I have glanced into ontic structural realism. I will analyze such using maths.
In maths you can have a relation. This is essentially an ordering, based on the well-ordering theorem in maths.
This relation is a very good analogy in ontic structural realism, where only the structures are inherent. It is the most defensible form of scientific realism, per the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
I haven’t the time to read it quite yet. Admittedly. But I would like to discuss my intuition surrounding it, since philosophy is largely a science of inquiry.
Furthering the prior argument about relations, we can order things, essentially. And these orderings are essentially “reality” according to ontic structural realism.
The problem with this is it appears to describe things without their nature. This appears to be reductionist. Thus science and logic appear reductionist.
In an attempt to shore up these arguments, I am arguing that the senses actually portray the world as-it-appears and this is sufficient for truth (though not necessarily). This is different than Kant, who makes it clear that we cannot know the true nature of things (noumena is inaccessible). Kant argues that the Categories are the limits of our knowledge. This may very well be true, and further research has been done on the subject. Further elaboration on what the Categories are and what they mean have been done in light of this.
I would like to go further than Hegel’s argument against Kant.
I would take a skeptical claim to Kant and argue he hasn’t proven that reality itself is not Categorical, and indeed I challenge where Categories come from. Categories came from the mind, so who is to verify the claim that we don’t know what things are in themselves? I feel Kant created new “dogmatic” metaphysical entity that we cannot question because it is unknowable itself. Therefore Kant is self-defeating since we can neither prove nor disprove Kant’s proposition. It is thus a useless abstraction, a point I agreed upon with Hegel. Thus in the attempt to overcome dogma Kant instead created new dogma. He posited a whole reality of “not-phenomena” that may or may not exist, hence a metaphysical account that hoodwinked the West.
What Kant got right though is that we use Categories. We use logic. We use various tools, and those can only be instantiated logically. I would argue this is the foundation of the universe. I would argue that Kant would have had a stronger argument if he made an argument against teleological and essential views of things. Since these are contingent on non-necessary things. Perhaps that is what Kant meant? But the idea of necessity is still applied with certain ideas.
What I think is a bigger problem is what is reality, if it is Categorical. It means our purpose must be Categorical as well? But then that applies truth, which itself is arguably a metaphysical concept (see necessary truth). Then we don’t necessarily know what ought to be: we are not onmniscient. For things that are self-definitional as ourselves, we struggle to define things since we are the truth-bearers! I hate this because what this means is merely the most effective at propagating themselves are the ones who are most effective in this system, regardless of the truthfulness of our system. This explains why we have so many problems. Truth is not inherent to Categories, despite the fact it structures things.
Getting to common sense ontic reality know. I would argue, due to the structures inherent in the system, that we perceive reality as it is. There are physical arguments to be made for this. But my argument is the correspondence theory of truth, whereby what we observe is what is true. And hence. We are truthbearers. And reality is what we perceive. I understand that people say things, trivially, contrarily, but that is trivially negated by further elaboration of evidence. This means that, in light of evidence (what we perceive), we observe reality as it is. This is the ontic, and it is what we observe.