Critical Realism a philosophy that at the highest level of generality purports to integrate the positive insights of both New Realism and idealism. New Realism was the first wave of realistic reaction to the dominant idealism of the nineteenth century. It was a version of immediate and direct realism. In its attempt to avoid any representationalism that would lead to idealism, this tradition identified the immediate data of consciousness with objects in the physical world. There is no intermediary between the knower and the known. This heroic tour de force foundered on the phenomena of error, illusion, and perceptual variation, and gave rise to a successor realism – Critical Realism – that acknowledged the mediation of ‘the mental’ in our cognitive grasp of the physical world. ‘Critical Realism’ was the title of a work in epistemology by Roy Wood Sellars (1916), but its more general use to designate the broader movement derives from the 1920 cooperative volume, Essays in Critical Realism: A Cooperative Study of the Problem of Knowledge, containing position papers by Durant Drake, A. O. Lovejoy, J. B. Pratt, A. K. Rogers, C. A. Strong, George Santayana, and Roy Wood Sellars. With New Realism, Critical Realism maintains that the primary object of knowledge is the independent physical world, and that what is immediately present to consciousness is not the physical object as such, but some corresponding mental state broadly construed. Whereas both New Realism and idealism grew out of the conviction that any such mediated account of knowledge is untenable, the Critical Realists felt that only if knowledge of the external world is explained in terms of a process of mental mediation, can error, illusion, and perceptual variation be accommodated. One could fashion an account of mental mediation that did not involve the pitfalls of Lockean representationalism by carefully distinguishing between the object known and the mental state through which it is known. The Critical Realists differed among themselves both epistemologically and metaphysically. The mediating elements in cognition were variously construed as essences, ideas, or sensedata, and the precise role of these items in cognition was again variously construed. Metaphysically, some were dualists who saw knowledge as unexplainable in terms of physical processes, whereas others (principally Santayana and Sellars) were materialists who saw cognition as simply a function of conscious biological systems. The position of most lasting influence was probably that of Sellars because that torch was taken up by his son, Wilfrid, whose very sophisticated development of it was quite influential.
See also IDEALISM; METAPHYSICAL REAL- ISM ; NEW REALISM ; PERCEPTION ; SELLARS , WILFRI. C.F.D.