REALISM
From the study material for different universities prepared by Dr.
S. Sreekumar
1. What is Realism?
Damian
Grant begins his monograph on realism thus:
Nothing
illustrates the chronic instability of the word more clearly than its
uncontrollable tendency to attract another qualifying word, or words, to
provide some kind of semantic support.
Here, Grant
is pointing out two important aspects of realism. Firstly, the word suffers
from a ‘chronic instability’. Secondly, the word needs some other ‘semantic
support’ to survive. Grant adds that these two qualities of the term have given
rise to numerous types of ‘realisms’ and he lists out as many as twenty six different types.
