What distinguishes real from unreal?
What's the difference between real and unreal?
Is that I can't know everything about real things? For instance, I can't know everything about the Eiffel tower. It's real. If there's a tower of which I know every true statement, that has to be a tower I made up. It's imaginary.
Thoughts?
Is that I can't know everything about real things? For instance, I can't know everything about the Eiffel tower. It's real. If there's a tower of which I know every true statement, that has to be a tower I made up. It's imaginary.
Thoughts?
Comments (70)
Would you say that empirical is a kind of justification? Statement X is true. The justification is empirical. Statement Y is true. This is justified by reason.
Couldn't both statements be about something real?
But Thorongil, I know Santa wears a red suit. Santa is not real.
Teacher: "You don't know anything, Yogi"
Yogi Berra: "I don't even suspect."
Urbain Le Verrier predicted that Neptune existed, and Johann Gottfried Galle first observed it, having some knowledge of where it should be. Neither was "the first" in a sense. Others had suspected that there was a missing planet, and others had observed the planet without knowing it was missing or was even a planet. But a mathematical demonstration was needed: Planet X is causing perturbations in Uranus's orbit. "This" is the orbit it should have, and... Look! There it is!
So, seeing in this case was not believing, and believing (the math) led to confirmed seeing. The people who only "suspected" there was another planet out there didn't know enough. (Some people suspect there is a planet exactly opposite of earth which we can't see because the sun is always in the way.)
We don't know much about neptune (it's big, it's dense, and it's cold). We've seen it. Sort of, anyway. It's blue. That's not much, but knowing that something exists at all is knowing quite a bit, especially compared to "don't even suspect".
About the Eiffel Tower we both know a great deal, and can know more. You could, for instance, run your hands over the entire surface of the thing, top to bottom. You could smell, taste, feel, hear, and see every piece (not recommended). You could have as much intimate contact as you wished. You could further study it exhaustively with x-rays, stress gauges, and other devices. After doing all this, would you "know" the tower better than the tourist who comes, sees, takes a selfie, and moves on to the Louvre? Yes you would. But you can't "feel" what it is like "to be" a tower, to be a bolt subject to a certain amount of shear. You can't know what it is like to be me, and you can't know what it is like to be a bolt, either.
Most times I can't recall my dreams, meaning that I'm not even an expert of my own imagination. Other times my dreams have been crushed, which has nothing to do with what we're talking about, but it's a melancholy aside.
The difference between the real and the unreal is that the real is out there and the unreal in here. I know, very simple, but sometimes we have to accept that everything we learned in kindergarten (and even before) is true.
I could make up a word, let's say, florga, and then say it's a particular type of tree bark. Unless I have perceived, or inductively conclude based on reading a book on dendrology, the existence of a florga, then I cannot claim on any grounds, in the case of my personal experience, or good grounds, in the case of what dendrologists say, to have knowledge of it.
To drive the point home, if we grant your reasoning about Santa Claus, literally anything thinkable would have to be said to be known, which is obviously impossible given the infinite number of contradictions that would arise in doing so. Hence, you couldn't actually establish as true anything at all, including the claim that you have knowledge that Santa Claus exists. So your claim of knowledge concerning Santa Claus is self-defeating in the end. You have knowledge of red hats and are merely applying that to an imaginary figure.
I thought I'd use bears and caves as my example because that's something that we've all come across.
Quoting Wosret
No, things we think are real we take seriously, not "real things we take seriously." It doesn't matter whether it's real or not real; it only matters if we think it's real.
I think has more to do with how the justification for a given claim "bottoms out". So, the fact that a claim is not directly justified by appeal to empirical observations does not automatically disqualify it from being about the real. A statement is only disqualified in virtue of its justification ultimately bottoming out in appeals to claims about the attitudes of a particular person or group (or into claims about the structure of attitudes as such). So to give a simple example, justification for claims about Harry Potter will ultimately bottom out in appeals to claims about the attitudes of a particular person (i.e. JK Rowling), whereas the justification for claims about the chemical composition of DNA will ultimately bottom out in appeals to empirical observations.
I don't think this is right. Imagine that someone has made a list of justifications (call this set J) for a statement about something and this suffices to demonstrate that r is real. I can invent a set of justifications (P) that is just J with the last statement "at least this is how it is in my Harry Potter Fanfic". By the assumption on J, P suffices to show that r is real, but r is also unreal by construction. This implies that a set of justifications can suffice to show something is real if some subset of that set shows that it is real - or alternatively, that some subset of the set of justifications shows that something is unreal.
"bottoming out" would correspond to choosing the last element(s?) of this set of justifications, right? Then whether something is real or unreal depends on the last (few?) justifications given for it.
Imagine that we live in a time when we can't see the dark side of the moon. We have the ability to imagine that the moon is a semi-sphere and that the dark side is flat. But we reject that, not on empirical grounds, but on the grounds that it defies reason.
In this case, "The moon is a sphere" is not based on observation. Wosret's comment that we distinguish the real from the unreal by virtue of the potential for effect along with Bittercrank's mention of the original case for the existence of Pluto both point to the part reason plays in distinguishing real from unreal.
McDoodle's view is undeniable. If you go to teach a youngster what we mean by "real" you'll inevitably find yourself pointing to things that aren't real to provide contrast. And the looming possibility here is that there really is no "ultimate" criteria for deciding that something is real. Frequently, as Hanover mentioned, the distinction really comes from getting on with life.
The theory that I posed in the OP comes from the hypothesis that a fair amount of the time, I am thinking in terms of indirect realism. My theory of truth is Correspondence. I'm looking for the representation that best corresponds to the real (mainly when I'm at work.. in my free time I'm a high-functioning lunatic). But I can hear somebody like Banno asking: why does your praxis have to be about representations?
What occurred to me was that of the realm of fiction, we collectively know everything about it because we made it up. It's the realm of the real that gives rise to the concept of the truth which is unknown. And in fact, there's a little bit of unknown regarding everything that's real. That's why I say I'm thinking in terms of representations. I take the moon to be real. But I don't know everything about it. It's here that the divide appears between my representation of the moon and the real moon appears.
If I left out somebody's cogent point... could you say it again?.
I was objecting to the use of "empirical" to describe a real object. My point was that "empirical" is a property of justifications for accepting the truth of a statement. Real objects have properties like tiny or red... not empirical. The dark side of the moon scenario i wrote about above is meant to make that point. Agree?
Why do you think that you cannot know everything? It seems to me that taking the time to do so would be the only thing from stopping you. Or do you think that just because you will never know everything about it then it cannot be real. Would it then be real for someone that does know everything about it?
"bottoming out" would correspond to choosing the last element(s?) of this set of justifications, right? Then whether something is real or unreal depends on the last (few?) justifications given for it.[/quote]
Hi fdrake. Bottoming out is not really a matter of selecting which element comes last in a list of justifications that someone has arbitrarily generated with respect to some claim. What counts as justification for any given claim is ultimately determined by the norms governing rational discourse, and the content of those norms is (generally speaking) not entirely under the authority of the particular individuals who happen to be engaged in any given instance of discourse.
For instance, suppose that you were to ask me to justify the claim that water has a boiling point of 100 degrees centigrade, and I were to respond by saying that the United States Congress recently declared the boiling point of water to be 100 degrees centigrade. You might accept my response depending on whatever else you happen to believe about the reliability of the Congress in declaring matters of scientific fact, but more then likely you'd press me to offer a better reason. In other words, you're not willing to let the justification of that claim bottom out in a claim about the decrees of the US congress, and the reason you're not willing to let it bottom out in that way has to do with your understanding of what counts as a legitimate form of justification for the type of claim under question, and that understanding is ultimately based on your grasp of the norms of rational discourse, the content of which you did not determine and do not (personally) have any ultimate authority over.
Yes, I agree that "empirical" is not a property of objects. My point was that the real/unreal distinction is better understood in terms of the structure of justification rather than in terms of complete/incomplete knowability. I'm not convinced the latter is viable. For instance, does anyone know how many hairs were on Hamlet's head the moment he uttered "to be or not to be", or what Romeo had for breakfast the day before he died? I think you are on the right track in appealing to that fact that we have authority over the fictional in a way that we do not have over the real. However, I don't think that this authority entails complete knowability, and would argue that this difference in authority is better understood in terms of how claims are justified. To have authority over the truth of a claim is a matter of its justification being ultimately grounded in your attitudes (e.g. whims, prejudices, beliefs, desires, intentions, stipulations, etc.). So what I'm proposing is that we understand real objects to be the set of objects that are referred to by the set of claims over which we do not have such authority (i.e. that are not ultimately justified by appeal to anyone's attitudes). Thoughts?
What about laws? Aren't they real even though we have authority over them?
I don't think this gets over my objection, that the real is understood by contraries or contradictories, implying there is no real-in-itself. What is the negation of this set of real objects? (I'm temporarily hooked on logical words) Or, to put it another way, I can't imagine a set of objects that is not ultimately justified by appeal to someone's attitudes.
I take as locally real what I and my fellow adjacent humans accept as best current approximations. The landscape seen from my window is really there, and yet there is a well-known blind-spot in it, quite apart from the fact that a different sets of lenses with a different optical range would see more (which leads some of a scientific persuasion to argue that it's only the microscope that sees what is really there). But put us in the dark then give one of us night-vision glasses and they will be able to tell the others what's really around us.
And then, put me in a laboratory and I will be altogether more particular and fine-grained about what's real.
And then, take me to an evangelical church another Sunday and we will debate quite other reals.
And thence to the illusionist's show, and on to the opera where I will unexpectedly find my real feelings (concealed during all these other realities) overflow into tears when a woman sings of her lost child, as she did yesterday at a stunning performance of Janacek's 'Jenufa' that I went to!
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Your initial post on this thread argued that the word "real" has various meanings depending on what it is being contrasted against. You mentioned real/unreal, real/illusory real/imaginary and real/abstract. My initial thought in response is to deny that these truly designate different senses of the word "real" by claiming that the illusory, imaginary and abstract are simply different categories of the unreal. Claims about the illusory, the imaginary and the abstract all inevitably bottom out into claims about people's attitudes, though they will each do so in different ways. Or least, that's what seems prima facie reasonable to me at this point, without having devoted much serious thought to the matter. Perhaps you could comment on whether or not you agree before I spend more time thinking about it.
You also said above that you can't imagine a set of objects that is not ultimately justified by appeal to someone's attitudes. Sorry if this comes off as nit-picking, but it's the claims about objects, rather than the objects themselves that are/aren't justified. In any event, empirical observation claims are most often presented as the exemplar of claims that do not need to be justified by appealing to claims about anyone's attitudes, because they can instead be justified by appeal to claims about the reliability of the causal mechanisms that produced them.
To put this in terms of "authority" and "attitude-independence", I would argue that empirical observation claims are the class of claims from which our authority is withdrawn by default as a matter of course. In other words, we tend to treat our own empirical observation claims as attitude-independent by default. This is basically the conclusion of Wilfrid Sellars's argument for the priority of "is" with respect to "seems"; we naturally assume that perception is veridical unless confronted with good reasons for thinking otherwise, at which point we might (but don't have to) retreat into claims about how things "appear" or "look", which is a move that simultaneously expands our authority over our claim and retracts its purport with regard to what "is", thus increasing its justificatory dependence upon our subjective attitudes.
In any event, this inevitably raises the question of circularity. Observation claims are justified by appeal to claims about causal mechanisms, but claims about causal mechanism are justified by appeal to yet more observation claims. This obviously won't be convincing to anyone who doubts the veridicality of perception in general. If we accept Sellars's arguments for the priority of "is" over "seems" and also the contention that observation statements form the non-inferential basis for all other "is" claims, then the skeptic's challenge amounts to the claim that we can perform a global suspension of the concept "is". I think that a semi-persuasive argument can be made to the effect that, insofar as the skeptic wishes to demonstrate his conclusion, he will inevitably appeal to claims about what "is" the case, thus undermining his very position.
The point of all that rambling was to try to secure the notion that empirical observation claims can function as the set of claims that do not bottom out into claims about anyone's attitudes insofar as they (1) are treated as attitude-independent by default, (2) can be structured into virtuous circles of justification and (3) can't be thrown into question en masse without engaging in pragmatic contradiction.
Finally, you mentioned finding your "real" feelings while watching Janacek's 'Jenufa', and it's not my intention to deny either the truth or the meaningfulness of such claims. I agree that the word "real" is used in many different senses, and I am not suggesting that there is a single "correct" way to use the word. I am concerned with a particular usage that has been in play as part of the on-going dialectic of Western (and perhaps even non-Western) philosophical thought since at least the time of Aristotle. I'm sure we could get into debate over the extent to which that claim is true, but my point is simply to state that there's a particular concept and associated dialectic that I am interested in, and I don't consider it to be problematic that there are other usages that happen to fall outside of that scope.
Sorry this post was so long.
This had occurred to me. Fictional worlds imply unknown truths. But look at the statement: "Hamlet's hair-count was 90,000." Is that statement ever truth-apt? The term "reality bubble" comes to me to describe the way we enter fictional worlds, hypothetical situations, and even contemplate possibility. It's a kind of psychological act (to take Ying's inspiration).... to suspend disbelief and accept a fictional world as real. It's when we inhabit the reality bubble that it seems that there are things about Hamlet we don't know. Exit the bubble, and it's obvious that those questions don't have answers.
It's odd that you picked Hamlet. To me, he's a character who is trying to see beyond his reality bubble... which makes it an extraordinary play. I've found that not everybody interprets it that way, though.
[quote=AaronR]. So what I'm proposing is that we understand real objects to be the set of objects that are referred to by the set of claims over which we do not have such authority (i.e. that are not ultimately justified by appeal to anyone's attitudes). Thoughts?[/quote]
Right. Although I think your point about Hamlet indicates that the set of real objects doesn't have a fixed membership.
Thanks!
The problem that I see with this is that exiting the "reality bubble" has the effect of making all fictional claims seem like they are not truth-apt, not just the ones that we can't know the answers to. So at this point I'm not convinced that we can leverage that idea to support the notion that complete knowability is the criterion for unreality.
[quote=Mongel;1082"]
It's odd that you picked Hamlet. To me, he's a character who is trying to see beyond his reality bubble... which makes it an extraordinary play. I've found that not everybody interprets it that way, though.[/quote]
Indeed. I love that play.
I claim that Moby Dick is a fictional whale (as opposed to a squid). That statement is true. But you're right.. I don't think the scientific community knows everything there is to know about whales, so there could be unknown truths about Moby.
Yea, I think you killed my theory.
Yes. In fact, I won't ever deny the data of my senses. I saw what I saw. I heard what I heard. I will allow some flexibility with interpretation, though. Reason might conduct some negotiations where there's doubt.
What if you are on LSD and see a zebra prancing down the street? Is that zebra real?
I cross myself like a Catholic when I relate some of the stuff I experienced on acid. Never saw a zebra, though. LSD isn't a so-called "true hallucinogenic." Datura is. It undermines a person's ability to tell the difference between what's real and what isn't. Conventional wisdom says only fools take it because nothing good comes from it.
But to answer your question, if I saw a prancing zebra, I wouldn't deny what I saw. Deciding what it means that I saw it (whether it was real or not) would be an interpretation.
What do you mean, "interpretation"? Sorry, I was confused with this part of your response.
My theory of "experience vs interpretation" comes from the fact that I had dreams that came true when I was young. As an older teenager, I decided that it was my mind playing tricks on me. That was a nice theory, but committing to it set me on the course toward a crisis. If I accepted that my mind is dysfunctional, what was the basis for ever believing its testimony?
My solution was to set a rule for myself. I won't ever deny what I experience. I experienced having dreams that came true when I was young. What I won't allow is inflexiblity of interpretation. I don't know what it means that I experienced that. Maybe there was something wrong with the chemistry of my brain. Maybe there's more than one way to experience events in time and a dream can be an alternate to the waking mode. I don't know.
I note that some realists would be outraged by my flexibility. Bottom line is: it's not like I have a choice. Maintenance of my sanity is my responsibility. I've done a pretty good job. Unfortunately, that doesn't translate into a sturdy argument. :)
Are skeptical probabilities not enough to pragmatically determine if something is real or not? So being sober and fully rational would make experiences more probable of being true than experiences under the influence or while in an irrational mindset?
Pragmatism is focus on outcomes. A pragmatist accepts a thing as real "for all practical purposes" and finds no value in trying to go beyond that. If you're driving down a highway, it's practical to accept that the road is real and will meet your tires as you speed along. If you lack sobriety, you shouldn't be driving a car... not because you might lose confidence in the reality of the road, though. It's because your ability to react appropriately is diminished.
Is there any other way of determining the existence of something other than to directly observe it and assume all methods of rational inquiry are working?
Indirect observation is sufficient in many cases.... seeing evidence of X without directly observing X. Why do you ask this?
—Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Sorry to take so long to reply, I'm doing a course and it leaves little time for reflection. I'm sorry too that I was rather slapdash with words and I quite accept your correction about 'claims' (which I think is in a later para than quoted but I didn't want to make the quote unmanageably long!).
I don't feel these different alternatives to 'real' all bottom out as 'different categories of the unreal'. I think that's to assume your univocal, as it were, answer. I am thinking of Nelson Goodman's 'many worlds', each of which can be rigorously delimited. I think the boundaries of the 'real' overlap but are different, depending on the shared assumptions of the people communicating.
Perception is the most 'scientific' example. My moment-to-moment experience I take for 'real'. But I accept that on closer scrutiny the world I inhabited at that moment had other features that I missed, and they are 'real' too. My 'old gits' philosophy group used to watch videos by Steven Novella in which one of his catch phrases was 'Whereas in reality' - which he would use to show you how things 'really' are compared to the 'illusion' of your perception, e.g. of everyone's blindspot. I regard both understandings as 'real' and reject his formulation, although he regards his formulation, as I understand it, as empirically-based, and I regard it as based on his attitude.
Where biology and chemistry, say, don't coincide, or where physics and chemistry don't coincide, I take both formulations as 'real'.
I take 'Don Juan' to be a fictional character but 'He's a Don Juan' to be an ok description of a person who seems real enough to me. Here I don't think the 'set of real objects' idea works: objects can be in a real set and an alternative set depending on context and attitudes.
I hope this is a reasonable basis for response. Thanks for your thoughts.
In other words, the ensuing discussion will set out to determine how we "ought" to think about the general formal structure of reality. So whereas you seem to be saying that the fact that the content of "reality" varies by discursive context precludes the possibility of there being anything like a "formal structure of reality", I would argue that it is actually a condition for its possibility. Discursive contexts are not hermetically sealed with respect to one another, anyone can come along at any time and challenge the shared assumptions undergirding any given context, and that is part of what makes the debate over the content of those underlying assumptions possible.
If you're interested and have the time, check out Peter Wolfendale's "Essay On Transcendental Realism". It situates the argument that I have presented here in a broader dialectical context, which may (or may not) help clarify it.
Thanks Aaron. Your position seems related to 'ontic structural realism', insofar as I understand that, which is not an awful lot.
I realise I am very minimalist in these debates. I am halfway through a first quick reading of the Wolfendale article - for which my thanks - and come up against fundamental statements where I know I will get stuck. I think it's because I've been a struggling dramatist most of my life, and drama is how the world(s) seem(s) to me. So I don't think that 'All discourse aims at truth', indeed I eschew absolute remarks like that as much as possible (but sometimes find I've made them!). Likely most discourse aims at communication of understanding, perhaps, though some of it is communication about and of power-relations, some about profound feelings, and some like the best art is not very definable in what it's about.
I've grappled lately with McDowell and Haugeland in an effort to find a friendly way in which objectivity can make sense to me in the way, I feel, it does for you and Wolfendale. But I can't seem to get there. So much of this theorising seems, underneath, to be deeply in love with an idea of science and therefore blind to how people mostly talk. For me the empirical in the ordinarily real way of things is soaked in attitudes, and we have to drain events and objects of what they most importantly mean to us - my mother's jewel-box, the hill I look up at from my window every morning where I've walked countless hours, my friends and lovers and all our associations and memories - in order to arrive at this stripped-down attitude-free version of the 'real'.
Anyway I'll carry on with the article when I have a bit of time over the weekend, but that's my first reaction, I hope it makes sense.
The idea that there is a "common conceptual thread", which, as you seem to be using it, might be taken in the sense of an essence, is rather, for me and per Wittgenstein, better understood as a more or less loose association of conceptions, which certainly may be pre-critically understood as a threadlike essence, but which unravels on closer examination.
You give an example of someone coming in and questioning the others' assumptions that numbers are real, and say that the discussion now devolves to considerations of what is meant in general by the term 'reality. In relation to what you go on to say of that situation, namely that "that discussion now brackets questions about what particular things are or are not real and asks after what it means to attribute reality to anything at all."; I would respond that this is misleading, because although the question of the reality of particular things may be bracketed, the question of what kinds of things are real could not be left out, or there could be no discussion at all.
I have engaged in many discussion of the 'nature of reality' where the assertion has been made that numbers are real, but always, when the question of what is meant by the 'reality of number' is raised the answer is given as a denial of material reality along with an assertion of some other unspecified kind of reality. The issue I have is that if a postulated 'kind of reality' cannot be specified in any way other than as 'not material', what motivation could we have to take it seriously?
Now I am not arguing that there is an ultimate 'nature of reality', but if we were to think there were, then the best candidate by far would be 'material reality'. On the other hand the idea of reality seems to be inextricably tied to the idea of existence, and I think it is reasonable to think there can be more than one kind of existence , fictional existence, functional existence, logical existence and so on. In the same way I think we can say there are fictional,functional and logical realities. In the end I think all realities, in one way or the other, can only be thought as material, (by which I definitely don't mean 'stuff') but that is another story.
As for Wolfendale, yes, your critique does make sense to me. That said, I don't agree with it. The thing to keep in mind as you read Wolfendale is that he is not attempting to describe the way that human beings actually think, argue or communicate. He would say that that is the job of psychology, sociology, etc. Instead he's attempting to describe the normative structure of thought, or, what is sometimes called "transcendental psychology". What good is that? Well, it's an attempt to work out what we ought to be committed to solely in virtue of being rational subjects. To be a rational subject is to occupy a place within the "space of reasons", or to be the type of subject that intrinsically makes a claim about something. As such we have a set of responsibilities that we are bound to, regardless of whether or not we actually fulfill those responsibilities or even fully understand them. His goal is therefore to work out the implications of claiming itself, to explicitly identify what it means to make a claim, and what it means to be the type of subject that makes claims. He's not saying that this form of subjectivity exhausts what it is to be human, or that the actual interactions between human beings ever actually satisfy the ideal structure he has uncovered. In fact, he doesn't even think that rational subjectivity is real! Instead he is basically just saying, "insofar as you take yourself to be a rational subject, here is what you ought to be committed to".
So, I'm not sure if that helps at all, but let me know if you want to discuss it any further.
Now, I happen to agree that the concept of existence applies to, well, just about everything. This follows in virtue of having to use some form of the verb "to be" in order to discuss any object whatever, be it fictional, functional, logical, etc. However, I would not say that we are thereby committed to the real or actual existence of all those things, and that's because I think that the word "real" has a special role to play in the structure of rational inquiry. I've already attempted to explain that special role in previous posts, but if you don't find it convincing or feel that I have not responded adequately to something you've written so far let me know and I'll be happy to discuss it further!
Thanks for your response Aaron. I have just two points regarding what you have said there.
First, in attempting to answer the question "what does it mean to say that something is real, would we not have to make reference to "what is real", not in the sense of 'what particular things are real', but in the sense of 'what kinds of things are real'? (The "are" in each of these two sentences I would take to be equivalent to 'should we say are'). I can't see any way around having to make such references, and of course this is the same point I made in the earlier response.
Second, in relation to your point that whereas the concept of existence applies to everything, the concept of reality does not, I would just like to highlight the fact that in the kind of arguments I was referring to about the reality of numbers; it is, usually and confusingly, the obverse point that is made by the proponents of numerical reality; namely that numbers are real but that they do not exist.
And this last point feeds into my earlier note that all these terms 'existence', 'materiality' and 'reality' do not seem to be univocal at all, and I think this is precisely the difficulty faced when trying to ascertain any circumscribed ambit of applicability relative to them.
I will stick with it, though I'm afraid I only have time to pop in today. I am familiar with this sort of argument from McDowell. I try to go with it, but I can't. In a sense it becomes trivial: 'All discourse aims for truth because all the discourse I'm talking about aims for truth.' I don't feel that's so, even in the area of the philosophy of science where it might be most applicable: any given student essay, for instance, and its mark, is a ritual exchange based on currently approved wisdom, nothing to do with truth. So are many routine papers. Such an approach does seem to end up claiming that the philosophy of a certain sort of science is philosophy itself, because it demarcates the rest of thinking acting and feeling into another non-philosophical zone. But as I said, I'll stick with it!
To your second point, yes I have seen people make that distinction between existence and reality, but I've found that they'll often end up sneaking existence in the back door in order to explain what they mean by "real".
To your third point, I'm not sure I understand what you mean when you say that there terms are not "univocal". Do you just mean that they are often used in different and inconsistent ways depending on context?
If I have understood what you have written about 'what qualifies as talk about the real', it seems to highlight the fact that we only ever talk about what we should say is real, and are incapable of talking about the Real itself since it is not an item of experience, but is rather an idea that expresses what we think about the ontological status of items of common sensory experience, based on the logical distinction we make between those items and, for example, fictional or imaginary items.
To your last question the answer is 'yes', the fact that they "are often used in different and inconsistent ways depending on context" seems to preclude the possibility that an unequivocal meaning for such terms can be established. I am almost tempted to say that arguments about what is real, devolve to arguments about what the term means, which in turn devolves to arguments about what kinds of things we should say are real. The problem is that the purpose of any such discussion is to establish what the term 'real' means, but unless we can establish what 'real' means prior to any discussion, it seems that it must remain stuck in the hermeneutic circle.
I have retraced my steps with Wolfenden, and then skip-read onwards.
One core difficulty for me is that this entire strand of analytical thinking has a narrow view of 'discourses'. My account of discourses would included the artistic, the spiritual, the ordinary conversational, public information exchange (media), the historical and the social-scientific. I don't feel these are represented in Wolfenden's account of 'All discourses': no disrespect to him, it's what a lot of analytic philosophy focusses on too. Philosophy merges into philosophy of science.
That means that I can only follow the argument up to a point.
But it does also mean that I have a more-or-less opposite view: that scientific understanding is about intellectuals having attitude, not about not-having-attitude. Objectification requires determinedly riding roughshod over what makes the particular particular, and special, and requires a determined refusal of God-claims about explanations of experience and how we analyse that experience into perception and conception.
Back at the op, I don't think that your/Wolfenden's view exhausts 'the real' as compared to its supposed opposites, in all sorts of discourse. I don't fully understand how this self-confessedly idealised view of particular discourses enables you to propose, say, that there is a certain set of 'real objects'. How do you make the connection from there to here, the ordinary world of language?
I hope I'm making sense and not just sounding ornery.
In regard to your second paragraph, I don't agree that we cannot talk about the real itself. Basically I have been arguing that the concept of the real is a non-eliminable part of the normative structure of rational discourse. The upshot is that insofar as we achieve that ideal through actual practice we will find it impossible not to deploy that concept and thus talk about the real itself. That implies being committed to the reality of the things referred to by such talk. So for instance, saying that the claim "water covers roughly 70% of the earth's surface" qualifies as talk about the real implies commitment to the real existence of "water" and "the earth", etc.
In regard to your third paragraph, I guess I am not sure what the appeal to contextual differences and different usages is intended to establish. Do you deny that communities can reach consensus on the correct usage of words through rational dialog? I would agree that absolute consensus is an ideal that cannot be reached. That said, I would say that to engage in rational discourse is to implicitly take aim at that ideal (and others as well), and so the fact that you have come here to toss around ideas finds you implicitly committed to the achievement of that goal.
As for the hermeneutic circle, I agree with you in spirit if not in detail. As mentioned, I don't think that existence and reality are equivalent, and so I think that the concept of reality can be examined without having to bracket the concept of existence. This means we can employ the concept of existence in order to explain the concept of reality, if need be, without engaging in vicious circularity. More generally, I agree that we cannot think thought without thinking. Some see this as inherently problematic, but I'm not convinced it is. Arguments that attempt to show that we cannot think thought always seem to end up having to think thought in order to show that we can't think thought. So, in my experience those kinds of arguments are non-starters (not to imply that you're making that kind of argument).
I feel it's really important to understand that he's not arguing for the devaluation of non-objective forms of discourse. For Wolfendale "non-objective" does not mean "irrational". In fact, his own essay is an example of non-objective discourse by way of his own classification! He is simply arguing that people brandish the word "reality" without bothering to make explicit what they mean, and more often then not when you dig in you'll find that the notion being employed is more-or-less vague and/or incoherent. That might be good enough for ordinary discourse where the question of what is real just doesn't really come up very often, or for spiritual discourses in which everyone simply agrees to apply the word so that it includes their favorite deity or personal spiritual experience, but it's not good enough for philosophy where making things explicit is the name of game. So he argues for an explicit concept of reality that is to be understood in terms of a particular justificatory structure, and he thinks that it aligns well with the way the concept is intuitively applied in less explicit forms of discourse. If someone thinks that his concept is inadequate, incoherent or in some other way deficient then they are free to argue against it and propose alternatives, or else they are free to step off the stage of rational discourse. In my opinion, that's really all he's saying.
OK, I don't mean to say that "knowing what distinguishes talk about the real from other kinds of talk... (tells)... us what kinds of things are real any more than it tells us what particular things are real." I meant to say the obverse which is that knowing (or more realistically, stipulating) what kinds of things are real (and not what particular things are real) tells us what distinguishes talk about the real from other kinds of talk. In other words, I don't see how any such distinction could be made without examples to clarify it.
As to your second paragraph I do agree that, as per you example, talk of "water covering 70 % of the earth" commits us to the logical (which I think also entails the ontic) reality of water, earth and so on; but I am not convinced that it commits us to their ontological reality. But again it depends on what you take 'ontological' to mean, and that's not so easy to clarify with examples. The use of examples of kinds of things such as water and earth does seem to lend support to my contention that to clarify what we mean by 'real' we need to refer to examples.
I don't believe so much that "communities ... reach consensus on the correct usage of words through rational dialog", as I think that community just is commonality of usage, and I think what constitutes 'correct usage' can only be established after the fact by thinking about examples of kinds of usage. It is thus more a matter of 'empirical investigation' than "rational dialogue". For me the upshot of this is that there is no perfectly correct use; we are not able to establish a point, but only a range.
An investigation into the differences and commonalities between the ideas of 'existence' and 'reality' would be a very complex and interesting one, I think. Is it reality or existence for example that implies being, or is being another conceptual category again? Or conversely does being imply reality or existence or both?
Or, to return to the example of argument about the reality of numbers; can they be thought to be real without being thought to exist, and if so should they be thought to be or not to be?
Is being fundamental to reality or merely to existence? Or is (as with both Derrida and Deleuze) difference fundamentally real, with both being and existence being derivative? Is it possible to establish any particular way we should talk about these things?
Quoting John
That doesn't seem quite right. If someone were to stipulate that unicorns are real, would you just accept that without a challenge? It's through such challenges that concepts are revised and refined. And when it comes to the question of what is real/unreal there needs to be some non-ontological considerations that motivate the distinction or else you end up going in vicious rather than virtuous circles.
Quoting John
Sure, but there is a reason we are committed to the real existence of water and not, say, the real existence of unicorns, and it has to do with how claims about those things are justified. I didn't throw the water example out there as a matter of stipulation, it was meant to be hypothetical - if that claim qualifies, then we are committed.
As for the ontological/ontic distinction, I don't really recognize it insofar as it is presupposes an equivocal conception of Being. Excising that presupposition collapses it into a more conventional distinction between formal and regional ontology, or the inquiry into Being as such and the inquiry into what kinds of beings there are. There's a lot more that could be said here, but I'll leave it at that for now.
Quoting John
I think you're overlooking the fact that linguistic communities are defined as much by their disagreements as they are by their agreements, and I'd say that disagreements are what primarily drive the revision and refinement of what does and does not constitute correct usage. Correctness is therefore not primarily something that is determined by rarefied, post-hoc reflections upon usage (though it does have a role), but is something that evolves organically through acts of praise and censure as the members of a community respond to instances of actual usage.
Quoting John
These are great questions, and to say that they're worth asking doesn't necessarily mean we're committed to the possibility of actually determining final, incontrovertible answers to them, but it does seem to imply setting that as the ideal goal such that we strive to achieve it even if we know that we never fully will.
I think we may be talking at cross-purposes here Aaron, perhaps because my expression has been unwittingly ambiguous. I would not accept that unicorns are real, precisely because they are one of the kinds of things that general usage of the term 'real' rules out ( i.e. stipulates against) as a referent. So what I meant is that by examining what kinds of things (in this case mythical beasts) are stipulated to be unreal (imaginary) in common usage, we can establish the limits of reference for the idea 'real' and thus what is included as a constituent of reality. But when it comes to entities such as numbers then the provenance of the real is not so unambiguous.
Quoting Aaron R
I fully agree with you that we are committed to the reality of empirical (publicly perceived) things such as water, precisely because testable claims can be made about them. But again, what about numbers? Testable claims can be made about them, too.
Quoting Aaron R
Yes, I think I tend to somewhat agree with you, but it's a complex question. For Heidegger, as you are probably well aware, whether or not something exists is a merely ontic matter, and he tended to apply this even to the question of the existence of God(s). The inquiry into being as such, (or in other words, what it means to exist) on the other hand, is an ontological matter, and this question feeds into the inquiry about what kinds of beings, as distinct from the question about what beings there are (to the latter of which, being an ontic question, any answer would be subject to temporal change). So, I would say that 'what it means to exist' feeds into what kinds of beings we would say exist, but also that any answer we give to the question is informed by considering what kinds of beings we generally do say of them, that they exist.
Quoting Aaron R
I think the kind of "disagreements" you refer to are just the kinds of "equivocal" usages I was referring to earlier. And by "equivocal usage" I don't mean equivocation within a sphere of usage, so much as equivocation between different spheres of usage (or in Wittgenstein's terminology, 'different language games'). And I am in full agreement that the established usage (which is subjected by philosophers to "rarefied post hoc reflections") is itself established largely pre-reflectively by practice, which would certainly include both agreement and disagreement, as you noted..
Quoting Aaron R
Yes, I think we are actually substantially in agreement on these issues. I am certainly not in agreement with those who think that the impossibility of a final, incontrovertible answer to a question renders the question meaningless or even a waste of time.
Anyway the conversation with you is always challenging and stimulating Aaron, and so may it continue, to be...
I don't understand how the rational sphere of discourse, as so defined, is somehow superior to other forms. I know you say in your next paragraph that you and Wolfenden don't claim this; nevertheless you seem to be saying that the nature of 'reality' can somehow be decided upon in the space of reasons and the news of that decision brought back to the other spheres - say to theatre, where the nature of 'reality' is constantly being brought into question but which can't be called upon because it doesn't make rational claims. That just isn't how I think about the world.
That aside, I am still thinking about the basic ideas, and remain puzzled by the notion of a set of objects that are real without attitude. To me the 'real' is often an event, something that 'really' happened, in a way that can't be translated or reduced to talking about an object. When I think of objects I think of who talks about them where, in considering their 'reality'. My living-room rug for instance, is a real rug, really described by chemistry and physics, also used by children as a magic carpet in a game where one of them wears a sheet which becomes a royal cape and a crown made of cardboard. It is real when described in certain ways but a prop in make-believe games at other times. In this way the object is made real or otherwise *by* attitude, not made real by being attitude-free.
But the theatre can be a forum for entering into the space of reasons and for making claims. Claims do not have to be expressed verbally, they can be articulated through movements, gestures, dances, etc. Just think about what you yourself wrote:
Quoting mcdoodle
Calling something into question is a move in the space of reasons. I think you're getting hung-up in the formality of Wolfendale's style and falsely concluding that his position requires the belief that the only legitimate forum for asking and answering questions about the nature of reality is academic philosophy and science.
Quoting mcdoodle
Do you believe that the chemical composition of your rug is dependent upon your attitudes toward it? Are you claiming that when you and the kids treat the rug as if it were a cashmere magic carpet that it literally becomes a cashmere magic carpet, and ceases to be the polyester rug that it previously was? If you answered "no" to either of these questions then I believe you are leveraging the very distinction that Wolfendale is trying to describe.
Having recently read 'Mind and World', though I confess I think I now need to reread it to get a proper grip, I think I am agreeing with the McDowell position mentioned in the paper, eventually to be disagreed with:
[quote=Wolfenden, explaining McDowell]A property is real iff we take some ascriptions of it to entities to be true.[/quote]
So I take the ascription of chemical properties to the rug to be real, because I trust chemists' descriptions of it insofar as they're vouchsafed to me, and I take the ascription of magical properties to it to be, well, magical. In different contexts different properties matter to the participants in talk. When the children play using the rug and it very visibly and plausibly becomes a magic carpet, especially if I get swept up in the game of make-believe, nevertheless in my heart I know it's 'really' just a rug. When physicists explain to me that it's composed of minuscule fields of stuff that are unobservable, I call their descriptions 'real' on trust, knowing that another generation of physicists will probably revise how physicists describe it. I don't regard the descriptions derived from the physics and the chemistry as 'more real' than 'the rug we bought in Turkey'. They're plural ways of describing real properties in different contexts.
I'm interested in how your narrowing down of the 'real' to a 'set of objects' deals with the notion of facts as events that 'really' happened. Take a detective's investigation or a statement in a court of law, for instance, where 'real' might be used. How is that to do with objects? (I think the 'entities' in Wolfenden's terse summary of McDowell's position is an attempt to summarise some ideas that also include events)
Quoting mcdoodle
I hope this doesn't come off as completely dismissive, but literally the whole point of Wolfendale's paper is to explicate a legitimately "thick" notion of "reality" in contradiction to the McDowell claim. For Wolfendale, truth simpliciter isn't sufficient. He thinks objectivity is required as well and explains why.
Quoting mcdoodle
Wolfendale is just trying to make explicit the logic that is implicit in this statement of yours.
Quoting mcdoodle
This could mean many different things, so I'm not exactly sure how to respond to it. Wolfendale, again, is not denying that the word "real" can have different meanings in different contexts. He's concerned with a particular context. Neither do i get the impression that he would claim that physics and chemistry have a monopoly on reality. I think he'd happily admit that other empirical disciplines such as biology, psychology, sociology, economics, political science, etc. or even swathes of "ordinary" discourse can have purchase on the real.
Quoting mcdoodle
It's important to understand that Wolfendale doesn't take himself to be doing metaphysics here (fwiw, I believe that Wolfendale actually subscribes to some kind of a Deleuzean process-based metaphysics). So the word "object" is intended to have a transcendental, rather than a metaphysical, function in the context of his discussion. It is rooted in the Hegelian concept of "natural consciousness" which, contra Hegel, he takes to be the best transcendental description of thought/consciousness available, for reasons he tries to make clear.
I too am busy, Aaron, thanks for engaging me in a reply.
I confess I'm confused, if W-dale is into a sort of process-based metaphysics, why he's focusing so heavily on 'objects', damned elusive things, 'just bloody slow events' as one engineer told me he called them, presumably a process-minded sort of a bloke.
McDowell does work his own way carefully and painfully from his thin version of reality to a different route to 'objectivity', and before a reread which I don't have time for now, I found his struggle appealing.
For the present I can see I'm deep-rooted in some sort of pluralist view of the real. I don't know why you think 'pluralist' needs some sort of unpicking, but that's where I'm stuck, till I read or think more about it.
As for Wolfendale's preoccupation with objects, you have to be able to appreciate the distinction he's making between the transcendental and the metaphysical in order to understand why he's not actually obsessed with objects. So one way to think about this is via the following question: how can we define the real without lapsing into vicious circularity? If we define the real in terms of something we already take to be real, then we will not succeed. So one of the purposes of his paper is to circumscribe a domain of discourse that is non-ontological (i.e. doesn't entail any ontological commitments) from which we can answer the question "what is it to talk about the real?" such that the answer that it provides entails that it itself does not qualify as talk about the real. That's one of the roles of transcendental discourse, to answer the question of what metaphysical discourse consists in without actually engaging in metaphysics.
It's not that I think that your "pluralism" necessarily needs unpicking, so much as I am just trying to understand what you think "pluralism" means with respect to the real. You've sort-of explained it, but I've found the explanations you've so far provided to be somewhat unclear. It seems like you are really defending something like an "explanatory" pluralism rather than a metaphysical pluralism, but I'm not really sure. So I'm stuck too, which is fine. It wouldn't be philosophy if we didn't get stuck sometimes, would it?
Individual, single person hallucinations (all modalities): Purely subjective (no corroboration at all, not even a child). Unreal!
Real (non-hallucination): multiple witnesses willing to give a sworn testimony, given objective status i.e. real! Unfortunately folie à plusieurs (madness of several), rave parties, mass hysteria, so on and so forth.
So, one person's testimony amounts to nought. More the merrier, yes, but we don't know if it's delusion/hallucination en masse. The long and short of it - we don't know if anything's real.
We pinch (pain, as philosophers claim, is the hallmark of reality: red pill/blue pill) ourselves to confirm we're not just dreaming; I've never ever experienced a dream in which I wanted to pinch myself and dreams, for some, are more bizarre than what we take to be real, the so-called awake state. Something's terribly off here. We don't question the reality of dreams when dreaming but we have doubts about the reality of what we're certain is the actual world.
Has anyone dreamt of dying i.e. can the brain simulate (practice) the process of expiring?
It is the intuition that there is a complementary set for every single set. However, intuition is not always true. Intuition, in my opinion, is the result of the conditioned mind which is so used to seeing multiplicity and difference. However, there are not 2 universal sets, there is only one universal set, the set of Reality. Now there is such a thing as relative reality and absolute reality, both of which are part of absolute reality. Relatively speaking, things are "not real" when they contradict the greater experience or the rest of experience. For example, if I say "The red car on my porch", then it is false and said red car is not real because I don't have a red car on my porch. However, is the absence of the red car a result of my limited perception or an independent existence of its own? Because I can certainly say that I and everyone else simply cannot perceive the red car. So let us say, "The red car on my porch which can be sensed by a specific set of people that is the set of all people which are not hallucinating."
However, what is a hallucination? Is a hallucination simply bogus perception or are they really seeing into a different reality, or seeing more of reality? Well let's say there is a universe where nobody, not even alien lifeforms, can see the red car on the porch. Then finally we can say the red car is not real, right, right? Well, which is more correct, the red car is not real or that nobody can see the red car? Those 2 statements means 2 different things. The first is that the red car truly isn't part of reality such that nobody can see it, the second means nobody can see the red car but it doesn't mean the red car isn't real.
Alright, thanks for this chance to show off my philosophical exercise. The real answer is that everything is real, what differs is a different variable called actuality, at least that's what I call it. Actuality is what applies in the world such that we experience that particular reality. Different consciousness (people) have different actualities. This actuality does lead to infinite layers of actuality, let me demonstrate. So the red car is real but it is not actual. Then where is the actual red car? Well that's not actual. So where's the actual actual red car? Well that's not actual, and so on. However, it all means the same thing, I can't see the red car and probably nobody else can, but there is one Being which can see that red car, God. So reality is absolute, but actuality is relative.
Though then again, "real" might mean different things for other people. Some may differentiate "real" from "exist" or "being". I don't. In my paradigm, reality is simple the collection of all existence, and being is just a synonym for existence. As such, the unreal does not exist, there is no "unreal". What exists is relative perception and relative experience. The unreal is not real, so I guess the unreal does exists and is thus real. However, we can say that "The only member of the complementary set of Reality is the complementary set of Reality." Because the set contains itself, then we go into an infinite dive, but it means the same thing, Non-Reality is part of itself.
What's real is mostly what we agree to be real. Which is not the same as saying that in that case there is no difference between fantasy and reality.