Midwest Studies in Philosophy

Volume 45, 2021

Doubt

Primordial Realism

Here I show how thinking of inquiry as immature can illuminate problems about metaphysical and scientific realism. I begin with the question whether human beings at the very beginning of systematic inquiry who (counterfactually) held themselves to be thus situated, temporally speaking, and came to recognize their inability to prove or probabilify the truth of metaphysical realism would have been justified in believing or accepting metaphysical realism even so. Drawing on broadly Wittgensteinian ideas I defend an affirmative answer. Then I extrapolate from this result, arguing by analogy that acceptance of both metaphysical realism and scientific realism is justified for us today.