New realism (philosophy)

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New realism was a philosophy expounded by a group of six U.S. based scholars in the early 20th century.

The central feature of the new realism was a rejection of the epistemological dualism of John Locke and the older forms of realism. The group, including Ralph Barton Perry, Edwin Holt, and William Montague, maintained that when one is conscious of, or knows, an object, it is an error to say that there are two distinct facts -- knowledge of the object in a mind, and an extra-mental object in itself.

In an example from Edwin Holt: the question between the old realism and the new concerns knowledge that a particular cow is black. Is the blackness on that cow's hide, or in the observer's mind? "That color out there is the thing in consciousness selected for such inclusion by the nervous system's specific response,"Holt wrote.

My consciousness, in the sense Holt has in mind here, is not physically identical with the nervous system which is the condition of selections. The consciousness is "out there" with the hide of the cow. My consciousness is all throughout the field of sight -- and smell, and hearing -- for which my system selects. For consciousness is at any moment identical with the set of facts it is said to know.

This position has its attractions, and belongs to a broader category of views sometimes called neutral monism or (following William James, radical empiricism. But it hasn't worn well over the subsequent century.