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Dec 13, 2023 · This article explores the philosophical questions of reality, perception, and sensory experience. It uses Plato's allegory of the cave, sensory substitution studies, and virtual reality to illustrate how reality can be subjective, limited, and manipulated.
Reality is the independent nature and existence of everything knowable, whether it is knowable by logical inference, empirical observation, or some other form of experience. Reality’s existence and nature are independent because reality does not depend on our mind’s apprehension of it to continue to exist or to maintain its character.
Jul 8, 2002 · The question of the nature and plausibility of realism arises with respect to a large number of subject matters, including ethics, aesthetics, causation, modality, science, mathematics, semantics, and the everyday world of macroscopic material objects and their properties.
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- Realism in ontology
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realism, in philosophy, the viewpoint which accords to things which are known or perceived an existence or nature which is independent of whether anyone is thinking about or perceiving them.
The history of Western philosophy is checkered with disputes between those who have defended forms of realism and those who have opposed them. While there are certainly significant similarities linking the variety of positions commonly described as realist, there are also important differences which obstruct any straightforward general characterization of realism. Many, if not all, of these disputes may be seen as concerned in one way or another with the relations between, on the one hand, human beings as thinkers and subjects of experience and, on the other hand, the objects of their knowledge, belief, and experience. Do sense perception and other forms of cognition, and the scientific theorizing which attempts to make sense of their deliverances, provide knowledge of things which exist and are as they are independently of people’s cognitive or investigative activities? It is at least roughly true to say that philosophical realists are those who defend an affirmative answer to the question, either across the board or with respect to certain areas of knowledge or belief—e.g., the external world, scientific theories, mathematics, or morality.
The affirmative answer may seem no more than the merest common sense, because the vast majority of one’s beliefs are certainly most naturally taken to concern mind-independent objects whose existence is an entirely objective matter. And this seems to be so whether the beliefs in question are about mundane matters such as one’s immediate surroundings or about theoretical scientific entities such as subatomic particles, fundamental forces, and so on. Nevertheless, much argument and clarification of the issues and concepts involved (e.g., objectivity and mind-independence) is required if the realism favoured by common sense is to be sustained as a philosophical position.
In application to matters of ontology, realism is standardly applied to doctrines which assert the existence of entities of some problematic or controversial kind. Even under this more restricted heading, however, realism and opposition to it have taken significantly different forms, as illustrated in the following three examples.
Realism is the view that things exist or have a nature independent of human perception or cognition. Learn about the varieties, history, and arguments of realism in philosophy, from Plato's Forms to universals, scientific realism, and more.
Reality can be defined in a way that links it to worldviews or parts of them (conceptual frameworks): Reality is the totality of all things, structures (actual and conceptual), events (past and present) and phenomena, whether observable or not.
Nov 24, 2011 · A book that explores what reality is by examining various philosophical, physical, and cognitive perspectives. It covers topics such as dreams, matter, persons, and time, and cites examples from Descartes, Borges, and solipsism.
May 7, 2021 · Physical processes, conscious experience, and the social construction of reality are three major philosophical perspectives on the nature of reality.