Realism jottings

Realism may be structural/ontological but it is confounded by the psychological. To put it in Platonic terms; the ideas are there but the refractive medium of the mind creates adumbration which needs the maieutic work to bring clarity. But is it right to say that the bridge between the first and second orders is broken down if indeed it ever existed? Are contingency, necessity, probability, identity, non-contradiction pontoons to the ‘other side’? To add ‘as such’ to those topics may be deemed pleonastic but it’s a tic that comes on under pressure from materialism.

Was Hume really a metaphysican looking for first order justification of induction and causality amongst the debris of the second order? Not to be had Davey lad. Ay!

The Vedanta people with their valid means of knowledge (pramanas) take perceptual realism as the default. Doubt arises as the result of new evidence and is not a sceptical position. The coin that we spotted turned out to be silver foil when we picked it up. There are no red barns to hide in, as it were.

Here’s the thing: is this supposed breach between the metaphysical and the everyday scientific a mere sophism? To use an expression of the Tantra: ‘what is here is there, what is not here is not anywhere’.