Reality and Representation

This book defends realism from a naturalistic perspective. Criticizing the view of philosophers such as Hilary Putnam, Michael Dummett and Donald Davidson, the author argues that representation is a natural, biological phenomenon, which needs to be analyzed in teleological terms, and he shows that such an analysis implies reality and human judgment are conceptually quite independent of each other. Papineau explains how it is possible for human beliefs to be justified as representations of reality. He then argues that humans can avoid error, and justify their beliefs, by taking practical steps to ensure that their various perceptual and inferential habits are reliable for truth. The work is primarily concerned with judgments about the natural world, but it also attends to the problems of moral, mathematical and logical truth, and offers special non-realist theories of these kinds of knowledge. It also contains discussion of linguistic meaning, perception, the nature of mental states, induction and the relevance of history of science to epistemology.