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Over at Agent Swarm, Terrence Blake claims that Quentin Meillassoux’s notion of correlationism  is excessively narrow since it disqualifies realist positions which respond to worries about access, objectivity and truth raised by transcendental philosophers from Kant through to Husserl, and Heidegger. I’m not sure if Meillassoux’s speculative solution works and I share his worries about Harman’s OOO. But I don’t see any reason to doubt that  the concept “correlationism” beautifully describes a range of contemporary anti-realist philosophies, not all of which are written in the  house style of the post-Kantian European tradition ((Kant, Hegel, etc.). Hilary Putnam’s internal realism is a particularly salient example of correlationism within the pragmatist/analytic camp because it wears its Kantian heart on its sleeve.

Internal Realism is a philosophical oxymoron since it denies that there are things whose existence and nature is independent of human descriptive practices. The fact that Putnam expresses his variant of transcendental philosophy in the post-Wittgensteinian argot of linguistic practices and language-games rather than transcendental subjects or Daseins is largely irrelevant since the roles that language and subjectivity play in correlationist philosophies are, to put it bluntly, correlative (Perhaps, as Frank Farrell argues, “language” and subjectivity” are a hangover from the Nominalist God whose omnipotence extended to determining differences and similarities within an unstructured universe – See Farrell 1996). Meillassoux does not address analytic correlationism in After Finitude but his formulation of correlationism seems to apply to post-Wittgensteinian position for which language and practice assumes the mantle of the transcendental subject:

In the Kantian framework, a statement’s conformity to the object can no longer be defined in terms of a representation’s ‘adequation’ or ‘resemblance’ to an object supposedly subsisting ‘in itself, since this ‘in itself is inaccessible. The difference between an objective representation (such as ‘the sun heats the stone’) and a ‘merely subjective’ representation (such as ‘the room seems warm to me’) is therefore a function of the difference between two types of subjective representation: those that can be universalized, and are thus by right capable of being experienced by everyone, and hence ‘scientific’, and those that cannot be universalized, and hence cannot belong to scientific discourse. From this point on, intersubjectivity, the consensus of a community, supplants the adequation between the representations of a solitary subject and the thing itself as the veritable criterion of objectivity, and of scientific objectivity more particularly. Scientific truth is no longer what conforms to an in itself supposedly indifferent to the way in which it is given to the subject, but rather what is susceptible of being given as shared by a scientific community.

Such considerations reveal the extent to which the central notion of modern philosophy since Kant seems to be that of correlation. By ‘correlation’ we mean the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other. We will henceforth call correlationism any current of thought which maintains the unsurpassable character of the correlation so defined (Meillassoux 2006, 4-5).

Putnam is a modern Kantian because he regards ontology as internal to languages or conceptual schemes (though, for Putnam, unlike Kant, these categorical frameworks are historically contingent). There are no ontological facts that obtain independently of some fixation of language. Such facts would require the existence of a One True Theory of reality which, he claims, is precluded on model theoretic grounds:

The suggestion I am making , in short, is that a statement is true of a situation just in case it would be correct to use the words of which the statement consists in that way in describing the situation. Provided the concepts in question are not themselves ones which we ought to reject for one reason or another, we can explain what ” correct to use the words of which the statement consists in that way ” means by saying that it means nothing more nor less than that a sufficiently well placed speaker who used the words in that way would be fully warranted in counting the statement as true of that situation (Putnam 1987, 115).

As a number of commentators have argued the semantic considerations that motivate Putnam’s shift from realism to internal realism are precisely the one’s that motivated Kant to develop a non-representational account of concepts (See Moran 2000).  While Putnam is exemplary, similar considerations apply to Dummett-style anti-realism. Davidson is a harder case because, unlike Putnam, Davidson rejects epistemic accounts of truth (Davidson 1990, 307-9). However, Davidson thinks that what Tarski leaves out when he shows us how to determine the extension of the truth predicate relative to an object language L is a presupposition of our intersubjective practices of interpretation. Thus, as Jeff Malpas argues, Davidson is probably some kind of “horizontal realist” for whom the world must be understood as the open phenomenological background against which interpretative practices operate – thus looping us back to transcendental subjectivity in its most developed, subtle but still humanist formulation. Horizontal realism is still realism with something missing. It is not relativism, strictly speaking, but the “world” that it presupposes is more like Husserl’s pre-theoretically given Lebenswelt than Meillassoux’s great outdoors (Malpas 1991)

References

Davidson, Donald (1990). The structure and content of truth. Journal of Philosophy 87 (6):279-328.

Farrell, Frank (1996). Subjectivity, Realism and Postmodernism: The Recovery of the  World in Recent Philosophy ( Cambridge University Press).

Malpas, J.E. (1992) Donald Davidson and the Mirror of Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge      University Press.

Moran, Dermot (2000). “Hilary Putnam and Immanuel Kant: Two `internal realists’?” Synthese 123 (1):65-104.

Meillassoux, Q. (2006) After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, Ray Brassier (trans.). New York: Continuum.

Putnam, Hilary (1987). Representation and Reality. MIT Press.