Bringing real realism back home: a perspectival slant

In this essay, I suggest bringing real realism closer home, namely back to its Kantian roots. The very same roots that make real realism a ‘homely’ kind of realism, against any Grand Metaphysical Conclusions about the world, its causal necessities, and natural kinds. I suggest reinterpreting a key aspect of real realism—i.e., the notion of success at stake in ‘working posits’—along more ‘homely’ lines, lines that acknowledge historical continuity, conceptual nuances and our role as epistemic agents in assessing success and inferring truth. The result is a form of perspectival realism—to adopt Ron Giere’s terminology— which is, however, already at a distance from what Giere himself intends by this term. Hence, my very own (loosely Kantian-inspired) perspectivalist slant to real realism.