Why the World Does Not Exist by Markus Gabriel

Author:Markus Gabriel [Gabriel, Markus]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780745687568
Amazon: 0745687563
Publisher: Polity
Published: 2015-06-28T22:00:00+00:00

Subjective Truths

Constructivism is absurd, though it does not wear its absurdity on its sleeve, which is why it is still so widespread among both natural and social scientists. We have become accustomed to the notion that everything around us ought to be understood as a hidden cultural construction. At best, the natural sciences might still describe things as they are, but even they have to tarry with The Hidden Reality, as the title of Brian Greene’s most recent book suggests.50 This certainly places the so-called humanities in a difficult position. For if they have to do only with cultural constructs, the difference between true and false disappears, and the interpretation of a poem or a historical matter of fact also turns into some kind of hallucination. The motto of the happy constructivist is as follows: to each his own Faust or his own November revolution! Everything becomes merely a question of perception.

In Writing the Book of the World, which we have already mentioned, Ted Sider suggested a rather accurate diagnosis, which at one go makes new realism reconcilable with constructivism. To this end we can modify Sider’s favorite example somewhat. Let us begin with an extremely simplified world that consists of two precisely differentiated halves, of which one is black and the other white.

In this world, which I call “the Sider world” (see figure 6), only a few facts obtain: the fact that two halves exist, one of which is black and the other white, and the fact of their respective magnitudes. Now Sider describes expressions which structurally correspond to facts of the world as “carving nature at its joints.” Let’s look, for example, at the statements

In the Sider world two halves exist

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