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Full Idea
External realists have three principles: Independence - the world is objects that are independent of mind, language and theory; Correspondence - truth involves some correspondence of thoughts and things; Cartesian - an ideal theory might be false.
Gist of Idea
Realists believe in independent objects, correspondence, and fallibility of all theories
Source
Tim Button (The Limits of Reason [2013], 01.1-3)
Book Ref
Button,Tim: 'The Limits of Realism' [OUP 2013], p.8
A Reaction
[compressed; he cites Descartes's Demon for the third] Button is setting these up as targets. I subscribe to all three, in some form or other. Of course, as a theory approaches the success implying it is 'ideal', it becomes highly likely to be accurate.
Related Idea
Idea 18695 An ideal theory can't be wholly false, because its consistency implies a true model [Button]
| 18692 | Realists believe in independent objects, correspondence, and fallibility of all theories [Button] |
| 18693 | Indeterminacy arguments say if a theory can be made true, it has multiple versions [Button] |
| 18694 | Permutation Theorem: any theory with a decent model has lots of models [Button] |
| 18695 | An ideal theory can't be wholly false, because its consistency implies a true model [Button] |
| 18696 | The vagueness of truthmaker claims makes it easier to run anti-realist arguments [Button] |
| 18697 | A sentence's truth conditions are all the situations where it would be true [Button] |
| 18698 | Predictions give the 'content' of theories, which can then be 'equivalent' or 'adequate' [Button] |
| 18700 | Cartesian scepticism doubts what is true; Kantian scepticism doubts that it is sayable [Button] |
| 18701 | The coherence theory says truth is coherence of thoughts, and not about objects [Button] |