Reality received positive reviews from critics at Berlinale, with praise for Satter’s direction and the cast performances (particularly Sweeney’s). In preparation for her role, Sweeney watched interviews and spoke with Winner over Zoom and text. As a team of agents arrive and begin searching the house, Winner engages in casual conversation with the agents, all of which is picked up by recording device, the transcript of which forms the basis of the film’s dialogue. Influenced by Kant, Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) argued that reality is tied to consciousness as an intersubjective correlate of experience that cannot be reduced to a wholly mind-independent substrate. In China, beginning roughly in the 9th century, Neo-Confucianism maintained that reality has a rational order expressed in the principle Li, which acts as a ground of being.
- For example, metaphysical idealism asserts that everything is essentially mental, for instance, by understanding material objects as ideas in the mind.
- For example, psychologism asserts that mathematical objects are mental constructions or ideas rather than abstract objects.
- Reality testing is another suggested psychological function in which individuals distinguish intrapsychic from external events to assess how their experience aligns with reality.
- An even wider definition includes everything that has existed, exists, or will exist.
- The school of Vaisheshika arose roughly in the 2nd century BCE and developed a system of six fundamental categories of being.
- In this sense, realism and anti-realism encompass many domain-specific positions across diverse fields.
The reality–virtuality continuum is a theoretical framework that posits a continuous scale of mixed reality forms. It denies the existence of knowledge in any form or domain, arguing that knowledge is impossible. These limitations indicate a gap whereby reality is not fully captured and exceeds knowledge.
Computer scientists discuss how systems of knowledge representation can organize information about reality and make it accessible to computational processes. Reality testing is another suggested psychological function in which individuals distinguish intrapsychic from external events to assess how their experience aligns with reality. It overlaps with the cognitive sciences, which investigate how cognitive processes transform information about the world, and with neuroscience, which studies the brain activities underlying such processes. It concerns the question of how mental and linguistic entities, such as thoughts and words, can establish contact with reality by successfully referring to things in the world. It focuses on how individuals experience reality and how conscious states are intentional or directed towards entities other than themselves.
Realism and anti-realism
Epistemology, another philosophical subdiscipline, explores how people can know reality. They examine what it means for something to be real, how entities are divided into different categories of being, and which entities exist at the most fundamental level. Accordingly, worldviews address not only theoretical matters but also practical and evaluative outlooks about what matters and how one should act.
Levels of reality
- Becoming, by contrast, covers change, like when an entity shifts from one state of being to another.
- Realism and anti-realism are families of views concerning the mind-independence of reality.
- A different view suggests that reality is made up of many worlds that exist in parallel to one another, each representing a distinct way of how things could have been.
- Inspired by Leibniz, David Lewis (1941–2001) developed modal realism, maintaining that possible worlds are as real as the actual world.
- In China, beginning roughly in the 9th century, Neo-Confucianism maintained that reality has a rational order expressed in the principle Li, which acts as a ground of being.
- The structure of reality concerns the fundamental patterns of being, describing how entities are organized and interact with each other.
Non-naturalism, another form of realism, maintains that values differ significantly from empirical properties and belong to another domain of reality. Naturalism argues that values are part of the natural world and can be studied by the natural sciences through empirical observation. Some positions concern the existence of values in general, while others are limited to specific domains, such as moral, aesthetic, or religious values. Formalism, another form of anti-realism, understands mathematics as a practice of symbol manipulation, suggesting that mathematical truth is grounded in whether the manipulation rules permit the construction of a proof.
Levels of reality
More general constraints arise from limits of human cognitive faculties rather than situation-specific circumstances, such as facts too complex for anyone to conceive. Testimony is a transmission of knowledge from one person to another through communication.k Memory is the capacity to store information from other sources and make it available to cognitive processes when needed. Reason is the ability to draw logical inferences and arrive at truths independent of immediate sensory input. Anti-realism is understood as a view that identifies the meaning of a statement with the evidence that would support it or the conditions under which a person is justified in asserting it.
A related topic concerns the possibility and limits of knowledge as a successful cognitive contact with reality. Anti-realism, by contrast, holds that certain aspects of reality depend on mental processes, subjective perspectives, or social conventions. Realism is the view that reality does not depend on human knowledge or consciousness and exists apart from them. An event that has actually happened, or a thing which really exists is said to have «reality.» Something close to reality is realistic.
In the social sciences, critical realism holds that observable events in the social world only partially disclose reality. Local realism is a view that combines the principle of locality with the notion that there are definite physical properties, whether or not they are being observed by someone. For example, psychologism asserts that mathematical objects are mental constructions or ideas rather than abstract objects. It holds that this practice can be useful in some contexts without ascribing substantive or framework-independent reality to such entities. According to conceptualism, universals exist in the mind as concepts through which people categorize and order their impressions, acting as tools of cognitive organization rather than properties of external entities. Platonism about universals holds that they are part of reality in their own right, independent of the particular entities that instantiate them.
Inspired by Leibniz, David Lewis (1941–2001) developed modal realism, maintaining that possible worlds are as real as the actual world. Responding to Kant’s philosophy, the German idealists sought a unifying principle as the foundation of all reality. Inspired by Plato’s realm of forms, Plotinus (c. 204 – c. 270 CE) identified the One as the supreme principle underlying all of reality. His student Aristotle (384–322 BCE) proposed a system of ten categories describing the fundamental constituents of reality. In ancient Greek philosophy starting in the 6th century BCE, the pre-Socratics discussed the first principles from which all things arise. In psychoanalytic theory, the reality principle is a proposed mechanism that counteracts the pleasure principle, delaying immediate gratification when it collides with the demands of external reality.
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) rejected the possibility of mister golden objective knowledge of the things in themselves, arguing instead that all experience is shaped by the innate structures of human cognition. Plato (c. 427 – c. 347 BCE) argued for the existence of a realm of eternal forms or ideas in addition to the material world of mutable entities. Skepticism about metaphysics holds that it is not possible to know the fundamental nature of reality, such as claims about categories of being or the existence of universals.
Some outlooks suggest that only the fundamental level is ultimately real, arguing that non-fundamental entities are in some sense eliminable since reality can be described without them. For example, one view suggests that macroscopic objects, such as a chair, depend on the microscopic objects that underlie them, such as elementary particles. The structure of reality concerns the fundamental patterns of being, describing how entities are organized and interact with each other.