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Full Idea
Despair over metaphysics will not change until it has shaken off the incubus of a perverted epistemology, which has left thought in a hopeless tangle - until common-sense critical realism is made the starting point for investigating reality.
Gist of Idea
Metaphysics is hopeless with its present epistemology; common-sense realism is needed
Source
Stephen S. Colvin (The Common-Sense View of Reality [1902], p.144)
Book Ref
-: 'Philosophical Review' [-], p.144
A Reaction
It seems to me that this is what has happened to analytic metaphysics since Kripke. Careful discussions about the nature of an object, or a category, or a property, are relying on unquestioned robust realism. Quite right too.
Related Idea
Idea 20727 Common-sense realism rests on our interests and practical life [Colvin]
20726 | We can only distinguish self from non-self if there is an inflexible external reality [Colvin] |
20727 | Common-sense realism rests on our interests and practical life [Colvin] |
20728 | Metaphysics is hopeless with its present epistemology; common-sense realism is needed [Colvin] |
20729 | Arguments that objects are unknowable or non-existent assume the knower's existence [Colvin] |
20730 | If objects are doubted because their appearances change, that presupposes one object [Colvin] |
20731 | The idea that everything is relations is contradictory; relations are part of the concept of things [Colvin] |