Theory and Reality

Theory and Reality is the title of a book published in 2003, written by Peter Godfrey-Smith.

I haven't read it and don't have any immediate plans to do so but will give some ancillary data about it since it seems from the descriptions I've seen to be the sort of thing that may interest some of my readers.

First, here is the website of the book's author, a Harvard professor.

He says, on one of the pages of that site, "My main research interests are in the philosophy of biology and the philosophy of mind. I also work on pragmatism (especially John Dewey), general philosophy of science, and some parts of metaphysics and epistemology. I have written three books, Complexity and the Function of Mind in Nature (Cambridge, 1996), Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (Chicago, 2003), and Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection (Oxford, 2009)."

The second of those three books, of course, is the one with the sweeping title.

You can get a "limited preview" of Theory and Reality through Google Books here.

Here's a passage from late in that book. Godfrey-Smith has just remarked briefly about the origins in natural selection of our perceptual organs. He then writes, "So far this is not a point about science or even about human beings in particular. It is a claim about all the animals (and other organisms) that use perceptual mechanisms to adapt themselves to what is going on in their environments. But this point is enough to help us avoid some philosophical problems about our 'access' to the world. We should not think in terms of two domains in reality: one accessible and one mysterious. We are biological systems embedded in a world containing objects of all sizes and at all kinds of distance and remove from us. Our mechanisms of perception and action give us a variety of different kinds of contact with these objects."

So far, it seems to me, so good.