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Contemporary
philosophical realism is the belief that some aspects of reality are ontologically independent of our conceptual schemes, perceptions, linguistic practices, beliefs, etc. Realism may be spoken of with respect to other minds, the past, the future, universals, mathematical entities (such as natural numbers), moral categories, the material world, and thought.
Realism can also be promoted in an unqualified sense, in which case it
asserts the mind-independent existence of the world, as opposed to skepticism and solipsism. Philosophers who profess realism often claim that truth consists in a correspondence between cognitive representations and reality.
[1]
Realists tend to believe that whatever we believe now is only an
approximation of reality but that the accuracy and fullness of
understanding can be improvedIn some contexts,
realism is contrasted with
idealism. Today it is more usually contrasted with
anti-realism, for example in the philosophy of science.
The oldest use of the term "realism" appears in medieval scholastic interpretations and adaptations of Greek philosophy.
Platonic realism
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- the problem of universals. Universals
are terms or properties that can be applied to many things, such as
"red", "beauty", "five", or "dog". Realism in this context, contrasted
with conceptualism and nominalism,
holds that such universals really exist, independently and somehow
prior to the world. Moderate Realism holds that they exist, but only
insofar as they are instantiated in specific things; they do not exist separately
from the specific thing. Conceptualism holds that they exist, but only
in the mind, while nominalism holds that universals do not "exist" at
all but are no more than words (flatus vocis) that describe specific objects.[citation needed]
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The Scottish School of Common Sense Realism
Main article: Scottish Common Sense Realism
Scottish Common Sense Realism is a school of philosophy that sought to defend naive realism against philosophical paradox and scepticism, arguing that matters of common sense
are within the reach of common understanding and that common-sense
beliefs even govern the lives and thoughts of those who hold
non-commonsensical beliefs. It originated in the ideas of the most
prominent members of the Scottish School of Common Sense, Thomas Reid, Adam Ferguson and Dugald Stewart, during the 18th century Scottish Enlightenment and flourished in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in Scotland and America.
[citation needed]
Its roots can be found in responses to such philosophers as John Locke, George Berkeley and David Hume. The approach was a response to the "ideal system" that began with Descartes' concept of the limitations of sense experience
and led Locke and Hume to a skepticism that called religion and the
evidence of the senses equally into question. The common sense realists
found skepticism to be absurd and so contrary to common experience that
it had to be rejected. They taught that ordinary experiences provide
intuitively certain assurance of the existence of the self, of real
objects that could be seen and felt and of certain "first principles"
upon which sound morality and religious beliefs could be established.
Its basic principle was enunciated by its founder and greatest figure,
Thomas Reid:
[3]
- "If there are certain principles, as I think there are, which the
constitution of our nature leads us to believe, and which we are under a
necessity to take for granted in the common concerns of life, without
being able to give a reason for them--these are what we call the
principles of common sense; and what is manifestly contrary to them, is
what we call absurd.".
Naïve realism
Plato (left) and Aristotle (right), a detail of The School of Athens, a fresco by Raphael. In Plato's metaphysics, ever unchanging Forms, or Ideas, exist apart from particular things, and are related to them as their prototype or exemplar. Aristotle's philosophy of reality also aims at the universal. Aristotle finds the universal, which he calls essence, in the commonalities of particular things.
Naïve realism, also known as direct realism, is a philosophy of mind rooted in a common sense theory of perception that claims that the senses provide us with direct awareness of the external world. In contrast, some forms of idealism assert that no world exists apart from mind-dependent ideas and some forms of skepticism say we cannot trust our senses. The naive realist view is that objects have properties, such as texture, smell, taste and colour, that are usually perceived absolutely correct. We perceive them as they
really are.
Scientific realism
Scientific realism
is, at the most general level, the view that the world described by
science is the real world, as it is, independent of what we might take
it to be. Within philosophy of science,
it is often framed as an answer to the question "how is the success of
science to be explained?" The debate over what the success of science
involves centers primarily on the status of unobservable entities apparently talked about by scientific theories.
Generally, those who are scientific realists assert that one can make
reliable claims about unobservables (viz., that they have the same ontological status) as observables. Analytical philosophers
generally have a commitment to scientific realism, in the sense of
regarding the scientific method as a reliable guide to the nature of
reality. The main alternative to scientific realism is instrumentalism.
[citation needed]
Aesthetic realism
Aesthetic realism (not to be confused with Aesthetic Realism) may mean the claim that there are mind-independent aesthetic facts,
[4][5] but in general discussions about art "realism" is a complex term that may have a number of different meanings.
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