An Appearance–Reality Distinction in an Unreal World

Analysis 82 (1):114-130 (2022)
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Abstract

Jan Westerhoff defends an account of thoroughgoing non-foundationalism that he calls “irrealism,” which is implicitly modeled on a Madhyamaka Buddhist view. In this paper, I begin by raising worries about the irrealist’s account of human cognition as taking place in a brain-based representational interface. Next, I pose first-order and higher-order challenges to how the irrealist—who defends a kind of global error theory—can sensibly accommodate an unlocalized appearance-reality distinction, both metaphysically and epistemologically. Finally, although Westerhoff insists that irrealism itself is not an ontological theory and that the irrealist’s rejection of absolutely general quantification precludes his commitment to any ultimately true theories, I propose strategies inspired by the Svātantrika commentarial tradition of Madhyamaka for how the irrealist might develop a lightweight account of unrestricted quantification that could be used to advance a lightweight ultimately true theory. This, I suggest, may allow the irrealist to (i) preserve a commitment to an unlocalized appearance-reality distinction, (ii) underwrite a distinction between ordinary veridical states and metaphysically accurate epistemic states, and (iii) provide an explanation for the massive error that he claims characterizes ordinary cognition.

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Allison Aitken
Columbia University

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References found in this work

Anarchy, State, and Utopia.Robert Nozick - 1974 - New York: Basic Books.
Knowledge and its limits.Timothy Williamson - 2000 - New York: Oxford University Press.
The Predictive Mind.Jakob Hohwy - 2013 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press UK.
Ontological anti-realism.David J. Chalmers - 2009 - In David Chalmers, David Manley & Ryan Wasserman (eds.), Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology. Oxford University Press.

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