Kant and the Distinction Between Scheme and Reality
Philosopher Ian Hacking talks about the distinction Immanuel Kant made between reality and scheme, a word used to describe "...the conceptual organization which we either socially or individually bring to raw sensation in order to organize it into s...
Changing Families: Idealized Perceptions of Family
Idealized perceptions of family are often at odds with reality. For example, the 1950's was a decade many point to nostalgically as the golden age of family. Yet fathers were frequently so consumed with their jobs during that time that they had li...
Being and Nothingness: Jean Paul Sartre
Philosopher Hubert Dreyfus talks about Jean-Paul Sartre, who views all human activity as a way of trying to cover up our nothingness and delude ourselves into thinking that we have an identity, content and meaning in our lives.
Brain in a Vat (Part 2)
Philosopher Hilary Putnam discusses problems with using any form of the brain in a vat argument for skeptical purposes. The biggest problem he cites is that the brain in a vat argument itself requires that many of our assumptions concerning the laws...
Pragmatism, Language and Reality
Philosopher Richard Rorty explores the link between language and reality, suggesting that no one language is any closer to reality than any other. Whether it's the language of poetry, the language of physics, the language of theology or any other la...
Does Science Give Us Truth?: Correspondence Theory of Truth and Scientific Realism, The
The correspondence theory of truth is considered the default position about truth. If a statement is true it is because it corresponds to some feature, some reality in the world independent of our ideas abut it. An approach to science called scienti...
Unconceptualized Reality
Professor of Philosophy Hilary Putnam explains his belief that the world we can think about and talk about is a world that is conceptualizable by us.
Getting in Contact with Reality
Philosopher Hubert Dreyfus contrasts differing views of reality and how we encounter it, as expressed by Martin Heidegger and Jean Paul-Sartre. He points out that where Heidegger sees meaning--as in objects in the environment--Sartre sees meaningles...
Social Reality
Philosopher John Searle explains the difference between institutional facts, like money, property, marriage, and nation states, and what he calls "brute facts," like the number of electrons in a hydrogen atom, or the snow atop Mt. Everest.
Encountering External Reality
Philosopher Ian Hacking calls himself a materialist, explaining that we learn partly through "a lot of innate equipment...but certainly from earliest experience how to adapt ourselves to the material environment in which we find ourselves."