a slight disagreement

Someone sent me the link to an Urbanomic page that contains this statement:

“Centred around the approaches of philosophers Quentin Meillassoux (Paris), Ray Brassier (American University in Beirut), Iain Hamilton Grant (Bristol UWE) and Graham Harman (American University in Cairo), and with the additional tangential influence of Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani, Speculative Realism refuses to interrogate reality through human (linguistic, cultural or political) mediations of it, instead drawing upon objective discourses such as mathematics, geology, astrophysics and chemistry to explore the possibility of conceiving of a reality indifferent to humans – a universe that exists before, after, and despite its manifestation in human experience.”

This part is certainly one of SR’s main concerns: “a universe that exists before, after, and despite its manifestation in human experience.”

But the preceding part is simply not a good definition of the movement: “Speculative Realism refuses to interrogate reality through human (linguistic, cultural or political) mediations of it, instead drawing upon objective discourses such as mathematics, geology, astrophysics and chemistry…”

This seems to be said in good faith, but it’s really a definition of scientism, not of Speculative Realism more generally.

Speculative Realism was always a very broad grouping of thinkers, probably best defined as the enterprise of breaking out of the correlational circle of human and world. It was never the case that there was agreement within the group that certain fields of human knowledge (the hard sciences) break out of the circle and others (the humanities) remain trapped within it. That would be an oversimplification not only of the diverse views of the Speculative Realists on this question, but also of the status of the sciences and humanities themselves. For it is by no means clear that the average professional physicist has more contact with the real than did Paul Cézanne, Emily Dickinson, or Marshall McLuhan.

In The Quadruple Object I call this “The Taxonomic Fallacy”: the idea that any basic ontological distinction (e.g., the real and the for-us) must be embodied in a distinction between two different kinds of entities (e.g., the sciences and the humanities).

The point is worth mentioning because one still occasionally hears critics of SR from within the humanities who claim that SR is just doing naive realist philosophy of science, and sentences like the one I criticized tend to bolster that impression.