realism

realism, in art, the movement of the mid-19th cent. formed in reaction against the severely academic production of the French school. Realist painters sought to portray what they saw without idealizing it, choosing their subjects from the commonplaces of everyday life. Major realists included Gustave Courbet, J. F. Millet, and Honoré Daumier. In a broader sense the term is applied to an unembellished rendering of natural forms. In recent years realism has come to mean the presentation of forms and materials that are simply themselves, not primarily representations of things that already exist.

realism, in literature, an approach that attempts to describe life without idealization or romantic subjectivity. Although realism is not limited to any one century or group of writers, it is most often associated with the literary movement in 19th-century France, specifically with the French novelists Flaubert and Balzac. George Eliot introduced realism into England, and William Dean Howells introduced it into the United States. Realism has been chiefly concerned with the commonplaces of everyday life among the middle and lower classes, where character is a product of social factors and environment is the integral element in the dramatic complications (see naturalism). In the drama, realism is most closely associated with Ibsen's social plays. Later writers felt that realism laid too much emphasis on external reality. Many, notably Henry James, turned to a psychological realism that closely examined the complex workings of the mind (see stream of consciousness).

realism, in philosophy. 1 In medieval philosophy realism represented a position taken on the problem of universals. There were two schools of realism. Extreme realism, represented by William of Champeaux, held that universals exist independently of both the human mind and particular things—a theory closely associated with that of Plato. Some other philosophers rejected this view for what can be termed moderate realism, which held that universals exist only in the mind of God, as patterns by which he creates particular things. St. Thomas Aquinas and John of Salisbury were proponents of moderate realism. 2 In epistemology realism represents the theory that particular things exist independently of our perception. This position is in direct contrast to the theory of idealism, which holds that reality exists only in the mind. Most contemporary British and American philosophy tends toward realism. Prominent modern realists have included Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and C. D. Broad.

In philosophy, any viewpoint that accords to the objects of human knowledge an existence that is independent of whether they are being perceived or thought about. In the metaphysical debate concerning universals, realism is opposed to nominalism, which denies that universals have any reality at all (except as words), and to conceptualism, which grants universals reality but only as concepts in the mind. Against idealism and phenomenalism, realism asserts the independent existence of material objects and their qualities. Similarly, moral realism holds that the moral qualities of things and actions (such as being good or bad, right or wrong) belong to the things or actions themselves and are not to be explained in terms of the subject's feelings of approval or disapproval. In opposition to conventionalism, realism holds that scientific theories are objectively true (or false) based on their correspondence (or lack of it) to an independently existing reality.

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or magical realism

Latin-American literary phenomenon characterized by the matter-of-fact incorporation of fantastic or mythical elements into otherwise realistic fiction. The term was first applied to literature in the 1940s by the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier (1904–1980), who recognized the tendency of his region's contemporary storytellers as well as contemporary novelists to illuminate the mundane by means of the fabulous. Prominent practitioners include Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jorge Amado, Jorge Luis Borges, Miguel Angel Asturias, Julio Cortazar, and Isabel Allende (born 1942). The term has been applied to literature and art outside of Latin America as well.

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Late 20th-century painting style based on photography, in which realistic scenes are rendered in meticulous detail. An offshoot of Pop art, it became a trend in U.S. painting in the 1970s among artists fascinated by camera images. Though photographs had been used by 19th-century painters such as Eugène Delacroix as substitutes for reality, the Photo-Realists relied on the photograph itself, replicating it in large-scale detail as the reality on which to base an acrylic painting. Its subjects often included reflecting surfaces (chrome-plated diners, motorcycles, glass-fronted buildings, etc.). Its awesome technical precision, brilliant colour schemes, and visual complexity earned the style wide popularity. Its most notable practitioners were Chuck Close, Don Eddy, Richard Estes, and Audrey Flack.

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In philosophy, the term anti-realism is used to describe any position involving either the denial of an objective reality of entities of a certain type or the denial that verification-transcendent statements about a type of entity are either true or false. This latter construal is sometimes expressed by saying "there is no fact of the matter as to whether or not P." Thus, we may speak of anti-realism with respect to other minds, the past, the future, universals, mathematical entities (such as natural numbers), moral categories, the material world, or even thought. The two construals are clearly distinct and often confused. For example, an "anti-realist" who denies that other minds exist (i. e., a solipsist) is quite different from an "anti-realist" who claims that there is no fact of the matter as to whether or not there are unobservable other minds (i. e., a logical behaviorist).

Anti-realism in Philosophy

Michael Dummett

The term was popularised by Michael Dummett, who introduced it in his paper Realism to re-examine several classical philosophical disputes involving such doctrines as nominalism, conceptual realism, idealism and phenomenalism. The novelty of Dummett's approach consisted in seeing these disputes as analogous to the dispute between intuitionism and Platonism in the philosophy of mathematics.

According to intuitionists (anti-realists with respect to mathematical objects), the truth of a mathematical statement consists in our ability to prove it. According to platonists (realists), the truth of a statement consists in its correspondence to objective reality. Thus, intuitionists are ready to accept a statement of the form "P or Q" as true only if we can prove P or if we can prove Q: this is called the disjunction property. In particular, we cannot in general claim that "P or not P" is true (the law of the excluded middle), since in some cases we may not be able either to prove nor disprove the statement P. Similarly, intuitionists object to the failure of the existence property for classical logic, where one can prove $exists\; x.phi(x)$, without being able to produce any term $t$ of which $phi$ holds.

Dummett argues that the intuitionistic notion of truth lies at the bottom of various classical forms of anti-realism. He uses this notion to re-interpret phenomenalism, claiming that it need not take the form of a reductionism (often considered untenable).

Precursors

Doubts about the possibility of definite truth have been expressed since ancient times, for instance in the skepticism of Pyrrho. Anti-realism about matter or physical entities also has a long history. It can be found in the idealism of Berkeley, Hegel, and so on.

Anti-Realist arguments

Idealists are skeptics about the physical world, maintaining either: 1) that nothing exists outside the mind, or 2) that we would have no access to a mind-independent reality even if it may exist. Realists, in contrast, hold that perceptions or sense data are caused by mind-independent objects. But this introduces the possibility of another kind of skepticism: since our understanding of causality is that the same effect can be produced by multiple causes, there is a lack of determinacy about what one is really perceiving. A concrete example of a situation where an individual's sensory input might be caused by something other than what he thinks is causing it is the brain in a vat scenario.

On a more abstract level, model theoretic arguments hold that a given set of symbols in a theory can be mapped onto any number of sets of real-world objects — each set being a "model" of the theory — providing the interrelationships between the objects are the same. (Compare with symbol grounding).

Anti-realism in Science

In philosophy of science, anti-realism applies chiefly to claims about the non-reality of "unobservable" entities such as electrons or DNA, which are not detectable with human senses. For a brief discussion comparing such anti-realism to its opposite, realism, see (Okasha 2002, ch. 4). Ian Hacking (1999, p. 84) also uses the same definition. One prominent anti-realist position in the philosophy of science is instrumentalism, which takes a purely agnostic view towards the existence of unobservable entities: unobservable entity X serves simply as an instrument to aid in the success of theory Y. We need not determine the existence or non-existence of X. Some scientific anti-realists argue further, however, and deny that unobservables exist even as non-truth conditioned instruments.

Anti-realism in Art

In discussions of art (including visual art, writing, music, and lyrics), anti-realism and anti-realist may be used in one of the philosophical senses described above, or may simply be used in contrast to realism, in whatever sense the latter is meant. Thus surrealism in visual art is an "anti-realist" tendency, and the psychedelic bands common in the United States in the 1960s were "anti-realist," etc. These terms may not be as precise when applied to art as when applied to philosophical matters. Anti-reality is occasionally used in this sense, although it may be used in other senses.

See also

• Constructivist epistemology
• Deflationary theory of truth
• Fact
• Idealism
• Intuitionistic logic
• Irrealism (philosophy)
• Philosophical realism
• Quasi-realism
• Reality
• Neil Tennant (philosopher)
• Crispin Wright
• Theory of Everything (ToE)
• Münchhausen Trilemma
• Nihilism

External links

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

References

• Michael Dummett (1963). Realism, reprinted in: Truth and Other Enigmas, Harvard University Press: 1978, pp. 145-165.
• Michael Dummett (1967). Platonism, reprinted in: Truth and Other Enigmas, Harvard University Press: 1978, pp. 202-214.
• Ian Hacking (1999). The Social Construction of What?. Harvard University Press: 2001.
• Samir Okasha (2002). Philosophy of Science: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.