- interest in or concern for the actual or real, as distinguished from the abstract, speculative, etc.
- the tendency to view or represent things as they really are.
- Fine Arts.
- treatment of forms, colors, space, etc., in such a manner as to emphasize their correspondence to actuality or to ordinary visual experience.
- a style of painting and sculpture developed about the mid-19th century in which figures and scenes are depicted as they are experienced or might be experienced in everyday life.
- Literature.
- a manner of treating subject matter that presents a careful description of everyday life, usually of the lower and middle classes.
- a theory of writing in which the ordinary, familiar, or mundane aspects of life are represented in a straightforward or matter-of-fact manner that is presumed to reflect life as it actually is.
- Philosophy.
- the doctrine that universals have a real objective existence.
- the doctrine that objects of sense perception have an existence independent of the act of perception.
- awareness or acceptance of the physical universe, events, etc, as they are, as opposed to the abstract or ideal
- awareness or acceptance of the facts and necessities of life; a practical rather than a moral or dogmatic view of things
- a style of painting and sculpture that seeks to represent the familiar or typical in real life, rather than an idealized, formalized, or romantic interpretation of it
- any similar school or style in other arts, esp literature
- the thesis that general terms such as common nouns refer to entities that have a real existence separate from the individuals which fall under them
- the theory that physical objects continue to exist whether they are perceived or not
- the theory that the sense of a statement is given by a specification of its truth conditions, or that there is a reality independent of the speaker's conception of it that determines the truth or falsehood of every statement
