The Metaphysical Scope of the New Realism: Confronting Eco’s and Parrini’s Strictures

Umberto Eco wonders how the New Realism differs from the Old Realism, of which it shares the correspondence view of truth and knowledge; so he suggests in its place a “negative” realism. Paolo Parrini challenges both Ferraris and Eco to produce arguments showing that the unamendable object of our knowledge is a metaphysically independent reality, rather than simply experience itself; and since he believes that this cannot be shown, he proposes instead an “empirical” realism. I argue that Ferraris’ realism is far from unsophisticated, and Eco himself must either grant some form of correspondence, or fall back into post-modern relativism. Further, I suggest that a merely “empirical” realism does not fully satisfy our demand for knowledge, and I sketch strategies for answering Parrini’s challenge. For instance, who claims that we cannot know reality in itself swaps the usual sense of ‘knowing’ with a new and unworkable one.