A Comment on Andrew C. Papanicolaou’s “BEYOND EDDINGTON’S ARGUMENT”: Pragmatism in Scientific Knowledge and Perception

摘要

I agree with Andrew C. Papanicolaou’s claim that human beings’ cognitive ability can reach to the real world, but don’t agree with his claim that the order of this world is akin to our thought. In this commentary paper, I will first defend a recent pragmatic scientific realism called as “entity realism” or “referential realism” which affirms that we are able to reach the real world not by inference but by technological, engineering settings. In the second half of this paper, I will also affirm that our perceptual ability directly reaches the reality too, in referring to the ecological psychology of James J. Gibson.