realist

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

1. n. One who is inclined to literal truth and pragmatism.
2. n. A practitioner of artistic or philosophic realism.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. n. A logician who holds that the essences of natural classes have some mode of being in the real things: in this sense distinguished as a scholastic realist; opposed to nominalist. As soon as intellectual development had reached the point at which men were capable of conceiving of an essence, they naturally found themselves realists. But reflection about words inclined them to be nominalists. Thus, a controversy sprang up between these sects in the eleventh century (first in the Irish monasteries, and then spread through the more civilized countries of northern Europe), and was practically settled in favor of the realists toward the end of the twelfth century. During the fourteenth century a reaction from the subtleties of Scotus produced a revival of nominalistic views, which were brought into a thoroughgoing doctrine by Occam, his followers being distinguished as terminists from other schools of nominalists. At the time when scholasticism came to a rather violent end, owing to the revival of learning, the terminists were in the ascendant, though some of the universities were Scotist. The Cartesians did not profess to be realists; and Leibnitz was a decided nominalist; while the whole weight of the English school (Occam, Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Hartley, Reid, Brown, the Mills, and others) went in the same direction. At the present day philosophy seems to be, and science certainly is, prevailingly realistic. See quotation under realism, 1.
2. n. A philosopher who believes in the real existence of the external world as independent of all thought about it, or, at least, of the thought of any individual or any number of individuals.
3. n. In literature and art, a believer in or a practiser of realism; one who represents persons or things as he conceives them to be in real life or in nature; an opponent of idealism or romanticism.
4. n. One who advocates technical as opposed to classical education; one who upholds the method of the real-schools.
5. Of or pertaining to realism; realistic; naturalistic.

Wiktionary

1. n. philosophy An advocate of realism; one who believes that matter, objects etc. have real existence beyond our perception of them.
2. n. One who believes in seeing things the way they really are, as opposed to how they would like them to be.
3. n. art, literature An adherent of the realism movement; an artist who seeks to portray real everyday life accurately.

GNU Webster's 1913

1. n. (Philos.) One who believes in realism; esp., one who maintains that generals, or the terms used to denote the genera and species of things, represent real existences, and are not mere names, as maintained by the nominalists.
2. n. (Art. & Lit.) An artist or writer who aims at realism in his work. See Realism, 2.
3. n. a person who avoids unrealistic or impractical beliefs or efforts. Contrasted to idealist or visionary.

WordNet 3.0

1. n. a person who accepts the world as it literally is and deals with it accordingly
2. n. a painter who represents the world realistically and not in an idealized or romantic style
3. n. a philosopher who believes that universals are real and exist independently of anyone thinking of them