Pragmatic realism: towards a reconciliation of enactivism and realism.
Catherine Legg, André Sant'anna
Phenomenology and the cognitive sciences January 1, 2025 Peer reviewed DOI: 10.1007/s11097-024-09959-w via PubMed
Summary
Enactivism's claim that mind and life are continuous suggests that organisms construct their own worlds, which conflicts with scientific realism's assumption that multiple subjects share one world. A previous attempt to resolve this tension by grounding realism in what subjects can manipulate fails to guarantee a shared world. Charles Peirce's pragmatism offers a better solution by distinguishing existence from reality and describing cognition as inquiry. This yields an inquiry-based enactivist realism that supports investigating non-human animal cognition and upholds a single truth across species.
Study at a glance
| Design | theoretical or philosophical paper |
|---|---|
| Key finding | Peirce's pragmatism resolves the tension between enactivism and realism by distinguishing existence from reality and grounding realism in inquiry, yielding a shared world across species. |
Abstract
This paper addresses some apparent philosophical tensions between realism and enactivism by means of Charles Peirce's pragmatism. Enactivism's Mind-Life Continuity thesis has been taken to commit it to some form of anti-realist 'world-construction' which has been considered controversial. Accordingly, a new realist enactivism is proposed by Zahidi (Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 13(3), 461-475, 2014), drawing on Ian Hacking's 'entity realism', which places subjects in worlds comprised of the things that they can successfully manipulate. We review this attempt, and argue that whilst Zahidi rightly urges enactivists towards 'internal realism', he cannot sustain a non-negotiable aspect of realism that is crucial for scientific progress - the claim that multiple subjects inhabit the same world. We explore Peirce's pragmatism as an alternative solution, foregrounding his distinction between existence and reality, and his inquiry-based account of cognition. These theoretical innovations, we argue, fruitfully generalize Zahidi's manipulation-based enactivist realism to a richer, inquiry-based enactivist realism. We explore how this realism's pan-species monism about truth encourages and supports the investigation of non-human animal cognition, and conclude by considering some implications of our discussion for long-standing realism debates within pragmatism.