Core Debates in Metaphysics – Philosophy CUET PG – Notes

The Realism-ldealism Debate: The Nature of Reality

Metaphysics grapples with the most fundamental questions about reality. Perhaps the most enduring of these questions is: What is the ultimate nature of the world we experience? Is the world and its objects a solid, independent reality that exists whether or not any mind is aware of it? Or is reality, at its core, mental, spiritual, or constituted by consciousness? This fundamental divide gives rise to two major opposing schools of thought: Realism and Idealism.

The debate is not merely about abstract concepts; it shapes our understanding of knowledge, science, truth, and the place of humanity in the cosmos. It asks whether we are discoverers of a pre-existing universe or creators of the reality we perceive.

Realism: The Mind-Independent World

The Core Principle of Realism:

Realism, in its many forms, is grounded in a powerful common-sense intuition: the world exists independently of our minds. According to the realist, a tree falling in a forest does make a sound, even if no one is there to hear it. The mountains, stars, and atoms that make up the universe were here long before conscious beings evolved, and they will continue to be here long after we are gone. Reality is objective, external, and its properties are not contingent upon being perceived, thought about, or believed in. For the realist, the goal of inquiry, whether scientific or philosophical, is to achieve knowledge that corresponds to this independent reality. Truth is a matter of accurately representing the way the world is.

Varieties of Realism:

While all realists agree on the core principle of a mind-independent reality, they differ on the specifics of what this reality consists of and how we can know it.

• Naïve Realism (or Direct Realism): This is the most straightforward and intuitive form of realism. It holds that our senses provide us with direct, unmediated access to the world as it truly is. The apple you see is not an ‘idea’ or a ‘representation’ of an apple; you are directly perceiving the apple itself, with its properties of redness, roundness, and sweetness. The world is exactly as it appears to our senses. However, this view faces significant challenges. It struggles to account for perceptual illusions (a stick appearing bent in water), hallucinations (seeing things that are not there), and perceptual variation (the same object appearing differently to different observers or under different conditions).
• Scientific Realism: A more sophisticated view, scientific realism holds that the world described by our best scientific theories is the real world. While it concedes that our senses can be misleading, it trusts the methods of science to peel back the veil of appearances and reveal the underlying structure of reality. This reality includes not only observable entities but also unobservable ones posited by science, such as electrons, quarks, and gravitational fields. The remarkable predictive and explanatory success of scientific theories, according to the “no-miracles argument,” would be a sheer miracle if these theories weren’t at least approximately true representations of a mind-independent world.
• Platonic Realism (Realism about Universals): This form of realism addresses a different kind of entity: abstract objects or universals. A universal is a quality or property that can be shared by many individual things, such as ‘redness’, ‘justice’, or ‘humanity’. Plato argued that these universals are more real than the particular physical objects that instantiate them. They exist as perfect, eternal, and unchanging ‘Forms’ or ‘Ideas’ in a separate, non-physical realm. The particular red objects we see in the world are mere imperfect copies or shadows of the ultimate Form of Redness. So, for a Platonic realist, not only is the physical world real, but an abstract realm of essences is also real and, in fact, more fundamental.