[M.D. Holloway]

Epistemological idealisms take various forms. Rationalism is one such form. Rationalism recognizes the knower as active in the process of knowing, and knowledge as exceeding the limits of sense perception, but characteristically rationalism merely results in the opposite kind of problem. Rationalisms may suggest that it is not necessary to attend to empirical reality at all, as reality can be made what we want it to be according to how we exercise our reason. Or they may contend that empirical appearances are a mere dross which conceal what is actually real. Rationalism tends to treat the object of knowledge as a construct of our process of knowing it. The problem with rationalism, therefore, is that it tends to neglect the importance of paying attention to appearances as a source of knowledge; rationalism tends to imagine objects can be known without observation and investigation, that a purely deductive approach to knowledge will suffice, and that induction is unnecessary. From a Marxist realist perspective, reality is the unity of essence and appearance: essences are in fact nothing without their appearances, without the means in other words by which they manifest themselves, by which they make themselves known to us and thereby provoke us to inquire into the possibility that they might in fact actually exist. Appearances are not mere dross; they do not merely conceal a real content that exists beneath these surfaces. A vital part of any real entity is, from a realist vantage point, the forms in which its essential contents appear, or, to put it in other words, the forms in which these essential contents manifest or realize themselves. For example, freedom is not itself an empirical entity and as such is not equivalent with any one particular or even with any series of particular manifestations of various instances of freedom. And yet, on the other hand, it would not make any sense to talk about freedom if it did not manifest itself in various instances where we can see freedom at work, where we can see in other words the ways in which freedom appears. The same thing could be said for other general categories such as class and classism, race and racism, gender and sexism, exploitation, alienation, and social and political oppression. These categories all actually do maintain an objective existence, outside and independent of and preceding and exceeding their mere representation in language or thought, and yet we do not see any of these categories in the world around us, simply in and of and all by themselves: what we see are instances and manifestations of these categories which provide us evidence that such general categories do in fact exist. Moreover, once we understand manifestations of, for instance, racism for what they are, when we see these manifestations of racism we do in fact then see racism because our senses have been transformed -- they have been extended and refined by means of education and training to recognize more than what otherwise would be the case.




A very popular form of epistemological idealism today is what is often called conventionalism , or, as it is sometimes also identified, (post)modern relativism. This approach is popular among many post-structuralist and post-modernist thinkers. According to this approach, our knowledge is always bound and limited by the conventions proper to the various conceptual paradigms or linguistic constructs within which we work. Reality is nothing but signs, and what these signs are understood to mean will differ as they are organized differently within different "discourses," different domains of language use, and within different "texts," different sites at which discourses meet and intersect and within which signs are thus "written" and "read." What a sign or series of signs is understood to mean will depend upon the ways in which these signs are made sense of within a particular discourse, and this will in turn depend upon what rules, or conventions, a discourse prescribes for interpreting what this sign or series of signs means -- and for evaluating its worth, its significance, and its effectivity. Knowledge is thus relative to the discourses within which we work and the conventions that prevail for making sense of the meaning and value of signs within these discourses. Meaning, value, and knowledge are thus is in fact arbitrary in the sense of relative and conventional. From such a conventionalist position, things could hardly be otherwise because signs are all that we perceive and these signs in fact are not signs which point to some referent for which they stand or to which they refer; signs merely refer to other signs in a potentially endless movement and not to a reality outside of and independent of these signs. How we make sense of signs depends upon what conventions we follow in making sense of where to stop this potentially infinite motion of signs, to temporarily halt this semiotic "free play," and to establish an arbitrary ground upon which to act as if we could say that sign A means X, is worth Y, and refers to Z when in fact it only does all of this when we indicate it does. Sign A could in other words just as easily mean Q, be worth R, and refer to S. For example, from such a conventionalist perspective, a "rabbit" is a word which merely, in and of itself, refers to other words; we find it useful, as a matter of convention, to imagine that it stands in for and refers to a particular kind of animal, and yet it does not actually do so and need not be understood to do so -- as it can mean many other things depending upon the discourse with which we are working. It could also, for example, refer to the nickname of a player on a team involved in some kind of competitive sport; it could refer to a particular kind of car; it could refer to a particular kind of sex act or a pet name used in addressing a lover during sex; and the list goes on. The key here is that we know nothing, from a conventionalist perspective, of anything about any of these rabbits other than what the particular discourse within which we are working prescribes. Knowledge is a matter of mastering the conventions of the discourses within which we are situated as language users. These discourses are thus like language games and we are merely the inhabitants of positions as players in these games. We win and lose according to how well we are able to master the rules of the game, rules which refer to nothing outside of the game -- to nothing about any other game -- but only to what holds while playing the particular game in question. From this perspective, life is full of many different situations which are all games, all involving positions, rules, playing fields, obstacles and assistances, and, of course, objectives or goals.




Contemporary, or modern, or critical, forms of realism, including Marxist realism, accept much in conventionalist critiques of empiricism. They accept that reason and language mediate between sense and cognition. They accept that what we perceive through our senses from the appearances of objects is not strictly equivalent with all of what is or with what is simply true. They also accept that knowledge is socially and historically produced, and, in this sense, that knowledge is socially and historically relative. Realism accepts that developments and changes within history and society lead to developments and changes in knowledge. At the same time, however, realism agrees with empiricism that reality includes that which exists outside of and independent of consciousness and that this "external" reality is in fact knowable by means of what is "internal" to consciousness. To be more precise, "internal" and "external" are seen as interpenetrating: as overlapping and interrelated. Consciousness is itself both a product of and a part within the totality of reality that precedes and exceeds what is contained within itself, and consciousness in turn enables conscious beings to engage actively as parts within the totality of reality so as to transform their relations with other parts of this totality rather than merely to maintain and reproduce it as is by simply adapting and conforming to what is.