The mental approach to the world

Is the reality familiar to us independent of our thinking and cognition? Realism gives a positive answer to this question, the various forms of anti-realism a negative one. But the discussion between realists and anti-realists is based on a misunderstanding of the underlying problem. This lies not in the thought-independence of reality, but in our mental access to it: how can we gain knowledge about a reality independent of cognition and thought, and how can we refer to it in thought at all? A "contextualist" rejection of skepticism and a novel ("normatively disjunctive") conception of theoretical intentionality are intended to show that the mental accessibility of reality is not called into question by its thought-independence. The result is the indirect defense of a "direc.