This paper offers a pragmatist interpretation of Ian Hacking’s version of entity realism, and shows that such an interpretation enables the view to withstand a number of objections. Specifically, the paper shows Hacking’s rejection of a representationalist epistemology, which realist critics unjustifiably attribute to him, and shows his endorsement of a Deweyan pragmatist epistemology instead. If the interpretation is correct, the objections (a) that entity manipulation is theory-laden, (b) that the concept of home truths cannot do the work Hacking envisioned, (...) (c) that entity realism is a form of inference to the best explanation (IBE), (d) that some real entities aren’t manipulable, and (e) that some non-real entities are manipulable, lose much of their force. Objections (a), (b), and (c) rest on a metaepistemological misunderstanding, while objections (d) and (e) are addressed with (pragmatist) clarifications. This paper also offers a novel pragmatist argument for entity realism: the argument from technology. The argument from technology maintains that the reality of the entities that constitute our technologies is a precondition for those technologies’ meaningful use. In this case, entity realism remains a more viable perspective on science than is commonly acknowledged. (shrink)

Brandom, in his recent Spirit of Trust, develops a novel reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit as a theory of objective idealism. In this paper, I aim to defend this interesting blend of concept realism and idealism against some potential objections by revising Brandom’s account of conceptuality based on Hegel’s logical concept of life as constitutive of objective determinations. In the first section, I briefly reconstruct the main tenets of Brandom’s objective idealism and recount its achievements. In the second section, (...) I point out some major potential issues. First, Brandom’s commitment to a semantic holism in the context of scientific laws is likely to have reductionist or scientifically untenable implications. Second, Brandom seems to ignore Hegel’s own definition of objective idealism based on the concept of life – the culmination of his theory of conceptuality in his logic. I claim that Hegel not only has a strong emergentist commitment to the concept of life, but also argues that life is the ground of logical determinations. The last section suggests that a revision of Brandom’s framework based on a constitutive category of life can solve the problems outlined in section two. (shrink)