La materia pragmática de la realidad. Wittgenstein, Peirce, James y viceversa

The philosophical debate about the concept of reality has been often polarized by the dichotomy between foundationalist realism and skeptical anti-realism. In fact, these apparently antithetical stances share the common illusory quest for an ultimate and absolute foundation of knowledge. As an alternative to the realism/antirealism aut-aut, this essay proposes an idea of reality as strictly intertwined with the concreteness of our cognitive and evaluative practices, with their complexity and the dynamism of the inescapable interference of empirical and logical-semantic factors that constitute it. In this sense, a key role is played by the comparison between Ludwig Wittgenstein and C. S. Peirce. A careful reading of these authors provides some crucial theoretical moves, as the distinction between certainty and knowledge, the redefinition of the concept of normativity and the refusal of the Cartesian absolute skepticism’s hypothesis. From this perspective, a pragmatic and fallibilist conception of the relation between truth and reality emerges, which owes much to William James’s methodological and epistemological points.