1. Preliminaries Four preliminary comments are needed. Firstly, debates about realism and opposing views have figured prominently in the history of philosophy (see the entry on idealism ), and indeed the birth of analytical philosophy can be traced at least in part to the rejection of idealism in favour of realism by G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell at the end of the 19th century (see Moore 1903 and Chapter IV of Russell 1912). However, our focus in this entry is predominantly on realism and opposing views in 20th century and contemporary analytic philosophy. Secondly, there has been a great deal of debate in recent philosophy about the relationship between realism, construed as a metaphysical doctrine, and doctrines in the theory of meaning and philosophy of language concerning the nature of truth and its role in accounts of linguistic understanding (see Dummett 1978 and Devitt 1991a for radically different views on the issue).…