Scientific Realism
Philosopher Hilary Putnam calls himself a scientific realist for a number of reasons, including his contention that there's no serious difference in the reality status of scientific objects and common sense objects. Even with respect to observabilit...
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...
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.
The Realism vs. Anti-Realism Debate (Part 2)
Philosopher John Searle talks about the anti-realist view that we never actually perceive the real world and instead only perceive our own perceptions of that world. Professor Searle argues that this is incorrect, that we do, in fact, have direct pe...
The Realism vs. Anti-Realism Debate (Part 1)
Philosopher John Searle talks about what he calls a persistent error among western philosophers since the Greeks--namely, the notion that the external world is not real in and of itself, but instead is dependent on human minds and human consciousnes...
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."