This essay offers some fairly extensive objections to the critique of Bhaskar’s use of transcendental arguments found in chapter four of Tuukka Kaidesoja’s Naturalizing Critical Realist Social Ontology. The essay has three sections that correspond to three sets of objections, each of which centres around a certain topic in Kaidesoja’s critique. The first concerns Kaidesoja’s appeal to the connection between transcendental arguments and Kant’s transcendental idealism to criticize Bhaskar. The second concerns Kaidesoja’s problematization of a posteriori premises in Bhaskar’s transcendental (...) arguments. The third concerns Kaidesoja’s rejection of the prospect of ‘naturalized transcendental arguments’ and the non-transcendental ‘naturalistic arguments’ he proposes as an alternative. The overall aim of this essay is not just to defend Bhaskar’s naturalized transcendentalism against Kaidesoja’s metaphilosophical naturalism but also to help counter the association of transcendental philosophy with anti-naturalistic apriorism, foundationalism, idealism, and infalliblism frequently voiced by antitranscendental philosophers. (shrink)

The problem of justifying induction has vexed philosophers for centuries. It has been entangled with issues concerning logic and probability and the philosophy of science. This article proposes a new approach to untangling these issues and resolving the overall problem. This new approach is by way of the perspective of realist ontology. Induction should not be seen as a debased form of logic and the search for inflexible rules for justifying particular sorts of inductive inference should be abandoned. Rather, induction (...) can be justified pragmatically as a general practice because reality possesses ordered patterns. Induction, being dependent on repetition, can sometimes identify aspects of those patterns simply because the instances of repetition really do occur. Thus, confidence in conclusions based on inductive inferences is not properly to be derived from unchanging logical rules governing when and where inductive inferences may be successfully applied, but from the involvement of such inferences with a wider, deeper process in which not only deductive inferences and other inductive inferences are involved, but also a set of relations to broader bodies of relevant knowledge. That is, unlike particular deductive inferences, inductive inferences may not be engaged in isolation from all other information about the world and completely in the abstract. Induction is always connected with a process of retroduction. (shrink)

In the following essay I set out the core argument expounded by Nicholas Rescher in regard of the link between reality and appearance, illustrating this argument based on chapter 6 of his Reality and its Appearance. Rescher’s argument overlaps with critical realist concerns based on his approach to metaphysical realism. I make the point that the argument exhibits the virtue of concision, but, as a result, suffers from under-elaboration in important areas; most particularly, an explicit engagement with standard philosophical problems (...) of appearance, such as Gettier, and, more generally, the fundamental issue of how appearance may or may not change in response to changes in the human condition. (shrink)

In the following essay I set out the substantive content of Dustin McWherter's recent book The Problem of Critical Ontology, and I then consider the significance of this work as a form of constructive critique of Bhaskar in relation to Kant. This allows us to then make some general comments on the way constructive critique can be read in different ways, indicating different forms of ultimately reconcilable necessity and sufficiency in different domains of argument. In so doing, I also consider (...) some problems of epistemology and the issue of whether partial ignorance is acceptable. (shrink)