capacity to copy, depict, or reproduce. On the contrary, Hägerström concurs with Immanuel Kant’s idea that the subject is incapable of attaining truly transcendent object knowledge as the subject, on the one hand, has only indirect contact with the object, whereby the subject is precluded from the possibility of copying the object as it really is (the transcendental object), and thus also denied true metaphysical knowledge, and on the other, that there does not exist such super-natural objects. Hägerström’s philosophical premisses thus involve consequences other than those of classical (conceptual) realism. Knowledge, according to Hägerström’s theory, is not the capacity to reproduce objects passively, but the capacity to describe those objects and their relationships to one another in a non-contradictory manner. Hägerström’s realism is thus the expression of the scientific endeavor, at every given moment and perspective, to provide a non-contradictory description of investigated objects, which should apply regardless of whether the judgment in question refers to particular objects or a greater context of objects. In either case, and regardless of whether the judgment has physical things, facts, events, processes, or non-contradictory ideas as its subject matter, the objects of the judgment must be arranged into a noncontradictory context that must relate to physical reality without giving rise to contradictions. Hägerström also distinguishes between reality and existence in a manner that metaphysics does not. According to him, to be real is a function of an object’s or idea’s non-contradiction and that which lacks contradictions is real, and vice versa. However, while that which exists is noncontradictory and hence real, it is not the case that the formally real necessarily exists independently of the subject, for the absence of contradictions constitutes a formal criterion of reality, but not a material criterion. Only that which is real autonomously of the subject exists in its own right, which in turn implies reality. In this category, one finds things and objects of the physical world.Therefore, objects exist and are real, while ideas p a r t v i i i 642
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