| Reality in everyday usage means "everything that exists." The term "Reality," in its most liberal sense, includes
everything that is, whether or not it is observable, accessible or understandable by science, philosophy, theology or any other
system of analysis. Reality in this sense may include both being and nothingness, whereas "existence" is often
restricted to being.
In the strict sense of European-German philosophy, in the tradition of Ludwig Wittgenstein, there are levels or gradation to the nature and conception of reality. These
levels include, from the most subjective to the most rigorous:
Phenomenological reality
On the broadest and most subjective level, the private experiences, curiosity, inquiry, and selectivity involved in the
personal interpretation of an event, shapes reality as seen by one and only one individual and hence is called phenomenological. This form of reality might be common to others as well, but at
times could also be so unique to oneself as to be never experienced or agreed upon by any one else. Much of the spiritual experience of an individual occurs on this level of reality.
Truth
When two or more individuals agree upon the interpretation and experience of a particular event, a consensus about an event
and its experience begins to be formed. This being common to a few individuals or a larger group, then becomes the 'truth' as
seen and agreed upon by a certain set of people. Thus one particular group may have a certain set of agreed truths, while another group might have still different set of
truths that have reached consensus. This lets different communities and
societies have varied and extremely different notions of reality and
truth of the external world. The religion and beliefs of people or communities are
a fine example of this level of reality. This is well expressed in the famous quote by Henry Thoreau, "It takes two to speak the truth — one to speak and another to hear."
Fact
A fact or factual entity is a phenomenon that is perceived as an elemental principle. It is rarely one that could be subject
to personal interpretation. Instead it is most often the observed phenomena of the natural world. The proposition 'the sun rises
in the east', is a fact. It is a fact for people belonging to any group or nationality regardless of which language they speak or
which part of the hemisphere they come from. The Galilean proposition
in support of the Copernican theory,
that the sun is the centre of the solar
system is one that states the fact of the natural world. However during his life
time he (Galileo) was ridiculed for that factual proposition, because far too few people had a consensus about it in order to
accept it as a truth. Fewer propositions are factual in content in the world, as compared to the many truths shared by various
communities, which are also fewer to the innumerable individual phenomenological realities. Much of scientific exploration, experimentation, interpretation and analysis is done on this level.
Axiom
Axioms are self-evident
realities, the existence of which is accepted as given and on which further conceptions are generated.
The facts of a natural world would hold true only in the systemic construction of that world. Hence in a different system, the
facts of another world might no longer hold valid. The fact that 'the sun rises in the east', might not be valid in a different
solar system where the planet might be tilted in a different angle, or revolving in a different direction around its star, so
that the star might rise on the planet's horizon in the west instead of the east. Hence the facts of a systemic entity might not be universal outside the
realms of that system. However, exceptionally rare conceptions might be universal in ethos. For example, the mathematical-set theoretic idea that the union of a set of one
entity and another set of four entities would create a set that contains five entities,
- A = {a}; B = { b, c, d, e}; A ∪ B = { a, b, c, d, e}
would be valid in any systemic process or in any universe. It is in effect a conception more rigorous and pervasive than a
fact. It can be argued that statements of this nature are only trivially true, since the definitions of the concepts "set",
"entity", "union", "one", "four", and "five" are all defined in terms of each other, and that these concepts have no inherent
reality apart from this self-referencing structure.
Mathematical formulations and propositions in mathematical logic are based on axioms, and hence these fields are
often referred to as pure disciplines. The validity of the set theoretic proposition would hold true in any systemic process or
universe. Its validity is self evident in ontological existence and works on the
axiomatic level of reality.
Some portion of ultimate reality may lie beyond our scope to
examine or even imagine. Many of the concepts of science and philosophy are often defined culturally and socially. This idea was well elaborated by Thomas Kuhn in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). See socially constructed
reality for more discussion on this point.
Most of the cultural conflict in the world occurs when certain individuals or groups try to impose their phenomenological
realities or truths on other people or communities.
What reality is not
"Reality," the concept, is contrasted with a wide variety of other concepts, largely depending upon the intellectual
discipline. It can help to understand what we mean by "reality" to note what we say is not real.
In philosophy, reality is contrasted with nonexistence (e.g., unicorns do not exist; so they are not real) and mere possibility (a mountain made of gold is merely possible, but is not real) unless they are discovered.
Sometimes philosophers speak as though reality is contrasted with existence
itself, though ordinary language and many other philosophers would treat these as synonyms. They have in mind the notion that
there is a kind of reality--a mental or intensional reality,
perhaps--that imaginary objects, such as the aforementioned golden mountain, have. Alexius Meinong is famous, or infamous, for holding that such things have so-called subsistence, and thus a kind of reality, even while they do not actually exist. Most
philosophers find the very notion of "subsistence" mysterious and unnecessary, and one of the shibboleths and starting points of
20th century analytic philosophy has been the forceful rejection of the notion of subsistence--of "real" but
nonexistent objects.
It is worth saying at this point that many philosophers are not content with saying merely what reality is not--some of
them have positive theories of what broad categories of objects are real, in addition. See ontology as well as realism (philosophy); these topics are also briefly treated below.
In ethics, political
theory, and the arts, reality is often contrasted with what is ideal.
In ethics, discussions of ethical perfectionism, what might be called "moral idealism" or the notion that we are obligated to
be morally perfect human beings, runs up against notions of what is real about human nature and the human condition.
In political theory there is an old and distinguished tradition of inventing utopias
and utopianism--those of Plato and
Thomas More are the most famous--but these are often accused of ignoring the
so-called facts of reality concerning human nature. Political liberalism, by
contrast with conservatism, is usually thought of as being of the contrary
view--that human nature is inherently changeable, and that there are no "facts of reality" concerning human nature, a view
advocated in the twentieth century by the existentialists. And,
consequently, utopianism is more often a feature of liberalism rather than conservatism. (This perspective is furthered explored
in the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek's book The Road to Serfdom (ISBN 0226320618), defending the theory that
efforts towards utopia inevitably leads to totalitarianism, theories further explored by the Public Choice school of economics, applying the study of
human incentives on political and group behavior through rational choice.)
In the arts there was a broad movement beginning in the 19th century,
realism (which led to naturalism),
which sought to portray characters, scenes, and so forth, realistically. This was in contrast and reaction to romanticism, which portrayed their subjects idealistically. Commentary about these
artistic movements is sometimes put in terms of the contrast between the real and the ideal: on the one hand, the average,
ordinary, and natural, and on the other, the superlative, extraordinary, improbable, and sometimes even supernatural. Obviously,
when speaking in this sense, "real" (or "realistic") does not have the same meaning as it does when, for example, a philosopher
uses the term to distinguish, simply, what exists from what does not exist.
In the arts, and also in ordinary life, the notion of reality (or realism) is also often contrasted with illusion. A painting
that precisely indicates the visually-appearing shape of a depicted object is said to be realistic in that respect; one that
distorts features, as Pablo Picasso's paintings are famous for doing, are
said to be unrealistic, and thus some observers will say, but with questionable grammatical correctness, that they are "not
real." But there are also tendencies in the visual arts toward so-called realism and
more recently photorealism that invite a different sort of contrast with
the real. Trompe l'oeil (French, "fool the eye") paintings
render their subjects so "realistically" that the casual observer might temporarily be deceived into thinking that he is seeing
something, indeed, real--but in fact, it is merely an illusion, and an intentional one at that.
In psychiatry, reality, or rather, of being in touch with reality is integral to the notion of schizophrenia, since it has often been defined in part by reference to being "out
of touch" with reality. The schizophrenic is said to have hallucinations and delusions which concern people and
events that are not real. However there is controversy over what is considered out of touch with reality,
particularly due to the noticeable comparison of the process of forcefully instituting individuals for expressing their beliefs
in society to reality enforcement. The practice's possible
covert use as a political tool can perhaps be illustrated by the 18th Century psychiatric sentences in the U.S of black slaves
for 'crazily' attempting to escape. See also anti-psychiatry and one
its prominent figures, the ex-psychiatrist Thomas Szasz.
In each of these cases, discussions of reality, or what counts as "real," take on quite different casts; indeed, what we say
about reality often depends on what we want to say it is not.
Reality, world views, and theories of reality
A common colloquial usage would have "reality" mean "perceptions, beliefs, and attitudes toward reality," as in "My reality is
not your reality." This is often used just as a colloquialism indicating that the parties to a conversation agree, or should
agree, not to quibble over deeply different conceptions of what is real. For example, in a religious discussion between friends,
one might say (attempting humor), "You might disagree, but in my reality, everyone goes to heaven."
But occasionally--and particularly in the case of those who have been exposed to certain ideas from philosophy, sociology,
literary criticism, and other fields--it is often thought that there simply and literally is no reality beyond the
perceptions or beliefs we each have about reality. Such attitudes indicate anti-realism, that is, the view that there is no objective reality, whether acknowledged explicitly or not.
These topics will be discussed in greater detail below.
If we really do literally mean by "reality" simply "beliefs about reality," then our article about reality would necessarily,
to be complete, have to outline every world view (this is how the German word Weltanschauung is usually translated)--every broadly different way of "seeing" reality. In this sense,
the topic of reality encompasses many other topics: perception, psychology generally, cognitive psychology and cognitive
science, religion, sociology
and anthropology, and topics in philosophy.
But there is a way to make the topic of reality less cumbersome for present purposes: restrict the discussion to theories
about the general topic of reality itself. Thus, for example, a certain Christian world view would not count as a theory of
reality, but the theory that the Christian world view is a "construction" of reality would count as a theory about
reality. It is theories about reality, in this sense, that philosophers discuss as part of metaphysics; such theories are also sometimes discussed in literary theory (which is, today, heavily influenced by Continental philosophy and heavily anti-realist) as well as in sociology and cultural anthropology.
Philosophical views of reality
Philosophy addresses two different aspects of the topic of reality: the nature of reality itself, and the relationship between
the mind (as well as language and culture) and reality.
On the one hand, ontology is the study of being, and the central topic of
the field is couched, variously, in terms of being, existence, "what is," and reality. The task in ontology is to describe the
most general categories of reality and how they are interrelated.
If--what is rarely done--a philosopher wanted to proffer a positive definition of the concept "reality," it would be done under
this heading. As explained above, some philosophers draw a distinction between reality and existence. In fact, many analytic
philosophers today tend to avoid the term "real" and "reality" in discussing ontological issues. But for those who would treat
"is real" the same way they treat "exists," one of the leading questions of analytic philosophy has been whether existence (or
reality) is a property of objects. It has been widely held by analytic philosophers that it is not a property at all,
though this view has lost some ground in recent decades.
On the other hand, particularly in discussions of objectivity that have
feet in both metaphysics and epistemology, philosophical discussions of
"reality" often concern the ways in which reality is, or is not, in some way dependent upon (or, to use fashionable
jargon, "constructed" out of) mental and cultural factors such as perceptions, beliefs, and other mental states, as well as
cultural artifacts, such as religions and political movements, on up to the vague notion of a common cultural world view or Weltanschauung.
The view that there is a reality independent of any beliefs, perceptions, etc., is called realism. More specifically, philosophers are given to speaking about "realism about" this and that, such as
realism about universals or realism about the external world. Generally, where one can identify any class of object the existence
or essential characteristics of which is said to depend on perceptions, beliefs, language, or any other human artifact, one can
speak of "realism about" that object.
One can also speak of anti-realism about the same objects. "Anti-realism" is the latest in a long series of terms for
views opposed to realism. Perhaps the first was idealism, so called because reality was said to be in the mind, or "ideal" in that special sense.
Berkeleyan idealism
is the view, propounded by the Irish empiricist George Berkeley, that the objects of perception are actually ideas in the mind. On this view, one
might be tempted to say that reality is a "mental construct"; this is not quite accurate, however, since on Berkeley's view
perceptual ideas are created and coordinated by God. By the twentieth century, views similar to Berkeley's were called phenomenalism. Phenomenalism differs from Berkeleyan idealism primarily in that
Berkeley believed that minds, or souls, are not merely ideas nor made up of ideas, whereas varieties of phenomenalism, such as
that advocated by Russell, tended to go farther to say that the mind itself is merely a collection of perceptions, memories,
etc., and that there is no mind or soul over and above such mental events.
Finally, anti-realism became a fashionable term for any view which
held that the existence of some object depends upon the mind or cultural artifacts. The view that the so-called external world is
really merely a social, or cultural, artifact, called social constructionism, is one variety of anti-realism. Cultural relativism is the view that social issues such as morality are not absolute, but at least
partially cultural artifact.
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