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| reasonably replies that, because philosophy is, by nature, reflective,
"critical realism" means no more than "philosophical realism." Where
Maritain argues that critique, with its analysis of the principles and operations of
knowing, leads to the conclusion that the human intellect is naturally ordered to the
knowledge of extramental being, he must nevertheless admit with Gilson that that analysis
does not, cannot, validate extamental knowledge. |
| Nowhere in his argument for critical realism does Maritain establish
anything more than that the analysis of the principles and operations of the intellect
shows that it is ordered to, has its fulfillment in, the knowledge of extramental being.
And even at that, the knowledge is arrived at regressively in that it is only because we
first have the spontaneous intuition of extramental being that we know that our knowledge
of possible being is derived from it and that the latter accordingly leads to the former. |
| The most his critique has achieved is to have established that
extramental reality is coherent with, is the logical next step of, the concepts and
functions of the human mind. Further than this, he cannot go since that would require the
unjustifiable inference that such concepts and functions necessitate the existence
of things outside the mind. Unjustifiable because it purports to go from thought to
thing, to deduce the real from the possible. And to paraphrase William James, the
difference between the possible and the real is that possible fire is what won’t
generate real heat and a possible knife is what won’t cut real wood. |
| There is danger even in stopping at the coherence of the mind’s
operations with the claim that there is an extramental reality. Any attempt to defend the
existence of extramental things with such statements as "A public language
presupposes a public |
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