To say that something is real is to say more than simply that it exists: it must exist objectively. Objective existence, in the relevant sense, has nothing to do with impartiality. An official government inquiry into the state of the economy may be unbiased and disinterested, and so objective in one perfectly respectable sense, but this is not enough to secure any sort of realism about the economy. It must also be shown that the economy exists independently of us: independently of our minds and our mental states. It is this dimension of realism that we hope to explore in the remaining chapters of Part I. In this chapter we explain some senses of mind-dependence that are inimical to realism.

Answering the quietist's challenge

What it takes for something to exist mind-independently should be intuitively easy to grasp. But articulating clearly and precisely what mind-independence amounts to, on the other hand, is a delicate matter. To some extent this task is straightforward. It is certainly easy to come up with slogans associated with this aspect of realist doctrine. A realist about a domain of Fs typically claims that the Fs exist “outside our minds”, and that is why we “discover” or “detect” the Fs rather than “constructing them”, “inventing them” or “projecting them on to the world”. And all of this goes some way towards explaining what it means to say that the realm of Fs exists mind-independently. An anti-realist, of course, rejects this characterization.