Victoria S. Harrison’s theory of internal pluralism approaches religious beliefs in terms of conceptual schemes. To her, this approach has the advantage of preserving core pluralist intuitions without being challenged by the usual difficulties. My claim is that this is not the case. After providing a succinct presentation of internal pluralism, I show that the critique of traditional pluralist views such as Hick’s may also be addressed to Harrison. There are two main reasons in support of my claim. Firstly, a (...) believer’s common understanding of religious experiences conflicts with the way in which internal pluralism understands religious belief. Such conflict implies that if internal pluralism were a sound theory, most religious beliefs would turn out to be false, and, contrary to Harrison’s intention, they would be rendered cognitively irrelevant. Secondly, internal pluralism excludes the possibility of religious disagreements. By applying to religions an epistemological approach based on conceptual schemes, doxastic dissent is actually dismantled at the cost of developing an entirely solipsistic reading of religious beliefs. In the final section of my paper, I will show that such unattractive features are consequences of the notion of conceptual scheme. (shrink)

This paper compares Kant's transcendental idealism with three main groups of contemporary anti-realism, associated with Wittgenstein, Putnam, and Dummett, respectively. The kind of anti-realism associated with Wittgenstein has it that there is no deep sense in which our concepts are answerable to reality. Associated with Putnam is the rejection of four main ideas: theory-independent reality, the idea of a uniquely true theory, a correspondence theory of truth, and bivalence. While there are superficial similarities between both views and Kant's, I find (...) more significant differences. Dummettian anti-realism, too, clearly differs from Kant's position: Kant believes in verification-transcendent reality, and transcendental idealism is not a theory of meaning or truth. However, I argue that part of the Dummettian position is extremely useful for understanding part of Kant's position - his idealism about the appearances of things. I argue that Kant's idealism about appearances can be expressed as the rejection of experience-transcendent reality with respect to appearances. (shrink)

By considering the semantic footings of the so-called antinomies of pure reason, this article contributes to the debate about whether Kant was committed to semantic realism or anti-realism. That is, whether verification-transcendent judgements are truth-apt (realism) or not (anti-realism). Against the (empiricist) semantic principle that Strawson, and others, have ascribed to Kant as the “principle of significance,” the bedrock of my article is what I call Kant’s Real Principle of Significance: an extension-based and normative principle stating that a judgement can (...) have no “significance” or “objective validity” (truth-value) without a universally recognizable norm for verifying it. This principle entails semantic anti-realism. I argue that we can extract the principle from the antinomy chapter of KrV, since in there Kant concludes that judgements of the form “the world as such is x” are without “significance” (lack a truth-value) in virtue of being unverifiable as a matter of principle. I propose that Kant’s reference to some of the antinomical judgements as “false” is not incompatible with this anti-realist reading because he operates with two distinct world-concepts: an illegitimate transcendental realist one and a legitimate transcendental idealist one. In contrast to most anti-realist Kant-interpretations, it is furthermore argued that any satisfactory anti-realist construal of Kant’s view must be compatible with his assertion that the thesis in the third antinomy about freedom “can be true.” That requires a thicker conception of “significance” or “objective validity” than what is often ascribed to Kant, which is encapsulated by the Real Principle of Significance. (shrink)

Realism takes many forms. The aim of this paper is to show that the “Critique of pure Reason” is the founding document of realism and that to the present-day Kant’s discussion of realism has shaped the theoretical landscape of the debates over realism. Kant not only invents the now common philosophical term ‘realism’. He also lays out the theoretical topography of the forms of realism that still frames our understanding of philosophical questions concerning reality. The paper explores this by analysis (...) of Kant’s methodological procedure to distinguish between empirical and transcendental realism. This methodological procedure is still of great help in contemporary philosophy, although it has its limits. (shrink)

This essay argues that the key to understanding Kant's transcendental idealism is to understand the transcendental realism with which he contrasts it. It maintains that the latter is not to be identified with a particular metaphysical thesis, but with the assumption that the proper objects of human cognitions are “objects in general” or “as such,” that is, objects considered simply qua objects of some understanding. Since this appears to conflict with Kant's own characterization of transcendental realism as the view that (...) (mistakenly) regards appearances as if they were things in themselves, the essay explicates the connection between the concepts of an object (or thing) considered as such and a thing considered as it is in itself. In light of this, it maintains that Kant's transcendental idealism is compatible with a robust empirical realism and that many of its critics are tacitly committed to a misguided transcendental realism. (shrink)