Oh, since you weren't hanging around awhile back, I better fill in something about Meill's concept of "corelationism" - which he derives from Kant and juxtaposes with "realism". Sgt, Jim, and I discussed all this fairly recently & it's pretty central to my points and Malalbou's (and similar to an opposition you put to me some years back of "realism vs constructionism" , no? ... so maybe we're finally having that long-withheld discussion....)
Meillassoux argues that correlationism has been the central notion of philosophy ever since Immanuel Kant, whose core epistemological hypothesis is twofold. On the one hand, Kant argues that objects conform to mind, rather than mind to objects. Kant claimed that in traditional forms of epistemology the mind was conceived as a mirror that reflects being as it is in-itself, independent of us. He argues that mind does not merely reflect reality, but rather actively structures reality. Consequently, on the other hand, he argues that we can never know reality as it is in itself apart from us, but only as it appears to us. If the mind takes an active role in structuring reality (for us) we are unable to know what it is in-itself because we cannot determine what, in appearances, is a product of our own minds and what is a feature of things as they are in themselves. This is because we cannot adopt a third-person perspective that would allow us to compare things as they appear to us and things as they are in themselves. Consequently, knowledge is restricted to appearances and we must remain agnostic as to what being might be like in itself.
https://euppublishingblog.com/2014/12/1 ... ictionary/
Meill in his book "After Finitude" tries to deny this, or at least heavily qualify it, and refers to Kant's idea as a "Ptolemaic counter-revolution." He then goes on to argue that the only truly "non-transcendental"universe (ie one truly without a "God") is "utterly contingent"-- the only possible necessity being that everything is utter contingent. This is based on a radicalization of Humes induction problem....
. Meillassoux insists upon reading Hume’s problem as more than merely epistemological. In fact, Meillassoux goes so far as to claim – this assertion is absolutely central to Meillassouxian ontology – that the problem of induction is already its own solution. In other words, the impossibility of any purported law of nature being deemed via induction to be a necessary connection qua forever-unbreakable rule is a matter of ontological insight rather than epistemological ignorance. The combination of a realist rendition of the inductive-yetmathematised empirical sciences of nature with a related rendition of Hume’s problem of induction leads Meillassoux to advance an ontology (un-)grounded on the core idea of hyper-chaos, namely, the concept of the omnipotent power of a lawless contingency unconstrained by sufficient reasons as the sole necessity operative across the temporal expanse of existence. As hyper-chaotic, the being and beings of Meillassoux’s ontology can, at any time, possibly undergo an unimaginably large number of radical transformations deviating from past and present observed patterns of behaviour.
https://euppublishingblog.com/2015/01/0 ... ictionary/
These issues - how/why do categories of thought agree with the objects of experience? - is more prevalent among (more-subjectivist) continental thinkers, whereas Brit-American analytic/empiricist styles of philosophy just tend to assume (as Graham Harmon puts it )"a naive realism". But, like Jim, maybe you can still give it a go?
ETA: .. also, Graham Harmon's spin on 'realism' vs 'correlationism":
Speculative realism is best understood as a loose umbrella term
for a series of vastly different philosophical enterprises. What all
have in common is their rejection of what Quentin Meillassoux
first termed ‘correlationism’. Whereas realists assert the exist-
ence of a world independent of human thought and idealists deny
such an autonomous world, correlationism adopts an apparently
sophisticated intermediate position, in which human and world
come only as a pair and cannot be addressed outside their mutual
correlation. Accordingly, the dispute between realism and ideal-
ism is dismissed as a ‘pseudo-problem’. Inspired ultimately by
Immanuel Kant, correlationists are devoted to the human-world
correlate as the sole topic of philosophy, and this has become
the unspoken central dogma of all continental and much analytic
philosophy. Speculative realist thinkers oppose this credo (though
not always for the same reasons) and defend a realist stance
toward the world. But instead of endorsing a commonsensical,
middle-aged realism of boring hands and billiard balls existing
outside the mind, speculative realist philosophies are perplexed
by the strangeness of the real: a strangeness undetectable by the
instruments of common sense.
https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/me ... uction.pdf