3. The Cosmocentric Thesis (C l)
What are the claims o f these thesis, and how do they mesh with the taxonomy I have been using tlius far? DT is the claim that “participants in the discourse necessarily posit the existence o f distinctive items, believing and asserting things about them.”** Moreover, it is
necessarily knowable a prion by anyone who would count as understanding an assertion that
a description fads (i.e. the assertion is false) in the absence o f the items posited by the
description. Bringing DT into alignment with our taxonomy shows that its denial leads to expressivism or quasi-realism, Pettit also identifies reductionism as an opponent of DT.^ On tills point, our taxonomy is misleading in marking reductionism as desctiptivrit; at the
level o f the controversial discourse, the claim is that there are no distinct entities posited by
the discourse, because all the entities o f that discourse can be reduced to or identified with those posited by the reduction level. So there is a sense in which one might see DT as satisfied by reductionism, though not straightforwardly. At any rate the important
observation is that all three o f the serious contender views (cognitivist antirealism, RAR, and MAR) all incorporate DT. It is a necessary but not sufficient commitment for realism.
OT is the claim that “the objects posited exist and have their character fixed independendy o f the dispositions o f participants in the discourse to assert and believe things about tliem”.** This is a two-part claim and so can be opposed in two ways. Denying existence to the discourse’s posits delivers an error theory; by DT assertions are true when the right state of affairs obtains, and the error theorist accepts this thesis but denies that the right state ever obtains. Following the taxonomy from top to bottom, we are now left with cognitivist antkealism as the only non-realist position, and indeed what distinguishes this view from the realist views below it is the claim that while DT holds, the entities wliich aesthetic judgments posit are not independent o f our knowing. Here a potential confusion resides in the word ‘objectivity’. Pettit uses it to signal mind-independence, and this is not to be entwined with the use o f ‘objectivity’ to characterize judgments. The former has its roots in the notion of objecthood. The latter, recall, associates with judgments their improvability by the ^ving of reasons, and the idea that there are better and worse judgments. The judgment-related sense of objectivity has no necessary logical connection to the object sense used by Pettit and others.
Finally, Pettit’s CT, is an epistemological thesis and thus not always included among the core realist claims. CT holds that “error and ignorance are always possible with regard to the substantive propositions of the discourse. It is possible.. .that participants are wrong about all and every substantive claim in the discourse.”’ Implicit in this thesis is the allowance for the possibility that every participant is wrong about one, many, or even aU the substantive claims comprised by the discourse, and this is so under epistemic conditions ranging from the actual to the normal to the ideal. So the ‘always’ in the statement o f CT above should be taken in the strongest sense possible. As Pettit notes, it may seem redundant to assert CT as a realist thesis independent from DT and OT. It is usually taken to be the case that mkid- independence carries implicitly a commitment to CT. Pettit holds, however, that it is not inconsistent to claim DT and OT while denying CT. Such a view would involve, additionally
to the first two theses, that tlie error or ignorance o f the discourse’s posits is a priori
impossible at some limit. One such view, according to Pettit, is the ‘interpretationist’ idew that “the referents o f any [substantial] discourse.. .are tliose entities which it most flattering to the discourse to take as its referents: those entities such that participants can be held to say more true tilings about them than anything else.”® This view resides in the logical space
4.0: Realism Revisited
formed by affirrning only the first two realist theses, but it is difficult to see just what the
corresponding theory of aesthetic judgment would be. And outside aesthetics, what might such a discourse look like? One possibility might be a highly ciccumscribed discourse of first-personal avowals; statements o f one’s own intentions, beliefs, and desires. Given a certain understanding o f these mental entities, it might be plausible to consider a discourse about them to obey DT and OT but not CT. But this case seems to be a special one, and the only one where such a combination o f tlieses is possible. This combination only works for this discourse because of the particular subject matter o f the discourse, and the logical relation holding between that discourse and its referents. In any other discourse, I maintain that CT follows from the joint affirmation of DT and OT, and is part and parcel o f an
aesthetics-appropriate realism a la Pettit. Realism, then, on his account, represents a
commitment to the conjunction o f DT, OT, and CT; they are (jointly) necessary (and only jointly) sufficient for any position identified as a realist one.
At this point a distinction between trivial and non trivial senses o f ‘miad-dependence’ should be noted. Trivial examples include self-conscious avowals, such as “I think that the vase is delicate”, third-person assessments o f belief, such as “He thinks that the vase is delicate”, or statements about minds or mentality, as in, “She has a beautiful mind.” I take it to be unnecessary to qualify the notion o f mind-dependence so as to exclude these trivial cases. The interesting sense (and the one I intend by the unqualified term) is one in which apart from the obvious trivial cases, the state o f affaks posited by an utterance is in a significant sense constituted by something like the beliefs attendant to the utterance. Roughly, it is the thought that thoughts o f ‘x’ play an extension-detertoining role for ‘x’. A discourse in which thoughts played such a role would violate Pettit’s CT. The more fraught question is whether Modest Aesthetic Realism, which takes concepts to be response-
dependent, employs a distinct notion o f mind-dependence. This question anticipates a central argument o f this chapter; much more is needed before that question can be properly addressed.
Wright’s characterization o f realism is given in very different terms than Pettit’s, though a common core can be identified. The distinction between antkealism and realism has historically been confiised with the distinction between non-cognitivism and cognitivism.
The latter contrast is between (cognitivist) theories that hold sentences in a discourse to be proper assertions and to have truth-values, and (non-cognitivist) ones that deny either or both o f these things. But non-cognitivist theory does not exhaust the logical space of antkealism. An antkealist can maintain that a discourse is genuinely assertoric, and that the assertions can have truth-values. The conception o f truthful assertions as representing the facts is a platitudinous one, and so one tliat makes no metaphysical commitments either way in the debate between realists and antkealists. To state the platitude, even in metaphysical terms such as ‘judgments fitting the facts’ or ‘corresponding to reality’ does not yet give a substantial, coiumittkig, content. “Antkealism”, says Wright, “is now properly identified with tlie view tiiat, with respect to a particular region o f assertoric discourse, nothing further can be done to substantiate the representative aspect o f the notion o f truth beyond what is accomplished by the platitudinous connections with normativity. Antkealism thus becomes the natural, initial position in any debate.”® The push to realism comes with the satisfaction o f criteria indicating tiiat the antireahst conception is too thin a metaphysics for the
explication o f our discourse-related practices.
Wright develops four ‘constraints’ such that each is “a sufficient condition for the propriet)’^ of a move away from [antkealism].”*® In other words, if the constraint is talcen to hold for some discourse, the need for a realist account becomes evident. These constraints, then, characterized as they are, fit less neatly into the taxonomy o f Figure 1; some o f them cut across it. A look at Wright’s constraints will prove useful, however, particularly as one of them serves to mark out Modest Aesthetic Realism firom a close but antkealist relative, Wright’s constraints are (possibly in descending order o f decisiveness);
1. Evidence-transcendence (ET)