Realism from a biological point of view

Concerning the problem of realism, two kinds of discussions are on the fore at present, namely internal philosophical and external scientific ones. The internal questions concentrate upon topics like the mind-independence of physical objects, upon their knowability, truth and an appropriate correspondence between language and the world, upon theoretical terms and their semantical content and related issues. On the other side, there are the external questions of the type, whether such a philosophically defensible epistemology is compatible with fact and theory of the today's results of science. This branch of the discussion has engendered many ramifications according as physics is taken into cognizance or biology. In the tradition of the Complementarity interpretation of Quantum Mechanics and also in the spirit of the orthodox Quantum Mechanics of Measurement and in the light of recent empirical results on polarization experiments, epistemological idealism seems to dominate the intellectual geography. On the other side, if the results of evolutionary biology are taken into account and human cognitive functions are embedded in a larger evolutionary framework, then a kind of naturalistic realism seems to be much more plausible and much more apt to match the scientific situation than the competing idealistic models. We shall argue that a temperate realistic position that does not make too strong a claim on justification or deduction from first principles can be vindicated in the light of evolutionary biology. The counterarguments from Quantum Physics are not compelling any longer, if recent results from algebraic Quantum Mechanics are taken into account. Au sujet du réalisme, deux types de discussions sont actuellement ouvertes et concernent l'une des questions philosophiques internes, l'autre des questions scientifiques externes. Les questions internes sont de type «Les objets physiques sont-ils dépendants de l'esprit?», «Sont-ils connaissables?», «Y a-t-il une vérité et une correspondance entre le langage et le monde?», «Les termes théoriques ont-ils un contenu sémantique?», etc. D'un autre côté, il y a des questions externes telles que «Telle epistemologie, défendable du point de vue philosophique, est-elle compatible avec les faits et avec la théorie des résultats actuels de la science?». Cette ligne de discussion a pris des voies diverses selon qu'on part de la physique ou de la biologie. Dans la tradition et l'esprit de l'interprétation en termes de comp