Realism about the external, natural world is an overarching empirical hypothesis. The method of hypothetical realism rejects as an excessive concession to the skeptic these two assumptions of constructivist intuitionism: first, that everything real must be exhaustively inspectable; and second, that our beliefs are to be justified to the point of certainty. We prefer to say that nothing is ever known directly; that all of our contact with the world is mediated by thoughts, words, and percepts construed as signs having referents distinct from themselves. We organize these signs into meaningful and possibly true hypotheses as we speculate--in practice, science and metaphysics--about a world we have not made
