Understanding Realism

Realism explained for you...

Understanding realism can be a bit of a tricky thing to do!

But actually it is really quite simple, and so there is no need for confusion.

Essentially a realist theory is one that posits that something actually exists - it is not just a misleading device or a figure of speech. As such, a realist theory makes a specific claim about what there is out there in the world.

Realist theories can apply to all sorts of things in life; commonly realist theories are seen in branches of ethics, for instance with regard to morality. Realism in ethics says that there really are moral values out there that we can find out about and gain knowledge of.

This compares to the many anti-realist theories which say that moral virtues and values do not actually exist independently of humans and are simply concepts that we must agree on; there is no value out there that we can discover and find and all agree on. If there were we would have encountered it by now and all agree, and anyway what would it be? The state of some moral values to attain knowledge of actually existing sounds strange.

So the connection can be made and is easy to see between realism and absolutism and anti or non-realist positions and relativism. Absolutism again being the theory that is one set of values that apply absolutely, whilst relativism makes a different claim that there is not just one set of values that applies to everyone everywhere at the same time.

Anything that involves concepts and theories in general can have those who interpret claims literally and are realists and those that don't. For instance people can be realist about a particular claim of quantum mechanics or see it as not really existing. For instance probability waves or the wavefunction can be seen as a real or simply a model.

Author: Stephen

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Last Updated: Feb 8th 2008

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