Collingwood and the realism/anti-realism debate

In this chapter I wish to discuss the nature of Collingwood’s anti-realism. My goal is to establish, first, what are Collingwood’s reasons for rejecting realism and, second, what the exact nature of his anti-realism is. The chapter is divided in three sections. In the first I outline the realist claim. In the second I discuss the significance of Collingwood’s identification of realism with the claim that knowledge makes no difference to what is known and attempt to show that Collingwood’s anti-realism amounts not to a denial of the existence of a mind-independent world, but to a denial of the possibility of cognising things as they are in-themselves. In the third section I seek to clarify further the nature of Collingwood’s anti-realism. My primary concern, in this section, is to show that whereas Collingwood’s anti-realism certainly entails the rejection of the traditional theory of truth as correspondence (adaequatio intellectus et rei), his specific brand of antirealism neither advocates the end of philosophy nor entails the dissolution of certain recurring philosophical problems such as the relationship between mind and body, freedom and determinism, theoretical and practical reason. In order to show that Collingwood’s rejection of the correspondence theory of truth is not meant to usher in a post-philosophical age, I contrast Collingwood’s anti-realism with the pragmatists’ rejection of the notion of truth as correspondence and argue that there are crucial differences between Collingwood’s and the pragmatic rejection of realism. I argue, first, that whereas the pragmatists seek to dissolve traditional philosophical problems, Collingwood seeks to rethink them within a new framework. I argue, second, that whereas the pragmatic rejection of the correspondence theory of truth leads, at least in some cases, to an abandonment of philosophy understood as a normative activity, Collingwood’s specific brand of anti-realism seeks to defend the idea of philosophy as a normative or, as he puts it, ‘criteriological’ science.