the consensus of many other informed observers. Waltz himself has adopted this
position: ‘some part of the scientific community has to decide whether enough of
an empirical warrant exists to give a theory credibility’.^65 Once again Waltz has got
into trouble – being realistic doesn’t matter, and yet it does.
Post-Kantian constructivism
If some community of observers decides that a given theory is empirically credible,
then, at least for them, the theory is realistic. Waltz’s realism by default raises
awkward questions. ‘What is the criterion’, Friedman asked, ‘by which to judge
whether a particular departure from realism is or is not acceptable?’^66 How can
Waltz, or any realist, say the world even has parts? How does a realist know that
Aristotle’s ti esti– what is – is real? For Aristotle, at least, what it isis but the first,
and presumably the most important, in a list of ten kinds of predication (gene ̄to ̄n
kate ̄gorio ̄n), or universal categories for talking about the world.^67
It is easy enough to read Aristotle as an empirical realist: the world out there is
more or less as we sense it. Generalizing from what I said earlier about formal causes,
we can also read him as a proto-constructivist: the world is what we say it is. In such
a view, any realist’s models of the world dovetails with other widely accepted
models. Yet all such models are made up, just as Friedman and Waltz insisted. When
we talk, we make our models (maps, formulae) available for others to use in making
their own models. In this process (as modelled), there is no reality beyond what our
models collectively say it is.
Insofar as we make models by imposing form (patterns, structure) on what we
think we see, the mind’s ‘eye’ does most of the work, and not the senses. I take this
point of view to be Kant’s, as propounded in The Critique of Pure Reason. What Kant
called an appearance(‘the undetermined object of an empirical intuition’) has two
components. That which corresponds to sensation (appears as the stuff of the world)
Kant termedmatter. That which ‘so determines the manifold of appearance that it
allows of being ordered in certain relations’ (appears as a pattern), Kant termed ‘the
formof appearance’. For Kant, this ‘pure form of sensibility’, which gives ‘extension
and figure’ to the world of appearances, ‘must be found in the mind a priori’.^68
In Kant’s view, the sensing mind imposes order on the manifold of appearances.
It does so, in the first instance, by situating appearances in space and time and then
by putting them together (Kant called this operation synthesis). And it does so with
the help of ‘pure concepts of synthesis’ that the mind ‘contains within itself a priori’.
Kant identified twelve such concepts. Following Aristotle, he called them categories
but claimed, against Aristotle, that his twelve categories constitute an ‘exhaustive
inventory’. Among the twelve are three categories of relation: ‘inherence and
subsistence’, ‘causality and dependence’, and ‘community (reciprocity between agent
and patient)’.^69
Once the synthetic operations of the mind have conceptually reordered the
manifold of appearances, we have in our minds a ‘manifold of representations’.
Thanks to the faculty of apperception, these representations are in turn subject to a
100 Structure? What structure?