ABSTRACT
Realism is both more difficult and easier to defend than one supposes. The "scheme-content" disjunction is an irrelevant distraction as far as empirical realism is concerned. This chapter finds an instructive analogy in the revival of rationalist treatments of the mastery of language and the conditions of perceptual knowledge, in the inquiries of a Cartesian Chomsky and a Kantian John McDowell, confronted with opposed intuitions centered in post-Darwinian and pragmatist inquiries regarding language and cognition, within the play of actual human life. McDowell's wording insinuates that Kant was on the right track regarding capture of empirical realism; but he nowhere shows us how to recover the argument or how "naturalizing" Kant's transcendental maneuver might do the trick. Derivatively, realism becomes a subordinate epistemological concern–benignly so–without the encumbrance of infinite regress. The "perceptual concepts" functioning among perceptual cognitions of discursively apt humans may be reasonably said to qualify our sense of realism within societies of persons.
