New Realism an early twentieth-century revival, both in England and in the United States, of various forms of realism in reaction to the dominant idealisms inherited from the nineteenth century. In America this revival took a cooperative form when six philosophers (Ralph Barton Perry, Edwin Holt, William Pepperell Montague, Walter Pitkin, Edward Spaulding, and Walter Marvin) published ‘A Program and First Platform of Six Realists’ (1910), followed two years later by the cooperative volume The New Realism, in which each authored an essay. This volume gave rise to the designation ‘New Realists’ for these six philosophers.
Although they clearly disagreed on many particulars, they concurred on several matters of philosophical style and epistemological substance. Procedurally they endorsed a cooperative and piecemeal approach to philosophical problems, and they were constitutionally inclined to a closeness of analysis that would prepare the way for later philosophical tendencies. Substantively they agreed on several epistemological stances central to the refutation of idealism. Among the doctrines in the New Realist platform were the rejection of the fundamental character of epistemology; the view that the entities investigated in logic, mathematics, and science are not ‘mental’ in any ordinary sense; the view that the things known are not the products of the knowing relation nor in any fundamental sense conditioned by their being known; and the view that the objects known are immediately and directly present to consciousness while being independent of that relation. New Realism was a version of direct realism, which viewed the notions of mediation and representation in knowledge as opening gambits on the slippery slope to idealism. Their refutation of idealism focused on pointing out the fallacy of moving from the truism that every object of knowledge is known to the claim that its being consists in its being known. That we are obviously at the center of what we know entails nothing about the nature of what we know. Perry dubbed this fact ‘the egocentric predicament,’ and supplemented this observation with arguments to the effect that the objects of knowledge are in fact independent of the knowing relation. New Realism as a version of direct realism had as its primary conceptual obstacle ‘the facts of relativity,’ i.e., error, illusion, perceptual variation, and valuation. Dealing with these phenomena without invoking ‘mental intermediaries’ proved to be the stumbling block, and New Realism soon gave way to a second cooperative venture by another group of American philosophers that came to be known as Critical Realism. The term ‘new realism’ is also occasionally used with regard to those British philosophers (principal among them Moore and Russell) similarly involved in refuting idealism. Although individually more significant than the American group, theirs was not a cooperative effort, so the group term came to have primarily an American referent. See also CRITICAL REALISM , IDEALISM, PER- CEPTIO. C.F.D.