In Some Forms of Realism: A Critique of Representative and Presentative Realism, Celestine N. Bittle mounts a concise attack on two forms of realism. I'll have to go back to this, but comparing his discussion of Spencer's transfigured realism, as expounded in Spencer's Principles of Psychology, and Bittle's characterization of it, I see . . . inadequate representation!

For what it's worth, I think my form of realism would best be described as neither presentative (like Epicurus's and Bittle's) nor representative (like most others'), but, instead, as performative realism. I see the truths in both presentative and representative realism as mere sketches on the way to the development of performative realism.

Yes, I've been influenced by pragmatism.

Bittle dubs his own doctrine as Critical Presentative Realism, which I take to be a mirror to George Santayana's critical realism, which is a form of representatiionalism (though hardly naive, since he doesn't regard the intermediaries between our minds and existent things as icons, but as sometimes rather arbitrary signifiers, thus moving close to my position, that the representations must not pretend to mirror reality — pace the late Richard Rorty's bâte noir — but provide maps that help us navigate it).

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