This is the third in a series of essays about abstractions in philosophy. Here, I continue the critique and extend it to another abstract concept that seems to trip many people up: reality.
Reality is one of the most common abstract metaphysical concepts used by both amateur and professional philosophers. We all like to say things like "In reality,..." We love to cite reality as the ultimate authority. "In reality..." is treated as a killer argument. And we try to ground our ideas of truth in reality.
However, these informal or common-sense uses of the term belie a deep and pervasive malaise in professional philosophy (the world over). After millennia of argument—across human cultures—there is no consensus on what "reality" is. Nor is there any consensus on what "truth" means (I'll come back to this). Metaphysics keeps promising insight into these problems, yet it never produces anything testable or even conceptually stable. New ways to approach reality keep emerging, but none of them ever manages to solve the problems it promises to solve.
And yet, at the same time, we all feel confident we know what reality is, or that we would know it when we see it.
When a problem has been argued over by clever people for a century without any consensus emerging, we may begin to suspect that we have framed the problem poorly. However, when we have argued for millennia and failed to reach any satisfactory conclusion, it calls the whole enterprise of philosophy, or at least metaphysics, into question.
Metaphysics is bunk. But why is it bunk?
Reality and Epistemic Privilege
Questions about reality are the principal topic of metaphysics.
- What is real?
- What does it mean for something to be real?
- What is the nature of reality?
Reality is such a basic concept that you might expect there to be a long-standing consensus about it. After all, given how most of us use the term "reality", it ought to define itself. And as noted, we all seem to have a "common sense" view of reality. However, there is no general consensus on reality amongst philosophers, and there never has been. On the contrary, reality is one of the most disputed concepts in philosophy. As with many problems I've written about in recent years, there is not only an existing discordant dissensus, but it is growing all the time as new propositions are floated that try (and usually fail) to take the discussion in different directions.
We need to be clear about the implications of this dispute over "reality". If philosophers cannot even agree on what reality is, they cannot agree on anything else. There is a structural failure in the field of philosophy, an impasse that has existed for thousands of years. Lacking agreement on “reality,” philosophy fragments into self-contained silos with no common reference point. Nonetheless, this ambiguous and disputed concept continues to play an essential role in philosophy and daily life.
The problem with all these abstract metaphysical concepts is that we only have experience and imagination to go on. No one has privileged access to reality, so no one actually knows anything about reality. There is no epistemic privilege with respect to reality.
Everyone’s access to reality is mediated by factors such as perception, cognition, language, theory, and culture. There is no way around this mediation; no way to get unmediated access to reality, whatever it is. In my "nominalist" view, reality is an abstract concept; an idea. And, thus, the idea that we could have direct access to reality is quite bizarre.
Still, the idea that some amongst us do have epistemic privilege is widespread, especially in relation to religions. People are constantly stepping up to confidently tell us that they alone have privileged access to reality and can tell us what it is. It is very noticeable amongst Buddhists who like to invoke reality.
“We live in illusion and the appearance of things. There is a reality. We are that reality. When you understand this, you see that you are nothing, and being nothing, you are everything. That is all.”--Kalu Rinpoche
"the development of insight into the ultimate nature of reality." --Dalai Lama
“To think in terms of either pessimism or optimism oversimplifies the truth. The problem is to see reality as it is.”--Thich Nhat Hanh
Closer to home, for me, the founder of the Triratna Order, Sangharakshita (1925 – 2018), argued that imagination was our "reality sense". This idea was inspired by English Romantic poets rather than Indian Buddhists. No word in the canonical languages of Buddhism means "imagination". It's not a concept Buddhists made use of prior to contact with Europe. Moreover, the "reality" imagined by Sangharakshita and his followers is distinctly magical, vitalistic, and teleological (all of which seem unreal to me).
Buddhists are not exceptional in seeking to leverage the dissensus on reality to stake a claim to privileged metaphysical knowledge. Nor are Buddhists the only ones who meditate. Hindus also have a long history of meditation, and they have arrived at radically different conclusions about the significance of meditative states. So too with the Sāṃkhya philosophy, which most people now encounter in the context of haṭha yoga.
There is no "reality sensing faculty" and no way to know reality directly. I do not doubt that some people experience altered states in meditation, though I would say these largely arise in the context of sensory deprivation. Whatever those states are, after 13 years of intensively editing, translating, and studying Prajñāpāramitā texts, I no longer find it plausible that altered states in meditation reflect reality (or that "reality", in any European sense, was an important concept in Buddhism prior to European contact).
Obviously, if we cannot get information about reality directly, then we cannot know reality in any conventional sense. In other words, the big problem with metaphysics is epistemic.
To be more precise, there is no epistemic justification for any metaphysics. We don't know reality. And we cannot know reality. All traditional metaphysics arises from speculating about experience.
This is not a new observation. David Hume (1711–1776) came to similar conclusions. He famously noted that we never see a separate event that we could label "causation". What we call "causation" is merely a regular sequence of events. If event B is always seen to be preceded by event A, then we say that A caused B. And this generalised to metaphysics. Hume argued that all knowledge is either sensory experience or ideas about sensory experience. And experience is not reality.
I have encountered many people, mostly Buddhists, over the years who professed to believe the opposite of this, i.e. that experience is reality. The corollary is that we all have our own reality. This is solipsistic and egocentric. We can show why this is false by coming back to the main argument.
Half a century earlier, Isaac Newton (1643 – 1727) was able to formulate relatively simple expressions using calculus that made accurate predictions about the motions of objects.
(where F = force, v = velocity, p = momentum)
And since, for any event we can witness on earth, these expressions predict future motion with considerable accuracy and precision, they surely reflect some kind of knowledge about reality. We can confirm this by using the same equations to retrodict past events that have already been observed, so we know the outcome of the process in advance. Newton's laws of motion are a very robust description of motion as it could be observed in the 18th century. In the course of my formal education, I personally demonstrated the efficacy of all these laws of motion.
At the very least, this is objective knowledge.
Thus, there is a tension between Hume's observation that we cannot know reality and Newton's observations that appear to describe reality very well.
Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804) attempted to resolve this tension by redefining "metaphysics" as a critical inquiry into the conditions that make knowledge and experience possible, rather than as speculative knowledge of things beyond experience. In his view, metaphysical ideas like causation, space, and time are a priori forms unconsciously imposed on experience by our minds. In other words, "space" and "time" are not part of reality and don't exist independently of an experiencing mind. Similarly, causation is how we explain sequences of experiences, not an aspect of reality. This means metaphysics cannot reveal things as they are in themselves, but only the necessary structures of how we must experience them.
The problem with Kant is that his view still requires a metaphysics, since he tacitly assumes that all humans experience the world in exactly the same way. This is a speculative view about human nature and requires something both universal and beyond experience. And I don't think it works because this is not something that Kant could know (even now). Worse, this is not my experience of other people. Exposed to a range of people, one of the most striking things we notice is that we do not all experience the world in the same way. Some aspects of experience are unequivocally not shared; they are subjective.
Kant might have gotten around this by emphasising that empiricism is more than just observing nature; it also crucially involves comparing notes about experience with other people. But he did not. It is precisely comparing notes about experience, noting the similarities and differences, that allows us to parse the commonalities in experience.
Kant doesn't really account for Newton's objective knowledge. Rather than positing that every human being sees the world in exactly the same way, it makes more sense to me to say that objective knowledge of this type is independent of the observer. From observations like Newton's laws of motion, we can infer that there is an objective world, which does have its own structures and systems. Still, this world can only be appreciated via mediated experience. At the very least, we may say that our ideas of space and time, for example, must be analogous to something objective, or we could not use them to predict the future in the way that we do.
Similar dissatisfaction with Kant drove the emergence of phenomenology. Husserl, for instance, wanted to suspend all assumptions about “reality itself” and focus instead on experience as it presents itself. Note that, despite the many successes of phenomenology, we all still rely on metaphysical frameworks to structure our understanding of the world. But this retreat from objectivity is also hamstrung by the fact that we can make valid inferences and predict the future.
However, despite the emergence of phenomenology, speculative metaphysics continues to dominate philosophy. Arguments about "reality" are ongoing and diversifying as time goes on.
Rescuing the Concept of Reality through Pragmatism
As far as I can see, some form of realism is inescapable. Realist explanations do the best job of predicting the future. Newton's laws of motion are still in daily use by scientists, engineers, and technologists precisely because they accurately predict the future. All the attempts to deprecate realism have ended in failure: specifically, failure to predict the future as realist explanations do.
Newton's laws of motion are objective facts. They are apparent to any observer. The laws have limits, and there are situations in which they fail to be accurate or precise enough. Still, within the well-known and accepted limits, the laws of motion apply.
And at the same time, we still only have experience to go on. Which means that realism has to have a pragmatic character. We can infer objective facts—such as Newton's laws of motion—and these allow us to predict the future. Being able to predict the future, and thus reduce the burden of uncertainty (without ever eliminating it), is nontrivial. Of course, such a pragmatic approach can never provide the kind of certainty that metaphysics promises, but then metaphysics has never delivered on such promises either.
I come back to a crucial point already made above: comparing notes. When we compare notes, especially in small groups, we immediately see that some aspects of our experience are shared and some are not. By painstaking observation and comparing notes, we can infer which things appear the same (or at least similar) to everyone and which are only apparent to ourselves.
Take the example of the acceleration due to gravity at the surface of the Earth. It doesn't matter who observes this or what method they use; it always turns out to be ~9.81 ± 0.15 ms-2. It doesn't even matter which units we use. We could measure it in fathoms per century squared, as long as we know how to convert one unit to another.
So the acceleration due to gravitation is more or less the same for everyone. And we can account for the variations with factors like elevation and the density of the underlying bedrock. We can say, therefore, that gravitation is independent of the observer. Another way of saying this is that gravitation is objective. And having inferred this, we can imagine many ways to test this with a view to falsifying it. An inference that both makes accurate and precise predictions (and retrodictions) and also survives rigorous attempts at falsification can be considered an accurate indicator of reality.
But we don't just compare notes on individual phenomena. Gravitation is a particular phenomenon, and we can compare this to other forces and how they operate. For example, we might look at gravitation in the light of observations of other kinds of motion. If we had a theory of gravitation that predicted motion that disagreed with our theory of motion, then we would be at an impasse. But this is not the case. When we investigate nature, we find that our inferences support and reinforce each other.
Newton's law of gravitation is consistent with his laws of motion. And they are both consistent with other formal regularities in the universe. And we now have explanations that go beyond the limits of Newton but which show that Newton's laws are special cases under certain limits.
Note that values obtained in this way should always include some measure of uncertainty. We aim to measure things with a high degree of accuracy and precision, but there is always some measurement error. And our inferences often rely on assumptions that may introduce inaccuracy or imprecision.
The physical sciences are inherently pragmatic. We aim to arrive at valid inferences that allow us to predict the future to a desired level of accuracy and precision. Doing this allows us to compile useful and robust inferences into a system of inferred knowledge that is highly reliable. Newton's laws are paradigmatic of such knowledge.
And when this is the case, we don't need to know what cannot be known. What we can and do infer is enough to be getting on with. We can step back from speculating about unobservable metaphysics and focus on what can be observed.
Note that this is not the same as the instrumentalism that afflicts quantum mechanics. Quantum theory was developed in a milieu profoundly influenced by logical positivism. Bohr, Heisenberg, Born, and others collectively resisted any attempt at a realist interpretation of quantum mechanics, arguing that since we could not observe the nano-scale (in the 1920-30s), we could not know it. They rejected both Schrödinger's realistic interpretation and both his and Einstein's critique of non-realist approaches. Schrödinger's cat was intended as a refutation of the Copenhagen view, but ended with Copenhagen adopting the cat as their mascot. The modern, Von Neumann-Dirac, formalism still resists realist interpretations. The majority of physicists simply accept that no realist interpretation of nanoscale physics is possible, even though we now have images of individual atoms, which allows us to affirm that atoms are objective phenomena.
While principled arguments exist for idealist or other non-realist views, such approaches have never allowed us to predict the future in the way that realism does. There is no idealist equivalent of Newton's laws of motion, let alone the systematic accumulation of useful knowledge that characterises science. To my knowledge, idealists have made no contribution to understanding the world.
Pragmatism allows for pluralism. Of course, most people do not want pluralism. They want answers. They want certainty. I sympathise. I want answers too. But after a lifetime of seeking answers, this is as close as I have come to a satisfactory solution.
Conclusion
"Reality" seems to be paradoxical. It is both intimately familiar and foundational to our worldviews and, at the same time, forever beyond our perception and understanding.
Thousands of years of argumentation over reality and the nature of reality have not resulted in a consensus; rather, it is the source of a growing dissensus.
Very many people reify reality, i.e. treat the abstract concept of reality as a thing in itself.
Since reality is an abstract concept, the nature of reality is abstract.
No one has epistemic privilege with respect to reality. No one knows. And the people who claim to know—including religious gurus—are misleading us or have themselves been misled. Sincerity is no guarantor of accuracy or precision. Belief is a feeling about an idea.
The emergence of phenomenology was not the end of metaphysics.
We can rescue this ambiguous and paradoxical abstract concept via pragmatism.
It has been apparent for some centuries that we don't have to rely on speculative metaphysics. We can and do infer objective facts about the world.
There are patterns and regularities in experience that only make sense in a realist framework. At the very least, experience must be analogous to reality, or we'd get lost and bump into things all the time. The precision and accuracy with which we can describe patterns and regularities in experience, and use these to predict the future, also argue pragmatically for adopting realism.
The most obvious of these descriptions and predictions come from physics, but we get them from all kinds of sciences, including social sciences.
Pragmatic objectivity is something we can aspire to and, at our best, approach. It's not the same as certainty, but it is good enough to be getting on with.
However, my sense is that promises of certain knowledge will always be attractive to some people. And this leaves those people open to manipulation and economic exploitation.
~~Φ~~
