Realism

I. Definition
You’re looking at a computer screen. Pixels are glowing and changing before your
eyes, creating patterns that your mind transforms into words and sentences. The
sentences and ideas are in your mind (and mine, as I write them), but the computer,
the server, the pixels, and your eyeballs are all real objects in the real world.

This is the position of philosophical realism: the view that whatever we perceive is real,
truly out there. It’s not an illusion, or “all in our minds.”

Although realism is extremely popular with both professional philosophers and non-
philosophers, it’s actually very difficult to justify logically. It’s notoriously difficult, for
example, to prove logically that you’re not dreaming, or not in the Matrix. Of course,
it’s at least as difficult to prove logically that you are dreaming or in the Matrix, and
these difficulties have created room for a variety of philosophical debates.

II. Realism vs. Idealism

Realism is often contrasted with idealism. Realists and idealists disagree on whether
the objects around us are “real” (outside our minds, in the world), or whether they are
simply ideas.
*Note that this distinction has nothing to do with the popular sense of these two
terms. In popular culture, an idealist is someone who believes in high ideals like
justice, goodness, and beauty, whereas a realist is someone who does not believe in
such things and just tries to deal with “grim realities.” In philosophy, the terms are not
used this way.

Realism
Realism is a far more simple and direct idea, and nearly everyone outside of
professional philosophy is more of a realist than an idealist.
 This is most people’s common-sense view of the world. We use our senses to gather
information about real objects that are around us. Those objects are really out there,
and they have physical properties that we can sense – they reflect light for us to see,
or they emit odor particles for us to smell. Then the mind directly connects with these
objects through memory, thinking, etc. Reality is a collection of objects that we sense.

Idealism
Idealists reject this picture of the world. They argue that the universe is not a
collection of objects that human minds can perceive, but rather a collection of ideas
that human minds can grasp. All physical objects, they say, are manifestations, or a
kind of physical clothing on top of the idea.
Example
When you see a football arc through the air into the receiver’s hands, it’s following a
mathematical trajectory called a parabola. Idealists would say that the ball’s path is
“manifesting” the abstract idea of a parabola, so what’s really “real” is not the ball or the
air or the stadium, but the ideas that all these things represent.