[Revised entry by Alexander Miller on April 27, 2026.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
The question of the nature and plausibility of realism arises in many areas, including ethics, aesthetics, causation, modality, science, mathematics, semantics, and the everyday world of macroscopic material objects and their properties. Although it is possible to accept (or reject) realism across the board, it is more common for philosophers to be selectively realist or non-realist about various topics: it is perfectly possible to be a realist about the everyday world of macroscopic objects and their properties, but a non-realist about…

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