Marvin Perry Realism Essay

The poor suffered from disease, inhabited substandard housing, had a high rate of alcoholism, crime and fighting, and high unemployment, and experienced lack of government social services. The poor and urban workers were the people that worked more harshly and were exposed to more diseases.

1. How did poverty represent the problems of an expanding nation during the early Republic period?

The Working class that made up around 80% of society had little or no bargaining power with their employers resulting in the continuation of unfair working hours, bad wages, and unsanitary and hazardous working conditions. The workers could not even fight for their rights in the political system as only the rich were eligible to vote.

Before exploring Wilde’s preface, it is vital to explore the definitions of “aestheticism” and “realism” as Wilde would have understood them. Elizabeth Prettejohn defines aestheticism as a direct descendant of Pre-Raphaelitism in which the visual arts take center stage. These “visual arts” include paintings and sculptures, but can also be found in nature. Due to the ambiguity of its subjects, aestheticism does not have one true definition, but is commonly described as the movement that preceded Pre-Raphaelitism. While Pre-Raphaelites were concerned with the relationship between nature and reality, aestheticism is concerned with differentiating art from the real (Prettejohn 1-2). According to various lectures that Wilde had given on aestheticism throughout his lifetime, it is said that Wilde used the term “aestheticism” as a catch-all term for treating all forms of art, natural or man-made, as beautiful for their own sake. (Prettejohn 4). In contrast to aestheticism, realism is defined by author George Eliot as “the doctrine that all truth and beauty are to be attained by a humble and faithful study of nature, and not by substituting vague forms, bred by imagination on the mists of feeling, in place of definite, substantial reality.” Eliot claims that realism uses modesty to impose the modern, real world into art (Mullan 1). In the preface of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde expresses his distaste of realists (“Those who find ugly

Realism is the tendency to view or represent things as they really are and not focus on the imagination of a person. Many people do not like to think in a realistic mindset because it shows the flaws that society has, or the

exist when trying to make a scientific prediction. Similarly, In the field of social sciences

Realism is the literary term applied to compositions that aim at a faithful representation of reality, interpretations of the actualities of any aspect of life

Interpretivists also argue that the statistics and data used by positivists to discover their ‘laws of society’ might be invalid, because of the way they are gathered.

The idea of Realism was unofficially was created in fifth century BC by Thucydides, and continued through Niccolo Machiavelli. This lead to the first official IR theory of realism in Thomas Hobbes, amd Hans Morgenthau, known as Classical Realist. From there Classical Realism evolved to the ideas of Kenneth Waltz, which brought along the ideas of neo-realism or structural realism theory. Then came offensive, defensive, and neoclassical realism. Overall the main idea of realism is defined by internationalrelations.org as “when looking at the political system, or more specifically, the international system, realists focus their ideas about how international relations work based upon the concepts of power and security.” ("Realism

James Robert Brown of the University of Toronto is a realist. Realism, as affirmed by Brown, is determined by scientific success, which is best determined by theories that, first, “are able to organize and unify a great variety of unknown phenomena.” (Brown, p.133). Second, latter theories systemize data more accurately than former, lastly and most importantly “ a statistically significant number of novel predictions pan out,” (Brown, p.134).

Realism, also known as political realism, is centered around the concept of human nature. Realists think that selfish passions and desires largely affect human behavior, and in turn relations between states. They also believe in the structured state behavior called anarchy, which is defined as the lack of an overarching power in the international relations system. Anarchy means that there are no laws or rules that dictate interstate behavior. Realism is founded upon the belief that power and

Abstracted empiricists, had according to Mills, adopted a research approach that sought to replicate the demonstrated success of the physical sciences, but in doing so had prioritised method over substance. In this respect it was “systematically a-historical and non-comparative.” Quantitative survey methods were presumed to be more rigorous than other kinds of social inquiry. But this kind of research was costly, required significant staff to distribute, collect, and tally the findings in preparation for basic computational analysis. These actions required large budgets and resources, and so led to the bureaucratization of

Longino suggests that subjective judgment is a component of all knowledge production, and that acknowledging this will make for greater objectivity in science. She questions the basis for a distinction between the context of discovery and justification. If the context of justification is a myth, then it doesn 't make sense to speak about the 'accuracy ' of data. If it doesn 't make sense to speak about the accuracy of data, then it doesn 't make sense to propose a normative philosophy of science based on accuracy. What is need is a 'better bias. ' This better bias will be obtained by including as many diverse points of view as possible. Better bias implies broader inclusion of minorities and women.

It is explained that “Epistemology is a term that describes the nature of knowledge and the means of knowing; “how we know what we know” or “what we conceive as a truth” (Kuada, 2012, p.59) and the way knowledge is created and constructed or revealed and fixed (Wisker, 2011). Epistemology also provides a philosophical background for deciding what kinds of knowledge are legitimate and adequate, which helps with the most novice of researchers who quickly select a data gathering method as they are keen to get on with the job (Gray, 2011).

Traditionally, realism generally is associated with any position that endorses belief in the reality of something. Thus, one might be a realist about one 's perceptions of tables and chairs (sense datum realism), or about tables and chairs themselves (external world realism), or about mathematical entities such as numbers and sets (mathematical realism), and so forth. Scientific realism is a realism about whatever is described by our best scientific theories—from this point forward, ‘realism’ here denotes scientific realism. But what, more precisely, is that? In order to be evident as to what realism, in the context of the sciences, amounts to and to distinguish it from some important antirealist alternatives, it is useful to understand it in terms of three dimensions: a metaphysical (or ontological) dimension; a semantic dimension; and an epistemological dimension.