PF Strawson and JL Mackie: Science: Just Another Way of Seeing the World (Part 3)

On The Very Idea - A Philosophy Podcast

On the third installment of my series on PF Strawson's undelievered lecture to The Royal Institute of Philosophy in 1979 titled Perception and Its Objects, I look at Strawson's criticism of JL Mackie's scientific realism. Strawson argues that Mackie's realism is not a real realism, unlike his own, as Mackie relies on a theory of representationalism that artificially separates the apple in the world from the observer's image based perception of the apple in their head in a way that does a disservice to the way that the average person sees apples in the world. According to Strawson, Mackie posits one distinction too many in his theory of perception. But, despite the clunkiness of the distinctions that representationalism relies on, I look at whether such distinctions between apples as they are in objective reality versus apples as experiences in one's head are necessary to do justice to the notion of science being on an elevated epistemic plane - more objectively entitled than our everyday perception of the apple.