Sartwell back in the discussion

Over at EYE OF THE STORM, Crispin Sartwell makes the right point against people who think realism isn’t that big of a deal: “you have a real world out there, but does it do any work?”

First commenter regirock is sincere, but misses the point with this bit:

“‘logical positivism builds on british empiricism and says that the only actual access to reality comes via sense data, or images in the head.’

I fail to see how this is at odds with realism. There’s a clear distinction between the existence of objects and our capability to perceive them.

A blind man groping an elephant in a room is constructing the image of an elephant in his mind but he’s still fondling a real elephant. In fact the reality of the elephant is necessary for there to be sense data for it.”

This misses the point at least as far as OOO is concerned, because we too agree that we are in the same position as the proverbial blind man here.

The new twist in OOO lies elsewhere. Namely, the relation between the blind man and the elephant is nothing ontologically special. It is not a privileged rift between perceiver and perceived, but rather one instance of relationality in general. The relation between elephant and floor or between one floor board and another is of exactly the same kind as that between the blind man and the elephant.

I don’t know Sartwell well enough yet to know everything about his own version of realism. But I do know that on the OOO front, regirock is attacking a correspondence theory of truth, which does not remotely resemble anything I have ever defended.