ABSTRACT
It would not be unreasonable to suppose that an untutored view of knowledge inclines toward a strong form of realism – meaning by that, that the independent world pretty well is as we perceive it to be: even a straight stick that looks bent in a glass of water, we learn to say, looks exactly as it should in such a circumstance. Our naive intuitions confirm, for one thing, that we do know the way the world is independently of our beliefs; for another, that, on the whole, our beliefs do not distort our perception of the real world, and, for a third, that what we thus come to know is not affected in any essential way by the admittedly historical process by which we achieve our level of scientific mastery. So the paradox dissolves, according to the strong realist doctrine. Nevertheless, the philosophical labors spanning the work of Descartes, Kant and Hegel, which still constitute ground zero for our understanding of the legitimacy of science itself, calls into question in the deepest way both the possibility of ever knowing the independent world as it truly is independently and the intelligibility of construing scientific knowledge as ahistorical.
