Cognitivism and Realism

Submitted by Al on Thu, 09/10/2008 - 08:28.

Can anyone help me with a fairly simple question: What's the relationship between cognitivism and realism?

I understand cognitivism to be the view that the attitudes under discussion (moral, aesthetic, scientific, whatever) are beliefs. We might think of them as representations of the world.

Realism is obviously a messy term, but the key sense is easily enough understood: the truths/facts under discussion (again, moral, aesthetic, scientific, whatever) are real facts, and so independently of what anyone thinks about them.

I can't help but feel it should be easy to state the relationship between these two, but I'm struggling.

At first glance I want to say that agents hold cognitive attitudes about something only if they are realists. But this is obviously wrong, since agents might hold cognitive attitudes without having given any thought to issues of realism at all.

Another suggestion is that agents should hold cognitive attitudes when they are realists. But that claim is really slippery, since it's not clear what sense of "should" is in play here. An epistemic one? And even if we can sort that out, it seems that the relationship between these two is more intimate than that. Mere one-way normative implication doesn't seem to capture just how it is that it seems that these two views should be put together.

(Matters seem worse once we introduce views like fictionalism.)

I want to say that these views are counterparts of one-another, both parts of some larger picture of how some domain works. But I don't see how to fill out that thought in any manner that makes sense. Any suggestions? As I say, I can't help but feel that I'm missing some obvious answer to this.

That's a tough one. Wouldn't

Submitted by Brandon (not verified) on Thu, 09/10/2008 - 14:43.

That's a tough one. Wouldn't error theorists be cognitivists who aren't realists?

I'm inclined to think that the link is real but negative -- i.e., if you're a noncognitivist you must be an anti-realist. At least, I can't think of any coherent way to salvage realism on a noncognitivist position. If that's so then realism is a sufficient condition for cognitivism and cognitivism is a necessary condition for realism. But I don't know if there's any better way to think it through.

Thanks for the comments

Submitted by Al on Mon, 13/10/2008 - 08:24.

Thanks for the comments (sorry for the slow reply),

I'm still inclined to think that there's some stronger link than the conditional that if you're a realist you are a cognitivist. If, in your practical reasoning, you treat normativity as part of the furniture of the world, that seems enough to make you a cognitivist. But that already seems to be a kind of realism. Maybe we could say that the grounds for believing one are the very same grounds that lend credence to the other?

You're both right that error-theorists and constructivists appear to be counter-examples to any strong thesis about an intimate relation between the two. But error-theorists are an odd case, since they think that we shouldn't be cognitivists (that is, they think that believing normative truths is a mistake). I'm also inclined to think that constructivism is an odd case, simply because I think it's incoherent, but I won't pursue that here.

Alex