INTRODUCTION

Obituary notices announcing the death of realism continue to appear in philosophical and theological works, but what is it that is supposed to have died? The philosophical doctrine known as realism can be expressed in terms of three characteristic sets of claims which, though not held by all realists and opposed by some, can serve as a preliminary formulation. Ontologically, the realist holds that there is a reality external to human minds and that it exists as it does independently of the concepts and interpretative grids in terms of which we think about it. Its being what it is does not depend on our conceiving it (as idealists hold), or on our conceptions of it (as Kantians hold), or indeed on our conceiving it at all. Reality is there to be discovered as it objectively is; it is not subjectively invented, constructed, or projected. Hence, epistemologically, the realist holds that reality can be (approximately) known as it is and not just as it appears to us to be (as empiricism holds). Semantically, the realist holds that it is possible to refer successfully to, and so make (approximately) true statements about, reality. That is, in classical terms, the truth of a proposition is a matter of its corresponding to reality independently of our being able to verify or otherwise confirm it.