparta, also illustrate the inadvertent nature of causal effects located at the third image: by highlighting the disparity of power between Athens and Sparta, the Athenian remarks only contributed to Spartan fear and insecurity, ultimately rendering Athens less secure and making conflict more likely. 12

The Athenian Thesis

The modern realist view is most approximated in Thucydides' text by what Clifford Orwin (1994) has labeled the “Athenian thesis,” a paradigm that closely corresponds to third-image realism. Although specifically addressing questions of justice and the sources of its empire, Athens presents a more general theory of state behavior centered around anarchy and relative material power position in three places: the Peloponnesian Congress in Book I, the Melian Dialogue in Book V, and the Athenian speech to the Camarinaeans in Book VI.

The Athenian representatives at Sparta give a positional account of their empire; Athens' imperial behavior was compelled by the insecurities and necessities generated by international anarchy, and not characteristics unique to Athens as a political entity. Initially compelled to succeed Sparta in leading the Hellenes against the Persian threat, Athens' transition from the war-time leadership of the Delian league to coercive empire was “compelled from the first by the situation itself to expand the empire to its present state, especially out of fear, then prestige, then self-interest” (1.75, italics mine). Once the tribute system of the empire had become vital to Athenian power, its imperial position created a unique set of interests and fears. With regard to Sparta, Athens was acutely sensitive to its relative position: Sparta was “by then not our friends as you once were but a source of suspicion and contention, and allies who left us would have gone over to you” (I.75). With regard to the allies, Athenian behavior was strongly motivated by the fear of the resentment its alliance system may have generated, a theme later emphasized at Melos in Book V. As Pericles would claim in Book II, the empire may have been unjust to take up, but it was now dangerous to put down.

Their decision to retain the empire, as well as their coercive management of it, is also consistent with what they characterize as a political law of human nature. According to Athens, it has “done nothing remarkable, or contrary to ordinary human behavior, if we not only accepted an empire when it was offered but also did not let it go … not as the originators of such conduct, moreover, as the rule has always existed that the weaker is held down by the stronger” (1.76). In this view, political actors do not forego opportunities to aggrandize power or to gain through the exercise of force, and are only limited in the scope of their intentions by countervailing power. This view, although rooted in a specific understanding of human nature, is entirely consistent with modern realism, which suggests that because states exist in an environment where unilateral force could be used to arbitrate disputes, states are interested in maximizing power relative to other states.

The Athenian thesis also contains an important claim about justice. Athens contends that morality is subordinate to considerations of necessity and power, and that justice is contingent on a balance of power between states. Justice—which Athens appears to loosely define as the absence of arbitrary coercion in managing political relations—is only possible among actors between whom there is an equal distribution of power; because considerations of relative political power are primary, states do not forego opportunities to expand in order to reciprocate moderation or restraint. This logic is repeated by a number of actors in the History , including the Corcyrans in Book I and the Mytelineans in Book III.

Interestingly, the Athenian representatives at Sparta claim to have behaved more justly than the distribution of power would enable, and that “all are entitled to praise whenever they follow human nature and end up behaving more justly than their actual power dictates” (I.76). Although seemingly contradictory in their selective acceptance and denial of moral agency, this statement in fact affirms the logic of political relations outlined by the Athenian thesis. First, because states under anarchy are primarily interested in advantage and expedience, claims about justice are arbitrarily employed; it is thus expected that Athens contends to be compelled when acting unjustly, and contends to be exercising agency when acting justly. I do not understand this section of the sentence, due mostly to the verbal phrase “contend to have been compelled,” which I'm not sure I comprehend; in addition, when this is juxtaposed to “exercising agency,” it has no parallel structure. Second, the act of giving justice without the expectation of reciprocity actually reinforces power asymmetries. The act of gift-giving without the expectation of reciprocity is often used to reinforce existing disparities in power ( Crane 1998 :chapter 5). This is evidenced by Athenian behavior at Mytilene and Melos; as Athens is pressured by the war, allied revolt, and the overextension of its power, it is less willing to act moderately toward its allies by deferring to the adjudication of disputes in terms of some legal framework, as was evidently the case in Book I.

The logic of the Athenian thesis, and specifically with regard to the sources of Athenian empire, is most prominently extended in two other speeches. At Melos, Athens delivers its most notorious claim about politics, that “justice is what is decided when equal forces are opposed, while possibilities are what superiors impose and the weak acquiesce to” (5.89). Athens also reinforces the positional nature of its thesis; because of an “innate compulsion to rule when empowered,” Athens contends that “we know that you and anyone else who attained power like ours would act accordingly” (5.105). This is the correlational logic of the third-image realism: variation in external conditions—which Athens seems to be defining in terms of relative material power position—outweighs variation in internal conditions—political culture or institutions—in determining state behavior.

A final place where Thucydides represents the Athenian empire as a response to the anarchic condition of international politics is in Euphemus' speech to the Camarinaeans (6.82-87). Early in its invasion of Sicily, Athens attempts to persuade Camarina to align itself with the empire, but anticipates that Camarina may be wary of a city whose source of power is the subjugation of former allies. Euphemus portrays the empire as a defensive measure to avoid being ruled by outside powers, first Persia and then Sparta. The empire is maintained out of fear, because ruling is the only way to escape being ruled by others. Athens thus links its security position to the steady expansion of its empire. This zero-sum logic is consistent with modern realism's focus on relative gains; the logic of the system is such that security—or not being ruled—requires expansion, and this pressure is incumbent on all states, regardless of domestic political–cultural characteristics.

An important distinction between modern and Athenian realism might turn on their respective views toward human nature. The Athenian thesis is driven by a specific view of human nature, that individuals are innately compelled to dominate when not opposed by countervailing power. According to Athens at Melos, the Athenians were not “the ones who made this law or the first to apply it after it was laid down,” but “applied it as one in existence when we took it up and one that we will leave behind to endure for all time” (5.105). 13 At certain places in the narrative Thucydides seems to endorse this view, or at least the logic of there being “laws” of human nature; in both the Archeology (1.89–1.118) and during the Corcyran stasis (3.69), he remarks that these events will recur as long as human nature is unchanging. Although he may disagree with the Athenian thesis over the actual content of that nature, for Thucydides human nature is a “causal” condition in the presence of which we can expect certain recurrent outcomes. In contrast, a goal of contemporary realism is, as discussed above, to more explicitly reformulate explanations of the competitive nature of international politics in terms of the effects of the system itself, and not the inherently dominating character of the individual agents that constitute that system.

How can we square the importance of human nature to Athenian realism with the centrality of structure to modern realism? This distinction can have important consequences for realist theory. For example, Steven Forde (1995 :151) argues that if the Athenian, nature-oriented paradigm is correct, then international politics is inexorably competitive, whereas an emphasis on the causal effects of structure at least introduces the possibility that interstate competition can be ameliorated or reduced.

The answer is that both views are in effect “positional.” First, both anarchy and nature are constants, or at least portrayed as invariant. It can be conceded that the Athenian thesis is a unit-level claim, but because nature is treated as constant, to a significant extent the concept doing the explanatory work in the Athenian thesis is structural variation in relative power position. Given the laws of political human nature posited by Athens, cities with varying political cultures will act similarly when under similar conditions of relative power. Second, the Athenian thesis, like structural realism, is relational in logic: Athenian claims to an “innate compulsion to rule” when empowered are framed in terms of relative power. Whether because of nature as Athens portrays it or the system, both the Athenian and modern iterations of realism expect that states will act similarly when similarly situated, and differently when differently situated, independent of varying properties at the domestic level. Athenian and realist expectations regarding state behavior effectively hold under the same conditions: independent political units with varying capabilities seeking survival in the absence of an overarching political authority.

Corinth, Pericles, and Political Culture

In terms of explaining Athenian behavior, both Corinth at the Peloponnesian Congress and Pericles in his Book II speeches subscribe to a similar perspective on international politics: Athenian imperial behavior is attributable not to the anarchic nature of the international system, but to characteristics internal to Athens. Although diverse and varied in their judgments of Athens, these arguments all share a common second-image logic about the impact of political culture and institutions on international behavior. Thucydides shows through both the Peloponnesian Congress debate and the figure of Pericles that the international history of the war is as much about political relations within states as between them.

In contrast with the Athenian's positional explanation of empire, the Corinthian speech locates the sources of Athenian behavior directly in the character of the city. In this view, the empire is a consequence of institutions and a political culture unique to Athens. Athenian institutions encourage a political culture of innovation, boldness, and risk taking; according to the Corinthians, the Athenians are “innovators and quick to carry out their plans … they are bold beyond their strength and risk-takers beyond their judgment” (1.70).

The Corinthian speech, while clearly motivated by instrumental and rhetorical objectives, also highlights the causal role of political culture and domestic character by juxtaposing Athenian and Spartan cultural attributes. Whereas Athenian institutions encourage a culture that is innovative, bold, and “quick to carry out whatever action it resolves,” Sparta is “[quick] to preserve the status quo, to make no further resolutions, and in [their] actions not even complete what needs to be done” (1.70). The Athenian and Spartan dispositions toward “intercity” politics are fundamentally divergent; partly because of such intracity factors as the Helots, Athens, according to Corinth, is “always ready to act while [the Spartans] are delayers, and they are always abroad while you are the most home-bound of all. For they believe that by being away they are gaining; you, that by making any move you will damage even your present assets” (1.70). 14 Although the ensuing exchange between Archidamos, who broadly accepts the substance of the Corinth speech but reverses its implications, and Sthenelaides shows that Greek city-state political culture is not uniform but contested, the actual outcome of this contestation is not relevant to the logic of second-image arguments.

Interestingly, Pericles' funeral oration also subscribes to this second-image logic, attributing Athenian power to properties of its political and social order, and specifically its democratic political institutions and culture. Although Pericles' vision of Athens is prescriptive as well as descriptive—there is an implicit normative dimension to his positive statements about the political character of Athens—he portrays Athens as exhibiting a unique and distinctive political–cultural paradigm. According to Pericles, Athens' is governed by a set of democratic institutions that, in addition to according each private citizen a formal equality under the law, fosters a unique concern for merit and distinction in public service. Athenian institutions promote a political culture that values daring, fame, and innovation, as a consequence of which Athens has achieved the greatest reputation and prestige. Athens has become an “education for Hellas,” where all the virtues uncompromisingly converge—an Athenian is “self-sufficient in the most varied forms of conduct, and with the most attractive qualities.” The particular importance of reputation as a political–cultural virtue is reflected in speeches both before and after the plague, and again may be more prescriptive in what it selects to emphasize than descriptive: Athens has “acquired certainly the greatest power known up to this time, of which it will be forever remembered by posterity, even if in the present we give way somewhere … we as Hellenes ruled over the most Hellenes, sustained the greatest wars against them both in combination and separately, and lived in a city that was in all ways the best provided for and greatest” (2.63).

Pericles also highlights the uniquely democratic and participatory nature of Athenian deliberative institutions as a source of political power, and a condition for Athens' empire and material supremacy. By providing an egalitarian environment in which every citizen has an opportunity to participate in public life, Athenian democracy produced, according to Daniel Garst (2000) , a “unity of will among its citizens that is far stronger than that resulting from blind obedience to the state.” Pericles juxtaposes the voluntary, consensual bravery and courage of Athenians to that of Spartans, the latter owing “more to law than to character” (2.39). Certain places in the History also present an interesting link between democratic institutions and naval power. In Book VIII, for example, Thucydides' account of the defeat of the oligarchic coup against the democratic regime in Athens largely ascribes its failure to the resistance of the armed forces, and most notably the navy based in Samos (8.72). Garst also cites Aristotle, who believed that sustained naval power was incompatible with oligarchy. Evidently rowing a trireme is a very democratic activity.

Pericles advances a certain ethos or vision in his characterization of Athens, specifying that what should be praised are innovation, daring, merit, and the reputation and prestige these acts accrue. These attributes have produced exhibitions of power that “will be admired by this and future generations,” and the “factual truth” of Athens power “we acquired because of these characteristics” (2.41). 15 Corinth largely agrees with Pericles' characterization of Athenian political culture, but represents this ethos as an almost pathological, and second image, source of conflict. In his eulogy of Pericles at 2.65, Thucydides suggests that this political–cultural ethic of fame and merit may ultimately be destabilizing and self-defeating for the political community itself; the political competition that ensued following Pericles' death over the de facto position of “first man” was in part responsible for Athens' defeat in the war. More broadly, Thucydides offers both an endorsement and a critique of Pericles' vision for Athens. On one level, the Periclean ethos and its focus on great motion and energy fulfills Thucydides' criteria of the “greatest disturbance” as to why the Peloponnesian War was “notable beyond all previous wars” (1.1). As the war produces a certain secular disintegration in cultural and civilizational standards, however, Thucydides shows that the alternative to great motion is the great suffering shown throughout the narrative, and most conspicuously by the indiscriminate and irrational violence and destruction of Hellenic education at Mykalessos by barbarians at the discretion of Athens, a Greek city.

Competing Images and Thucydides

The Corinthian and Athenian speeches at the Spartan Congress frame competing causal propositions about the sources of Athenian power specifically, but also the sources of international behavior more generally. They also organize a number of arguments in the book, from Athenian speeches to Pericles to Thucydides speaking in his own name, according to where they locate the primary element impacting the behavior of state. The secondary literature appears to be split on Thucydides' position in relation to this simple, second versus third image typology. Garst (2000 :68), for example, argues that “Thucydides departs from neorealist thinking on the Primat der Aussenpolitik … Thucydides' history shows that political institutions are equally, if not more, important in determining states' behavior.” Alternatively, Forde (1995 :151) argues that “one of the goals of the History is to test this realist Athenian thesis against the facts he has in view. The evidence he presents corroborates the thesis in its essential outlines.”

Here I would like to make two points about this debate and the evidence regarding the sources and conduct of Athenian imperialism, the one “empirical” case discussed in this section. First, Corinthian Innenpolitik clearly prevails over Athenian Aussenpolitik . Thucydides does present us with clear examples of self-regarding, power-political behavior, in radical departure from the values of the “ancient simplicity” that previously defined, or were thought to have defined, Hellenic civilization. 16 With regard to the Athenian empire, however, Athens' third-image view can at best explain its response to a given distribution of power, while second-image arguments about political institutions and culture are necessary to explain why this particular distribution of power came about, and specifically why Athens developed and then consolidated its empire. The logic of the Corinthian view, supported by Athens' very own “first man,” suggests that the “position” in which Athens found itself was in fact a consequence of characteristics unique to the organization of its polity. If a paradigm privileges some factors over others, third-image realism fails to capture significant elements of the dynamics motivating the Athenian empire.

Second, this debate is only the first stage in understanding the relationship between Thucydides and modern realism. Waltz's variation shares what I have been calling “third-image” realism's emphasis on the insecurity and competition generated by the structure of international anarchy, but suggests a different way of specifying the effects of the system on state behavior. Whereas third-image realism cannot account for an important domestic-political element to Athenian imperialism, the nature of Waltz's structural logic allows him to concede the significance of domestic level and ideational causal effects. Many secondary authors make the mistake of assuming that demonstrating the importance of non-structural factors in The Peloponnesian War severs the connection between Thucydides and structural realism. The assumption that the proliferating variables highlighted by recent scholarship on Thucydides—whether morality, justice, legitimacy, piety, rhetoric, individual character, national character, ideology, regime type, etc.—undermines a structural realist reading of The Peloponnesian War relies on a fundamentally mis-specified version of realism. 17 However, although a weaker casual theory in terms of modern social science standards, Waltz's iteration of structural (or “neo-”) realism better situates the facts as presented by Thucydides.

Waltz's reformulation of a structural theory of international politics begins with his sparse definition of political structure. Waltz argues that political structure consists of three elements: an ordering principle, a specification of the functions performed by the actors, and a distribution of capabilities or power across those actors. According to Waltz, the ordering principle of international politics is anarchic, the primary political units—states—are undifferentiated in terms of the functions they perform (i.e., they must independently provide for their own security), and states vary in terms of the capabilities they can bring to bear to perform these functions. Waltz further assumes that states are unitary, purposive actors who, at minimum, seek their own preservation.

In Waltz's view, international-political theory is analogous to microeconomic theory. The international system—like a market—is created by the actions of its units, and the theory is built from the assumed motivations of these units and the systemic constraints that arise from their interaction. Microeconomic theory posits the existence of firms, assumes for them the motivation of maximizing profits, and explains their behavior based on environmental factors. Propositions about variation in behavior correspond with variation in characteristics of the system or of the unit's position in that system, and not with variation in the units themselves. Similarly, and like third-image realism, Waltz believes that structural constraints explain why certain behavior recurs despite variation in the people and states that constitute the international system. 18

Unlike the third-image realism discussed above, however, Waltz does not derive determinate predictions about how states will respond to these structural pressures. In his causal story, structure does not determine state behavior, but by introducing certain costs and incentives predisposes or constrains states in certain directions. According to Waltz (2002) , structures “shape and shove; they do not determine the actions of states … international political theory deals with the pressures of structure on states and not with how states will respond to those pressures. The latter is a task for theories of how national governments respond to pressures on them.” 19 International structure impacts state behavior by providing incentives to act consistent with power-political imperatives, or suffer “costs” in terms of their territorial integrity and domestic political or cultural order accordingly. The logic of Waltz's theory is that when agents are ordered by force and competition and not by authority and law, certain behavior is privileged or rewarded, but not necessarily expected.

What are the constraints and incentives presented to states by the international structure? 20 As a set of autonomous political units, what are the features of the Greek international political system, and in what directions do they “compel” states? By positing that at minimum all states seek survival, Waltz contends that a system of decentralized competition creates powerful incentives for all states to behave in the self-regarding, power-political manner captured by the Athenian thesis. In the context of the Greek self-help world, these include an acknowledgment of the primacy of material power, the pursuit of expedience and immediate advantage over the norms that defined, or were thought to define, the Greek moral and civilizational order, including reciprocity, piety, and ritualized friendship, a tendency to balance against power and compete for security, that is, regard security as a relative, zero-sum game, to cooperate only with equals or when interests converge, and to pursue unilateral advantage over unequals. Most broadly, these systemic “compulsions” are captured by the idea, articulated by Athenian speakers throughout the History , that states either rule or are ruled (e.g., at 6.18 and 6.82), and that considerations of justice are only possible between equals (e.g., at 5.89).

In a subtle but crucial distinction, Waltz's international-political theory requires no assumption of rationality. The mechanism that drives international politics in Waltz's model is not “rational” responses to international anarchy but a process of selection and socialization that takes place in all competitive systems: states that do not emulate successful behavior or act on the basis of necessity and power-political expediency are “selected out” of the system. An international political system thus places significant pressure on states to act consistent with the structural imperatives of Athenian realpolitik, but it is not anomalous if they act “irrationally.” Waltz does not expect that all states will act like Athens (as does, as we have seen, third-image realism), only that states will suffer costs in terms of political–cultural autonomy if they do not.

The logic of this situational or structural argument allows Waltz to concede domestic-level causal effects; it is thus not enough to demonstrate that Thucydides has a position on what motivates state behavior, or that states deviate from the structural incentives specified. Cities can act consistent with conceptions of morality and justice and can prosecute wars in a manner consistent with unit-level, political–cultural attributes, but the logic of an international system is such that they will be “selected out” for acting inconsistent with power-political imperatives of necessity and expedience. 21 Whereas the significance of political culture in Thucydides' narrative does contest the Athenian-style, third-image realism formulated above, Waltz's realism is entirely consistent with a theory specifying the impact of political culture. Athens expects that, based on a specific understanding of human nature, cities with varying political cultures will act similarly when subject to the same external compulsions; Waltz, based on a specific understanding of how systems influence the behavior of their units, expects only that they will suffer “costs” terms of political and cultural autonomy if they deviate from the situational expectations of Athenian realpolitik. According to Waltz (2002) , history “abounds in examples of states that failed to mind their own security interests through internal efforts or external arrangement, and as one would expect, suffered invasion, loss of autonomy, and dismemberment. States are free to disregard the imperatives of power, but they must expect to a pay a price for doing so.”

There are analytical advantages and disadvantages to this spare conceptual model, especially as applied to Thucydides. On one level, Waltz's structural realism makes very weak causal claims; it is “underdetermined” to the extent that its causal conditions are consistent with the wide variety of political outcomes (in this case, state behavior) witnessed by Thucydides in the politics of the Peloponnesian War. As a consequence, however, it is highly transposable; it applies to any political system in which autonomous units seek survival. 22 The expectation that states suffer from deviating from realpolitik behavior should obtain whenever these specified conditions of political structure are present. A structural theory formulated in this way accounts for the enduring relevance of realism, and enables it to apply usefully to a number of political systems despite significant variation in the units that comprise that system, from Greek city-states to Italian principalities to the modern, post-Westphalia international system.

Thucydides' narrative provides evidence that states do suffer costs in terms of security, political cultural autonomy, and at times actual survival. The theme of cities emulating successful behavior or failing runs throughout the work, possibly the most explicit being the attempt by Corinth to persuade Sparta to emulate the Athenian culture of innovation and boldness at the Spartan Congress in Book I and Hermokrates' imploring of Syracuse to emulate Athens in Books VI and VII. Similarly, cities are punished if they act contrary to the logic of their position under anarchy, whether conceived in terms of power-political laws of nature or the pressures created by structural imperatives. Two cases illustrate these arguments: Melos' interaction with Athens, arguably the climax of political realism in The Peloponnesian War , and the Athenian failure to successfully prosecute the war.

Melian Idealism

The Melian dialogue contains the classic, oft-quoted statement of the Athenian thesis, that “justice is what is decided when equal forces are opposed, while possibilities are what superiors impose and the weak acquiesce to” (5.89), often cited by scholars as the earliest statements of the realist tradition. Athens uses the dialogue to reiterate a number of themes that characterize both their “procedural” and “paradigmatic” realism(s). Their interest in subjugating Melos is grounded in the strategic belief that the subject cities now pose a greater danger to Athens than does Sparta, and they reiterate that their “compulsion to rule” is a consequence not of cultural or institutional attributes unique to Athens, but to their relative material power position. Given a law of nature that Athens did not create or “lay down,” Athens “knows that [Melos] and anyone else who attained power like ours would act accordingly” (5.105). Procedurally, Athens frames the debate in terms of the factual reality of the situation and the logic of a self-help system; Melos should not “weigh … anything else besides planning your city's survival on the basis of the present circumstances as you see them” (5.87).

In fact, Melos responds in a way that challenges the Athenian thesis, and is anomalous from the perspective of a third-image realism that expects states under anarchy to act on the basis of rational self-interest and relative material power. Athens regards the Melian rejection of their offer “irrational, “ an act of “touching naivete” based on an illusion or imagination that ignores the reality of what is, or should be, immediately apparent.

Melian decision-making is based on three factors that Thucydides presents throughout the narrative as fundamentally anti-realist. First, Melos' decision is partly based on chance or hope; despite an imbalance of power, Melos argues that “warfare sometimes admits of more impartial fortunes than accords with the numerical superiority of two sides” (5.102). Second, Melos contends that there is a moral order, apparently enforced through divine intervention, that rewards and punishes just and unjust behavior. The Melians “have faith that we will not go without our share of fortune from the Gods, as righteous men who stand in opposition to unjust ones.”

Finally, the Melian rejection is based on the expectation of support from an ally, Sparta: “the Lacedaemonians and their allies will redress our deficiency in power, compelled, if for no other reason, to help us on account of honor, on account of our kinship” (5.104). Alliances are typically considered to be one of the two traditional mechanisms of balancing, self-help behavior, and Melos seemingly relies on Sparta to redress an imbalance of power. 23 However, Melos regards Sparta as “compelled” not by the realities of material power and situational necessities, but, as Lacadaemonian colonists, by the reciprocal obligations of honor and kinship. This view of alliances is contrary to the more typically realist view, presented, for example, by Corcyra and Myteline in Books I and III, that political cooperation is contingent on an underlying balance of power and convergence of interest (1.35, 3.11; see also 6.18, 7.57, 7.77). Ultimately, the Athenian offer is rejected on the grounds that Melos “will not in a matter of minutes do away with the freedom of a city whose habitation has lasted 700 years, but by trusting in the favor of the Gods, which has preserved it up till now” (5.112). Athens derides the decision as “fully irrational,” and “wishful thinking” that “when human means of saving themselves are still available … [men] turn to intangible ones, to prophecy, oracles, and whatever else of this sort combines with hope to bring ruin” (5.103). They also dismiss the Melian hope for Spartan assistance; extending the positional logic of realism, Athens argues that Sparta will not assist on the basis of kinship alone, in the absence of some immediate material interest.

The Melian dialogue is widely regarded as the climax of the Athenian realpolitik that extends through the debate at Sparta in Book I, the speeches by Pericles, and the Mytilene debate, and provides the most dramatic illustration of many of its (and by extension, modern realism's) key themes: the subordination of moral considerations to interest and expedience, the primacy of the existential survival of a political entity, the absence of coercion only in relations among equals, and the convergence of interests being the only stable source of cooperation. The actions of Melos itself, however, made on the basis of chance, honor, diffuse reciprocity, and speculation about the role of the Gods in human affairs, are not only contrary to the behavioral expectations derived by modern realism from the third image and by Athens from its putative laws of human nature, but also represent a discrete and competing political world view. Crane (1998) in fact argues that Athens crushed Melos not only because of the vital imperial interests threatened by continued Melian neutrality, but also because their continued existence represented a fundamental threat to the Athenian (and again, by extension, modern realism's) political world view.

The Melian dialogue, however, illustrates structural realist logic not because of Melian behavior as it relates to the Athenian thesis—it in fact contests its expectations—but because Melos pays a cost in terms of its survival for ignoring the logic of a system that rewards self-interested, power-oriented behavior, and discourages behavior driven by the factors listed above. The stakes of the dialogue for Melos were high; Thucydides dramatically concludes Book V with the elimination of Melos as an independent political entity; Athens “killed all the grown men they captured, enslaved the children and women, and settled the place themselves” (5.116). As a consequence of relying on chance, reciprocal obligations, and a quasi-political power other than that mobilized by its own initiative, Melos engages in what from the perspective of third-image realism is clearly “irrational” behavior. As Forde (1995 :145) argues, “violations of realist rationality are as salient in [Thucydides] as is realism itself. The Melians' failure to surrender to the overwhelmingly superior power of Athens is only the clearest such case.” But rationality is not what interests structural realism; as we have seen above, a structural theory of international politics would not contest that 700 years of political–cultural continuity can impact a state's decision-making process. Structural realism is only interested in the outcomes of those decisions, and its explanatory expectation—that states that ignore the imperatives of a self-help system will be punished—is vindicated by the events at Melos.

The argument can be made that Melian behavior confirms politics as an exercise in power and self-interest—that is, confirms the Athenian thesis—for two reasons. First, Thucydides notes that the Melian oligarchs did not allow the Athenian representatives to speak before the public at large, a clearly self-interested act; Athens' first statement in the dialogue is the observation that the debate is not open to the public “in order to avoid a continuous presentation by which the people would be taken in after hearing us say things that appealed to them” (5.85). 24

Second, Melos frames its moral arguments to the Athenians around the instrumental value of justice, and not behaving justly for its own sake. By arguing that they “will not go without their share of fortune from the Gods” (5.104), Melos regards the Gods as effectively serving as a source of supra-state moral and religious order, equivalent to an overarching political authority or public agent that regulates political relations between cities by punishing or rewarding just and unjust behavior. Melos' interest in moral behavior is not for its moral worth, but justice used instrumentally as a form of self-help ( Ahrensdorf 1997 :244). 25

The first argument does not address any of the premises of structural realism; whether the decisions of domestic actors are instrumental or rational from the perspective of their private interests is not relevant to the international consequences or outcomes of those decisions. The second argument is particularly interesting, because it directly challenges the premise of anarchy; as Ahrensdorf (1997 :244) asks, “insofar as realists contend that justice has no power in the real, anarchic world of international politics … how can the realists know that this assumption is true?” The Athenian response in 5.105 is that Melos' belief in its own divine favor is contingent on a specific understanding of divinity; according to Athens, because it was not the first to “lay down” the law that humans are under an “innate compulsion to rule wherever empowered,” it is morally exonerated for acting in terms of necessity and interest. Moreover, it is evident throughout Thucydides' narrative that while people's subjective religious beliefs matter in terms of motivating or impacting political behavior, the Gods themselves do not play an active role in human affairs.

Athens and Realpolitik

This understanding of structural realism also provides better insight into the role of Athens in the Peloponnesian War than unreconstructed third-image realism. Thucydides presents Athens as perhaps the primary practitioner of realpolitik, a view certainly shared by many of the secondary authors discussed here, yet they were defeated. Why did Athens—regarded by Corinth as the model of a successful political culture, one it implores Sparta to emulate—not succeed, as structural realism might expect?

An initial answer might be that both places in the narrative in which Thucydides comments directly on the causes of Athenian defeat involve how Athens deviates from the realpolitik ideal. First, in his eulogy of Pericles at 2.65, Thucydides projects how the domestic political competition to succeed Pericles as “first man” undermined Athens' capacity to act as a coherent strategic actor. According to Thucydides,

For as long as [Pericles] presided over the city in peacetime he led it with moderation and preserved it in safety and it became greatest in his hands, and when war broke out it is clear that he foresaw the power it had at this time … He said that by keeping quiet, looking after the fleet, not extending the empire, and not endangering the city they would prevail; yet they managed all the affairs in the opposite way, and in accordance with personal ambition and personal gain they pursued other policies that seemed unrelated to the war, to the detriment of both themselves and the allies (2.65).

The ensuing political competition prevented Athens from consistently adhering to the strategy of attrition forged by Pericles in Books I and II, and held together under the plague and other stresses only by the force of his prestige. Consistent with Thucydides' explanation, Michael Doyle (1997 :74) argues that factionalism undermined Athens ability to “calculate their security with close attention to the threats posed and to the resources available to meet those threats,” as did Pericles. 26

A second place where domestic-political competition and leadership are cited as causes of the Athenian failure occurs at 6.15, during the debate between Nicias and Alcibiades over the Sicilian expedition. Thucydides portrays Alicibiades as the most capable of the post-Perciles Athenian leaders, and the most effective in pursuing the Athenian “national” interest; “as a public person [he] managed the war with the utmost skill” (6.15). 27 In many ways he also personally embodied the Athenian ideal of boldness, action, and ability outlined by Pericles in the Funeral Oration, although in doing so raised concerns about his private life and the “magnitude of his license” (6.15). 28 As Alcibiades argued in the Sicily debate, “when I with these aspirations am personally assailed for them, consider whether my public management can be matched by anyone” (6.16).

Although both Nicias and Alcibiades were assigned to lead the expedition, Alcibiades was eventually recalled. Why did Athens deliberately act contrary to its own self-interest, and particularly in the management of an issue absolutely vital to their security and prosecution of the war? Thucydides' answer appears to be that he was feared as a potential tyrant, an extension of the domestic political competition cited in 2.65. Of Alcibiades, Thucydides writes:

It was this which destroyed the Athenian city. The masses, frightened by the magnitude of his license in conducting his personal life and of his aims in absolutely everything he did, developed hostility towards him as an aspiring tyrant … by entrusting the city to others they ruined it in short order.

Athens could have conquered Sicily and presumably won the war had they retained their most capable general, Alcibiades, who despite his private behavior was apparently best able to pursue Athenian affairs of state.

A second dimension was the religious panic that accompanied the mutilation of the Hermes on the eve of the Sicilian expedition (6.27). Alcibiades was arrested, condemned to death, and ultimately forced to flee, in connection with both the crimes against the Hermes and an accusation that he hosted celebrations of the “Mysteries” in his private home. In part this was driven by the fear of Alcibiades as a tyrant; it was believed that “both the Mysteries and the mutilation of the hermes were connected with the overthrow of the democracy, and that none of this had been done without [Alcibiades'] complicity, adducing as evidence the undemocratic licentiousness of his conduct in general” (6.28). 29 The events surrounding the investigation and trial were used as a pretext for domestic-political competition: “taking up the charges were those who especially resented Alcibiades for standing in the way of their assured ascendancy over the people” (6.27).

There was also an independent religious element to these events: the mutilations were construed as “an omen for the voyage” (6.27), producing mass religious panic through the city and the fear that the expedition was, as Nicias would later say, “resented by the Gods” (7.77). Although Athens contends to behave consistent with moral laws they did not “lay down,” there is some evidence to suggest that Athens felt some underlying guilt or moral culpability for the empire and the necessities required to sustain it, and thus interpreted the mutilation of the Hermes as a signal of divine punishment (e.g., see 2.17, 2.54, 2.62, 3.37). Athens did not consider removing Alcibiades until after the religious crimes, and his alleged association with the Mysteries reinforced public angst about his leadership. According to Ahrensdorf (1997 :257), Athens' response to the incident “reveals the power of both their pious fears and their pious hopes, fears and hopes that overwhelm their capacity to pursue their self-interest effectively.” 30

As a consequence of domestic politics and Alcibiades' presumed impiety, Athens recalled him and entrusted the pivotal military expedition to the more pious but less capable Nicias. Upon arriving in Sicily, Nicias squandered Athens' initial strategic advantage by not immediately attacking, before Syracuse could organize a military response and while it was still intimidated by the magnitude of Athenian military power (7.42). 31 Nicias also ceded the initiative to the arriving Spartan general, Gylippos, a mistake he himself later acknowledges. Later in Book VII, and after losing several military engagements, Nicias and the Athenian army witness an eclipse of the moon, which he construed as another bad omen. Hoping to appease the Gods and in deference to Athenian soothsayers, Nicias delayed the withdrawal from Sicily “thrice 9 days,” allowing Syracuse to encircle and decisively destroy the entire Athenian army (7.50). 32 Under Nicias, the Athenian army is reduced to relying on hope and the favor of the Gods, precisely those means of statecraft for which they chastised the Melian oligarchs. 33 In combination, these two qualities of leadership—indecisiveness and what Thucydides calls Nicias' “over-credulous” piety—are more associated with the cultures of political communities like Sparta and Melos than Athens.

The Sicily campaign represented a total strategic collapse for the city of Athens. Vital Athenian interests were at stake in the military outcome in Sicily, both because of the degree of military power committed by Athens, and because, consistent with what they believed to be the necessities and compulsions of the international system, they linked their security to the unabated expansion of the empire (2.64, 3.40, 5.85–113, 6.18. 6.82–87). 34 Acknowledging the high costs paid by Athens for deviating from third-image pressures, the defeat was, according to Thucydides, “the greatest reversal for any Hellenic army” (7.75). Domestic politics and an attempt to “appease the Gods” interfered with Athens' ability, or willingness, to pursue its own narrow material interests at stake in Sicily, and this explains why they were unable to sustain a foreign policy line consistent with the realpolitik paradigm outlined throughout the History . However, this is entirely compatible with structural realism as formulated by Waltz: the argument is not that domestic and ideational causal factors do not impact decisions and behavior, only that they do not negate the structural incentives states face, and that states often pay a price for acting contrary to them.

Other scholars have used the Athenian case to examine the ethical and practical implications of political realism. 35 Ahrensdorf (1997) , for example, uses the dismissal of Alcibiades to demonstrate that political communities cannot meet the “psychological requirements” of political realism in practice and often backlash, in the Athenian case by becoming overly pious. Forde (1995) advances a similar critique of realism, that the case of Athens (and, although not mentioned, presumably Corcyra) demonstrates that the self-aggrandizing and self-interested behavior encouraged by realism abroad is not sustainable within a political community at home. 36 Alcibiades also presents a variation of this argument, observing that those who “stand out” for their accomplishments in public affairs—that is, effectively engage in realpolitik—inevitably engender resentment among their peers, although the renown they gain through their reputation for success publicly benefits everyone in a community. 37

But the logic of these arguments is subsumed by, and even confirms, structural realism as formulated by Waltz. Whether Athens lost the war because it became a moderate Corcyra (consumed by self-interested domestic politics) or a moderate Melos (relying on moral and religious hopes), it suffered immense costs for deviating from rational, self-interested behavior. While arguably discrediting of a more deterministic third-image realism, Athens' experience in the war in fact indicates Waltz's structural realism.

Waltz's structural realism reconceives how systems exert effects on the political units of which they are comprised. A properly specified structural reading of Thucydides yields a different picture of the Peloponnesian War, highlighting not that states conform to the Athenian thesis, as many scholars assume, but that states suffer costs to the extent they deviate from the situational expectations of Athenian realpolitik. This article illustrated this argument with two examples, but could be expanded to include others, including cases of political actors successfully conforming to the competitive pressures of anarchy despite traditionalist cultures, such as Sparta and Syracuse in Books VI and VII.

What is the value added of what some might regard as a minor theoretical exercise, and others an attempt to use a canonical text to validate or legitimize a particular modern theoretical perspective? Although much of The Peloponnesian War substantiates this narrow version of structural realism, there are also ways in which a more complex reading of Thucydides both critiques and builds on Waltz's realism. A highly nuanced work like The Peloponnesian War is well suited to examining the interaction of factors located at different levels of analyses and across the materialist/ideational divide, such as human nature, political culture, identity, and rhetoric. Recognizing the importance of these other influences, however, does not negate or alter the structural constraints and incentives elucidated by Waltzian realism.

This suggests ways of combining different theoretical traditions; for example, acknowledging both the autonomous influence of anarchic structures and norms and identity captures an important intersection between the constructivist and realist research programs ( Barkin 2003 ; Jackson 2004 ). Scholars need not battle over whose theoretical camp Thucydides belongs in; in the substantive events he presents and the political ideas he advances, Thucydides demonstrates that a structural approach need not exclude attention to variation in unit-level attributes. As Stacie Goddard and Daniel Nexon (2005) argue, cultural or alternative domestic phenomena “might be integrated into structural realism without sacrificing Waltz's insights into the implications of anarchical orders for those situated within them.”

Waltz himself anticipates this idea, and argues to the contrary that theories are not just collections of assorted variables, but conceptual frameworks that relate phenomena in coherent and logical ways. 38 This argument is similar to what other scholars, working in the philosophy of science tradition of Imre Lakatos, refer to as a regressive “problemshifts,” in which variables are added on an ad hoc basis to account for empirical anomalies generated by the original terms of a theory ( Elman and Elman 2003 ; Elman and Vasquez 2003 ).

Of the many things that concerned Thucydides about political life, however, we might say with some confidence that regressive problemshifts were probably not among them. In the context of a well-crafted story, propositions often portrayed as mutually exclusive become eminently compatible. Thucydides shows us the value of a richer approach that artfully incorporates a diverse range of influences into a compelling account, possibly a more important methodological lesson for realism and the wider discipline than his contested claim to have focused on “the facts themselves.”

Examples of this “cottage industry” include Garst (1989 ), Ahrensdorf (1997 ), Lebow (2001) , and Thomas (2005) .

All quotations are drawn from Thucydides , translated by Lattimore (1998).

Gregory Crane (1998) identifies four characteristics common to all realisms: a procedural, a paradigmatic, a scientific, and an ideological. For the purposes of this paper, I focus on the first and second. Gerald Mara also suggests a distinction within realism between “accuracy,” or factual veracity, and “precision,” or explanatory power, which closely corresponds to Crane's procedural and paradigmatic. Conversation with author, March 2005.

Interestingly, Crane's translation of 3.82 is that “words had to change their ordinary meaning,” suggesting that it was language itself, and not just specific words relating to the evaluation of behavior, that became subverted in Corcyra. The argument about Thucydides presenting himself as a “scientific realist” seems to hold under either translation, although somewhat better under Crane's.

Whether Thucydides actually conforms to this standard of factual accuracy is not at issue here, only the perception and subsequent appropriation of Thucydides as a “procedural realist.”

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Naïve Realism and Phenomenal Intentionality

Published: 06 October 2020
Volume 49 , pages 1127–1143, ( 2021 )

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Takuya Niikawa ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4078-4917 1 , 2

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This paper argues for the conjunctive thesis of naïve realism and phenomenal intentionalism about perceptual experiences. Naïve realism holds that the phenomenology of veridical perceptual experience is (at least in part) constituted by environmental objects that the subject perceives. Phenomenal intentionalism about perceptual experience states that perceptual experience has intentionality in virtue of its phenomenology. I first argue that naïve realism is not incompatible with phenomenal intentionalism. I then argue that phenomenal intentionalists can handle two objections to it by adopting naïve realism: the first objection is that phenomenal intentionalism cannot explain how a veridical perceptual experience is directed at a particular object rather than any other object of the same kind. The second objection is that phenomenal intentionalism cannot explain how a perceptual experience is directed at a type of external object rather than other types of objects without appealing to a resemblance relation between a perceptual experience and an external object, which is considered to be problematic.

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What’s so naïve about naïve realism?

Why intentionalism cannot explain phenomenal character, naïve realism and the relationality of phenomenal character.

For other theoretical motivations for naïve realism, see Campbell ( 2002 ), Johnston ( 2006 ), Raleigh ( 2011 ) and Logue ( 2012b ).

Ott states that “I shall mainly be concerned with phenomenal intentionality in veridical perceptual cases. […] I am interested in a very narrow version of PI [Phenomenal Intentionality], one designed to account only for such simple cases. I take no position on whether all intentional content is phenomenal or whether all of its other forms can be derived from the perceptual kind” (2016, 132). I share his interest.

Since my focus is on PIP, I restrict the scope of these claims to phenomenal perceptual intentionality.

Note that naïve realism does not conflict with Phenomenal Grounding. Naïve realism states that the phenomenology of veridical perceptual experience is in part constituted by environmental objects that the subject perceives. This implies that the phenomenology of veridical perceptual experience is grounded in the subject perceiving the environmental objects. Importantly, this does not conflict with the relevant phenomenal grounding claim that the intentionality of veridical perceptual experience is grounded in its phenomenology. What the conjunctive thesis of naïve realism and PIP must accept is the grounding order that the intentionality of veridical perceptual experience is grounded in its phenomenology, which is grounded in the subject perceiving environmental objects.

Opponents of naïve realism may criticize the understanding of neural states/activities as the enabling condition by pointing to two specific kinds of empirical findings: (1) when the same object is perceptually experienced by two subjects who differ in some internal conditions, their perceptual experiences differ phenomenologically (Block 2010 ) and (2) when two objects with different reflectance properties cause the same neural activations in brain areas responsible for colour perception (V4), the two objects are perceptually experienced as having the same colour (so-called metameric matching ). If naïve realism holds that (a) neural states/activities only serve to select what external items constitute the phenomenology of perceptual experience and that (b) the phenomenology of perceptual experience is entirely constituted by the selected external items, then naïve realism seems incompatible with the empirical findings in question. However, naïve realists can allow that neural states/activities can contribute to perceptual phenomenology more substantially than just serving the selecting role , while holding onto the naïve realist core idea that the phenomenology of veridical perceptual experience is in part constituted by external items (French 2018 ). Although I admit that the empirical data in science of perception might be better explained by the internalist theories accepting the narrowness principle as Pautz ( 2017 ) suggested, it is fair to say that naive realism is not incompatible with the empirical data.

One may cast doubt on the compatibility of naïve realism and PIP by focusing on non-veridical perceptual experiences such as illusion and hallucination. It seems undeniable that non-veridical perceptual experiences also have intentionality. If the adoption of naïve realism causes a problem for PIP in explaining the intentionality of non-veridical perceptual experiences, advocates of PIP should not adopt naïve realism. Note, however, that naïve realism does not indicate anything about the ontological status of non-veridical perceptual experiences. As Moran ( 2018 ) persuasively argues, naïve realists can coherently take any kind of view about the nature of non-veridical perceptual experiences. Given this, the adoption of naïve realism does not affect what account advocates of PIP can provide for the intentionality of non-veridical perceptual experiences. Although I leave fully open how the conjunctive thesis of naïve realism and PIP should explain the intentionality of hallucinatory experiences, I briefly discuss the intentionality of illusory experiences at the end of Section 3.2.

This is not to say that there is no other condition to be satisfied for a particular object to be the intentional object of a perception experience. For instance, one additional condition may be that a large number of singular perceptual judgments that can be formed based only on the perceptual experience are true of the particular object. When I say that a perceptual experience is appropriately caused by a particular object, I mean that such other conditions are also satisfied.

Perhaps, we can imagine an abnormal case in which two particular apples are causally related to a perceptual experience in which only one apple is phenomenally manifested. I do not discuss this kind of illusory cases because my focus is how PIP can explain singular intentionality of veridical cases.

For this point, see also Allen ( 2019 , 6).

One might claim that the question can be answered by saying that the phenomenology of the experience makes it such that it is accurate only when there is a red apple (rather than other types of objects) before me. In this case, however, we are asked why and how this is so; this question is not essentially different from the original one. Moreover, I think that this answer goes wrong direction in explanatory order. It seems to me that the fact that the experience is about a red apple rather than other types of objects explains (not being explained by) the fact that the experience is accurate only when there is a red apple (rather than other types of objects) before me.

Ott ( 2016 ) does not explicitly distinguish between singular intentionality and general intentionality. Since I have interpreted the resemblance thesis as aiming to explain the general intentionality of perceptual experience, the description of the resemblance thesis that I have presented slightly differs from Ott’s one. But the problem with the resemblance thesis that I will take does not depend on this difference.

Ott ( 2016 , 141–42) tries to explain the singular intentionality of perceptual experience by appealing to resemblance. His idea is that it is very unlikely that a single perceptual experience perfectly resembles two numerically distinct scenes in reality and therefore it can single out an actual scene as the only one which the experience perfectly resembles. This account does not deal with Masrour’s argument against PIP with respect to singular intentionality, because it relies on the contingent fact that a perceptual experience does not perfectly resemble two numerically distinct scenes in reality.

Note that this is not to claim that if the resemblance thesis is true, we can never know what type of environmental object a perceptual experience is directed at. My point is that if the resemblance thesis is true, it is not through perceptual and introspective observations that we can know an intentional fact, such as a perceptual experience being directed at a red apple rather than a green apple or a red car.

I do not claim that it is intuitive to think that we can fully specify the intentional object of perceptual experience by introspection. For example, I do not claim that we can introspectively specify the intentional object of perceptual experience to the extent of determining whether it is about a real red apple or a fake red apple. My point is rather that it is intuitive that we can specify the intentional object of perceptual experience by introspection to the extent of determining whether it is about a red apple, green apple or a red car .

Note that the naïve realist constitution thesis is more determinate than the claim that a perceptual experience is (at least in part) constituted by an environmental object that the subject perceives. This claim does not imply that we can introspectively know what type of environmental object the perceptual experience is constituted by, because it does not specify what aspect of the perceptual experience is constituted by the environmental object. For example, if it is not the phenomenology but the metaphysical nature that is not accessible by introspection, then we do not have introspective access to the external constituent. The naïve realist constitution thesis is more determinate in that it specifies what aspect of perceptual experience is constituted by an environmental object: the phenomenology . Because of this, it follows from the naïve realist constitution claim that we can introspectively know what type of environmental object the perceptual experience is constituted by.

Note that I do not claim that we can always know by introspection alone what particular object a veridical experience is directed at. Suppose that I see an object O 1 in an epistemically unsafe condition in which there are many objects qualitatively identical to O 1 around me. Suppose further that my friend erroneously tells me that what I see is not O 1 but one of other such objects. In this case, although the phenomenology of my perceptual experience is in part constituted by O 1 , it is controversial whether I can know by introspection alone that it is constituted by O 1 rather than other qualitatively identical objects. This is because the unsafe external epistemic condition and/or my friend’s testimony may serve as an epistemological defeater. My claim is weaker: we can introspectively know what type of object a veridical perceptual experience is directed at.

I appreciate the anonymous reviewer’s suggestion to address this objection.

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Acknowledgements

I would especially like to thank Katsunori Miyahara, Paweł Zięba, Yusuke Ogawa, Uriah Kriegel, Yasushi Ogusa and Preston Lennon for their detailed comments on this paper. I also thank the members of Paris Consciousness/Self-consciousness [PaCS] group for the fruitful discussions. I also thank the audience at the conference “PERSPECTIVES ON INTENTIONALITY” (2014, Norway) and the workshop “Phenomenal Intentionality Workshop with Angela Mendelovici” (2019, Germany) for their helpful questions and comments. I appreciate the anonymous reviewer for their critical comments on the original version, which were really helpful for improving this paper. I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number: 18 K00031).

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Niikawa, T. Naïve Realism and Phenomenal Intentionality. Philosophia 49 , 1127–1143 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-020-00273-8

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The Challenge of Praxeological Realism

“Like most of us in this room, I have never met Ludwig von Mises in person. I first encountered his ideas some 20 years after his passing. In what follows, I will first describe this encounter. And then I will zoom in on his book, Human Action , and explain why it embodies the research paradigm of praxeological realism and also what the challenges related to it are.”

Presented at the 2024 Human Action Conference on Saturday, 18 May 2024, at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama.

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This book is a philosophical study of mathematics, pursued by considering and relating two aspects of mathematical thinking and practice, especially in modern mathematics, which, having emerged around 1800, consolidated around 1900 and extends to our own time, while also tracing both aspects to earlier periods, beginning with the ancient Greek mathematics. The first aspect is conceptual, which characterizes mathematics as the invention of and working with concepts, rather than only by its logical nature. The second, Pythagorean, aspect is grounded, first, in the interplay of geometry and algebra in modern mathematics, and secondly, in the epistemologically most radical form of modern mathematics, designated in this study as radical Pythagorean mathematics. This form of mathematics is defined by the role of that which beyond the limits of thought in mathematical thinking, or in ancient Greek terms, used in the book’s title, an alogon in the logos of mathematics. The outcome of this investigation is a new philosophical and historical understanding of the nature of modern mathematics and mathematics in general. The book is addressed to mathematicians, mathematical physicists, and philosophers and historians of mathematics, and graduate students in these fields.

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Arkady Plotnitsky is a distinguished professor here at Purdue University, where he teaches in the Literature, Theory and Cultural Studies Program, and the Philosophy and Literature Program. He received his M.S. in Mathematics from Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) State University, and his PhD in Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania. He previously taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Duke University. His extensive publications on the philosophy of mathematics and physics, continental philosophy, and on the relationships among literature, philosophy, and science, include nine books, two hundred articles and, as editor/coeditor, nine volumes of essays and journal issues. He has given about one hundred invited plenary lectures and presented over three hundred papers at international conferences. His most recent books are The Principles of Quantum Theory, from Planck’s Quantum to the Higgs Boson: The Nature of Quantum Reality and the Spirit of Copenhagen (Springer,2016) and Reality Without Realism: Matter, Thought, and Technology in Quantum Physics (Springer, 2021).

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REAL-TIME MULTI-AGENT MOTION PLANNING FOR THE NARROW PASSAGE PROBLEM

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In this thesis, we focus on real-time multi-agent motion planning, with an emphasis on solving the challenging narrow passage problem using behavioral methods. The difficulty of this issue is exacerbated in real-time multi-agent applications by additional constraints imposed on trajectories due to dynamics, uncertain locations, and human-like behaviors. Failure to address the narrow passage problem could lead to collisions or deadlocks, where agents become trapped in a narrow gap. The novel multi-agent navigation methods that we will present include leveraging spatial information from the workspace, using computational geometric techniques to mitigate the narrow passage problem efficiently, and generating human-like trajectories in simulated environments. The approach of responding to the nearby environment is known as behavior navigation, which is the basis for many crowd simulation techniques. Our thesis devotes significant attention to the derivation, analysis, and implementation of new local and global navigation techniques. It explores efficient ways to leverage human-like behaviors that can generate smooth and effective trajectories, demonstrating how optimized implementation enables real-time simulations of tens to hundreds of agents on many-core processors. It also analyzes the macroscopic flows that result from these behavior planning methods, examining collision times and the sum length of agents' trajectories as key indicators of performance. The approach combines local navigation with global motion planning, and several important extensions to the simulation framework are developed. These include a mesoscale model for navigation that accounts for long-term planning around grouped obstacles and methods for generating a more human-like crowd in simulation while ensuring smooth trajectories for non-holonomic agents. These advancements enhance the simulation's realism and improve its ability to handle hundreds of agents with complex dynamical systems and movements in real-world scenarios. In this thesis, we also discusses methods that generate a map-adopted trail graph, allowing for greater flexibility and scalability than the grid-like trail commonly used in traditional global multi-agent motion planning. This approach incorporates more detailed and accurate information about the workspace, resulting in more effective and efficient multi-agent motion planning. It also allows for greater adaptability to changes in the environment, making it an ideal solution for real-world scenarios with dynamic obstacles and other unpredictable factors. Overall, this research offers important contributions to modeling real-world scenarios accurately, which requires crowds to navigate through narrow passages and interact with obstacles in a coordinated and efficient manner. By enabling realistic, human-like behavior and smooth trajectories, these methods enhance the simulation's usefulness in modeling and predicting crowd behavior in various settings.
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This ‘Russian Woman’ Loves China. Too Bad She’s a Deepfake.

A.I.-manipulated videos on Chinese sites use young, supposedly Russian women to promote China-Russia ties, stoke patriotism — and make money.

A grid of six images of the same woman, with a variety of hairstyles and backdrops, some looking more fake than others.

By Vivian Wang and Siyi Zhao

Vivian Wang reported from Beijing and Siyi Zhao from Seoul.

The woman declares, in Mandarin inflected with a slight accent, that Chinese men should marry “ us Russian women .” In other videos on the Chinese short video platform Douyin, she describes how much she loves Chinese food, and hawks salt and soap from her country. “Russian people don’t trick Chinese people,” she promises.

But her lip movements don’t quite match the audio of the videos, which were posted recently to an account using the name “Ladina.” That is because it is footage of Shadé Zahrai , an Australian career strategist with more than 1.7 million TikTok followers, that has been modified using artificial intelligence. Someone dubbed Ms. Zahrai’s video clips with a voice speaking Mandarin Chinese to make it seem that she was peddling Russian products.

Welcome to a flourishing genre on Chinese social media: A.I.-manipulated videos that use young, purportedly Russian, women to rally support for China-Russia ties, stoke patriotic fervor or make money — and sometimes all three at once.

It is unclear who is behind many of the videos, but most eventually direct viewers to a product link, suggesting that the primary aim is commercial. And the main target audience seems to be nationalist Chinese men.

The videos are often labeled with hash tags such as “Russian wife” and “Russian beauty.” The women featured describe how accomplished Chinese men are, or plead to be rescued by them from poverty or their own less idyllic country.

Another set of videos feature a blond woman, describing her gratitude for having landed in China.

“I really envy my Chinese friends. You’re born with the world’s most precious identity and most profound and charming language,” she says in a video posted to another platform, Xiaohongshu, which is similar to Instagram.

A different video shows the woman thanking the Chinese people for supporting Russia through its economic difficulty by buying Russian chocolates from her. “In the past year, the entire world is boycotting Russia, imposing all kinds of restrictions and difficulties on us. China is like a savior,” she says.

These videos looked much more natural, with the woman’s lips synced to the fluent Mandarin. But they are fake, too. They were retooled from YouTube videos posted by Olga Loiek , a college student whose real videos are about self-improvement and her gap year in Germany.

Why do we stop ourselves from chasing our dreams? Most of the time, fear is the answer.

Ms. Loiek doesn’t speak Chinese. And she would never praise Russia like that, she said in an interview. She is from Ukraine, and some of her relatives are still there.

The makers of these videos are trying to capitalize on a market born of China’s current moment in geopolitics, technology and public sentiment.

Relations between Russia and China have deepened significantly in recent years, with the countries’ leaders, Vladimir V. Putin and Xi Jinping, declaring a “no limits” partnership in the face of mounting hostility from the West. Mr. Putin visited Beijing last week, where Mr. Xi welcomed him with great fanfare.

The use of foreign faces to laud China also seeks to tap into a sense of national pride, or nationalism, among the Chinese audience. Nationalist content has become one of the surest drivers of internet traffic in China, in a censorship environment where more and more topics are off limits.

That nationalism — like nationalism around the world — has often included a strain of sexism, said Chenchen Zhang , a professor of international relations at Durham University in England.

“This representation of young white women in sexually objectified ways is a typical trope of gendered nationalism, or nationalistic sexism,” Professor Zhang wrote in an email. “Viewers can get both their nationalistic and masculine pride reaffirmed in consuming this content.”

In several of the videos featuring Ms. Zahrai’s manipulated likeness, the faked character calls her viewers “big brothers.” The persona also notes that Russia is not selling those products in Japan or South Korea, two countries with which China has fraught relations.

The Chinese government has often encouraged online nationalism, but there is no indication that it has anything to do with the deepfake videos (though some local governments have partnered with real Russian women to promote similar messages about China’s appeal). There is also a small economy of real Russian influencers, many of them young women, on Chinese social media.

Many of the video makers may simply be taking advantage of China’s embrace of shopping via livestreaming and short videos . As A.I. technology has become more advanced, some Chinese companies have already switched from real to virtual salespeople to save money.

Artificially generated videos are likely to become more and more common as a sales tactic, since A.I. technology has advanced so quickly and become so much more accessible to the general public, said Haibing Lu , a professor at Santa Clara University who studies A.I. governance.

Ms. Zahrai’s management company said in an email that the A.I. modifications were “poor quality,” and that they “would likely appear to be fake” even to casual viewers. Some of the account’s videos had only a few dozen views, though the one discussing marrying Russian women had 22,000.

It didn’t seem to matter. An automated counter that pops up in one of the account’s videos suggests that the brand of salt being pitched has already been bought 360,000 times across the platform.

When The New York Times reached out to the Douyin account with the videos of the manipulated Ms. Zahrai, the account holder confirmed in an audio message that he had made the videos. “You set up three things: audio, video and mouth. You can build any video you want,” he said, before unfriending a reporter.

The levels of sophistication vary. Some of the fake women appear entirely computer generated, move stiffly and look like glorified Sims . Some, like those featuring Ms. Loiek’s likeness, are very good.

“Even though I knew it wasn’t me, the realism was frightening,” said Ms. Loiek, who recently found out that more than 30 different social media accounts in China had co-opted her image. “When I decided to create my YouTube channel, I was aware of the dangers of deepfakes, but I believed it was primarily a concern for famous political and entertainment figures. Now I realize that anyone with video footage of themselves online can be affected.”

Ms. Loiek reported the accounts on Xiaohongshu and made a YouTube video about her experience. Eventually, most of the profiles using her likeness were shut down.

In recent weeks, the social media platforms have tightened scrutiny, removing A.I. videos or adding labels to some of them. China was the first country to enact regulations around generative A.I., and on paper, some of its policies are stricter than those in the West.

But countries worldwide are struggling with enforcing their rules. Detecting wrongdoing may be especially difficult in China, because of its closed internet environment, where many foreign social media outlets are banned.

Foreign influencers are unlikely to know their image has been used on Chinese social media and file a copyright complaint. And the Chinese platforms may not be drawing on overseas content, either, when checking for A.I. manipulation, said a 35-year-old man who ran two accounts featuring A.I.-generated Russian women. The man, who gave only his surname, Chen, said he earned about $1,000 a month from the accounts before he shut them down in March, fearing greater regulation.

But more are still proliferating. And Russia may be the hot topic now, but the practice will probably soon spread to whatever the next trend is, said Professor Lu at Santa Clara.

“The people behind this would manipulate any possible topic to attract people’s attention,” he said. “Show ‘how to go to top schools’ to parents; ‘how to become beautiful,’ to young ladies. I believe going forward, everyone will use A.I. technology to customize topics to make videos appealing to a certain audience.”

Vivian Wang is a China correspondent based in Beijing, where she writes about how the country’s global rise and ambitions are shaping the daily lives of its people. More about Vivian Wang

Siyi Zhao is a reporter and researcher who covers news in mainland China for The Times in Seoul. More about Siyi Zhao

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The basic idea of realism about a particular domain can be roughly expressed as a conjunction of two theses, an existence thesis and an inde-pendence thesis: firstly the kinds of thing distinctive of that domain exist, and secondly their existence and nature are objective and independent of us, of our perceptions, thoughts and language.
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Realism. Philosophic realism in general is defined by Phillips (1987, p. 205) as "the view that entities exist independently of being perceived, or independently of our theories about them.". Schwandt adds that "scientific realism is the view that theories refer to real features of the world. 'Reality' here refers to whatever it is in ...
Essays On Realism
Essays On Realism . by Georg Lukács. Edited by Rodney Livingstone. Paperback. $35.00. Paperback. ISBN: 9780262620420. Pub date: May 10, 1983. Publisher: The MIT Press. 256 pp., 6 x 9 in, MIT Press Bookstore Penguin Random House Amazon Barnes and Noble Bookshop.org Indiebound Indigo Books a Million. Hardcover.
Realism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy/Spring 2010 Edition)
Few have been convinced by either the metaphor thesis or the constitution thesis. Consider Generic Realism in the case of the world of everyday macroscopic objects and properties: (GR1) Tables, rocks, mountains, seas, and so on exist, and the fact that they exist and have properties such as mass, size, shape,colour, and so on, is (apart from ...
The Realism of Hans Morgenthau
For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Realism of Hans Morgenthau. by. Brian A. Keaney. A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Department of Government and International Affairs College of Arts and Sciences University of South Florida.
Scientific Realism Without Reality? What Happens When ...
Scientific realism is usually presented as if metaphysical realism (i.e. the thesis that there is a structured mind-independent external world) were one of its essential parts. This paper aims to examine how weak the metaphysical commitments endorsed by scientific realists could be. I will argue that scientific realism could be stated without accepting any form of metaphysical realism. Such a ...
Critical Realism: A Critical Evaluation
Critical realism represents a broad alliance of social theorists and researchers trying to develop a properly post-positivist social science. Critical realism situates itself as an alternative paradigm both to scientistic forms of positivism concerned with regularities, regression-based variables models, and the quest for law-like forms; and also to the strong interpretivist or postmodern turn ...
Thucydides and Modern Realism
This paper makes two main arguments about the relationship between Thucydides, modern realism, and the key conceptual ideas they introduce to situate and explain international politics. ... the question posed by realism—and to be asked of Thucydides—is not whether states behave according to the Athenian thesis or consistently observe the ...
Naïve Realism and Phenomenal Intentionality
This paper argues for the conjunctive thesis of naïve realism and phenomenal intentionalism about perceptual experiences. Naïve realism holds that the phenomenology of veridical perceptual experience is (at least in part) constituted by environmental objects that the subject perceives. Phenomenal intentionalism about perceptual experience states that perceptual experience has intentionality ...
Full article: Critical realism: an explanatory framework for small
Introduction. This paper explains how critical realism was operationalized in a small-scale study in the field of teacher education. Critical Realism (CR) provides a way of thinking about the world which draws on social theory to seek explanations for social phenomena, alongside analytical tools to support data collection and data analysis.
The Challenge of Praxeological Realism
In what follows, I will first describe this encounter. And then I will zoom in on his book, Human Action, and explain why it embodies the research paradigm of praxeological realism and also what the challenges related to it are.". Presented at the 2024 Human Action Conference on Saturday, 18 May 2024, at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama.
In Print: Logon and Alogon
He previously taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Duke University. His extensive publications on the philosophy of mathematics and physics, continental philosophy, and on the relationships among literature, philosophy, and science, include nine books, two hundred articles and, as editor/coeditor, nine volumes of essays and journal issues.
Dissertation or Thesis
These advancements enhance the simulation's realism and improve its ability to handle hundreds of agents with complex dynamical systems and movements in real-world scenarios. In this thesis, we also discusses methods that generate a map-adopted trail graph, allowing for greater flexibility and scalability than the grid-like trail commonly used ...
In China, Deepfakes of 'Russian' Women Point to 'Nationalistic Sexism
Relations between Russia and China have deepened significantly in recent years, with the countries' leaders, Vladimir V. Putin and Xi Jinping, declaring a "no limits" partnership in the face ...