A scheme-interpretationist and actionistic scientific realism
pp. 257-276
in: Evandro Agazzi (ed), Varieties of scientific realism, Berlin, Springer, 2017Abstract
Any "grasping" of world factors or "the world is necessarily not only relative to presupposed interpretational perspectives, but only possible from within such a perspective. Thus, we have only the possibility of attending to or grasping states relative to interpretive perspectives. That means any actions and recognitions whatsoever are dependent on methodological schematizations and perspectives previously taken over or methodologically implied. All this also relates to the interpretative interconnection of action, action-orientation and formation, cognition and recognition, interpretation in representing, depicting or cognitional modeling or even abstract modeling—not to speak of active interventions, e.g., in experiments or everyday agency. Some of these schemata are primary interpretations or "Urinterpretationen" (original hereditary interpretation schemata) which are biologically, even possibly genetically fixed; others are variable as regarding the different levels and types of interpretation. Important however is to distinguish between what is accepted as ontologically basic and what is only methodological-epistemological. This is all the more decisive for the problems of realism—or different realisms, i.e., for the conception of reality and what is called "real" (be it "in itself" and independent of humans or be it "real" in a secondary, e.g., socio-cultural or even virtual, sense). Any direct recognitional "grasping" whatsoever is also interpretational. "Reality in itself" is then only indirectly recognized in the sense of methodologically "entangled" systems potentials.