response to Levi

from Levi’s most recent post:

“The naive realist, as I understand it, believes that the objects of our experience exist in-themselves exactly as we experience them, independent of us… With the possible exception of Graham Harman, and then only in a highly qualified sense, I know of no speculative realist that holds this position.”

Here Levi shot the wrong guy– this isn’t my position. My position is that objects exist independently of us, not that they exist exactly as we experience them. In fact, this is precisely what is rendered impossible by my position.

In fact, the position Levi describes as “naive realism” would be a more accurate description of scientific naturalism, which holds that in principle we can correctly identify the nature of real things that exist, by learning all of the properties that belong to them (though most naturalists would probably admit that in practice it will always remain difficult or impossible to know all of the properties of real things).

For my position, in contrast with this sort of realism, it is utterly impossible in principle to translate the real things into some perfectly knowable form. Not just because our concepts and instruments aren’t ever going to be good enough, but because you cannot possibly replace a real thing by any model of it. This is why, for me, knowledge always remains oblique, and why aesthetics looms so large for me even in my interpretation of what science does. The idea of things as bundles of properties is a far better fit for naive realism than my own position is.

That said, I don’t mind the word “naive”, and would like to rehabilitate it. Too much damage has been done to the human intellect by the requirement that we constantly glance suspiciously at everything from an aloof critical distance– now the basic personality structure of any self-respecting mainstream intellectual.

However, what Levi defines as “naive realism” is not my position. When, Levi, did I ever say that things have flavor apart from our tasting of them? Never.

In fact, the distinction between primary and secondary qualities is built into the very heart of my position. I simply deny that primary qualities = those pertaining to physical matter, and secondary qualities = those added by minds.