ABSTRACT
E. B. Holt identifies clearly the major historic challenge to realism, and the solution he must offer to defend it. He must argue that "illusion, hallucination, and erroneous experience" can be accounted for within realism: that the contents of such experiences are not fundamentally different than the contents of any other experiences, or at least that the two types of experience do not differ in the ways suggested by his opponents. Perhaps a bit more surprisingly, Holt's approach received serious criticism from one of the other leaders of the New Realism movement, Montague. One consummate problem for people supporting realist approaches to philosophy or psychology—approaches that argue, assert, or presume that people can know the world—is the problem of illusion, the problem that people often seem to be wrong about the nature of the world. Holt's understanding of illusion would be guided by his understanding of consciousness.
