XII—Fundamentalism vs. the Patchwork of Laws

Abstract

For realism. A number of years ago I wrote How the Laws of Physics Lie. That book was generally perceived to be an attack on realism. Nowadays I think that I was deluded about the enemy: it is not realism but fundamen-talism that we need to combat. My advocacy of realism-local realism about a variety of different kinds of knowledge in a variety of different domains across a range of highly differentiated situations-is Kantian in structure. Kant frequently used what should be a puzzling argument form to establish quite abstruse philosophical positions (0): We have X-perceptual knowledge, freedom of the will, whatever. But without 0 (the transcendental unity of apperception, or the kingdom of ends) X would be impossible, or inconceivable. Hence 0. The objectivity of local knowledge is my 0; X is the possibility of planning, prediction, manipulation, control, and policy setting. Unless our claims about the expected consequences of our actions are reliable, our plans are for nought. Hence knowledge is possible. What might be found puzzling about the Kantian argument form are the X's from which it starts. These are generally facts that appear in the clean and orderly world of pure reason as refugees with neither proper papers nor proper introductions, of suspect worth and suspicious origin. The facts that I take to ground objectivity are similarly alien in the clear, well-lighted streets of reason, where properties have exact boundaries, rules are unam-biguous, and behaviour is precisely ordained. I know that I can get an oak-tree from an acorn, but not from a pine-cone; that nurturing will make my child more secure; that feeding the hungry and housing the homeless will make for less misery; and that giving more smear tests will lessen the incidence of vaginal cancer. Getting closer to physics, which is ultimately