Dictionary Definition
reality
Noun
1 all of your experiences that determine how
things appear to you; "his world was shattered"; "we live in
different worlds"; "for them demons were as much a part of reality
as trees were" [syn: world]
2 the state of being actual or real; "the reality
of his situation slowly dawned on him" [syn: realness, realism] [ant: unreality]
3 the state of the world as it really is rather
than as you might want it to be; "businessmen have to face harsh
realities"
4 the quality possessed by something that is real
[ant: unreality]
User Contributed Dictionary
English
Pronunciation
- /ɹiˈæləti/, /ri"
Extensive Definition
Reality, in everyday usage,
means "the state of things as they actually exist". http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/reality
The term reality, in its widest sense, includes everything that
is, whether or not it is
observable or
comprehensible.
Reality in this sense may include both being and nothingness, whereas existence is often restricted
to being (compare with nature). In other words,
"reality", as a philosophical category includes the formal concept
of "nothingness" and articulations and combinations of it with
other concepts (those possessing extension in physical objects or
processes for example).
In the strict sense of western
philosophy, there are
levels or gradation to the nature and conception of reality. These
levels include, from the most subjective to
the most rigorous:
phenomenological
reality, truth,
fact, and axiom.
Phenomenological reality
On a much broader and more subjective level, the private experiences, curiosity, inquiry, and selectivity involved in the personal interpretation of an event shapes reality as seen by one and only one individual and hence is called phenomenological. This form of reality might be common to others as well, but at times could also be so unique to oneself as to be never experienced or agreed upon by any one else. Much of the kind of experience deemed spiritual occurs on this level of reality. From a phenomenological perspective, reality is that which is phenomenally real and unreality is nonexistent. Individual perception can be based upon an individual's personality, focus and style of attribution, causing him or her to see only what he or she wants to see or believes to be true.Truth
According to the less realist trends in philosophy, such as postmodernism/post-structuralism, truth is subjective. When two or more individuals agree upon the interpretation and experience of a particular event, a consensus about an event and its experience begins to be formed. This being common to a few individuals or a larger group, then becomes the 'truth' as seen and agreed upon by a certain set of people — the consensus reality. Thus one particular group may have a certain set of agreed truths, while another group might have a different set of consensual 'truths'. This lets different communities and societies have varied and extremely different notions of reality and truth of the external world. The religion and beliefs of people or communities are a fine example of this level of socially constructed 'reality'. Truth cannot simply be considered truth if one speaks and another hears because individual bias and fallibility challenge the idea that certainty or objectivity are easily grasped. For Anti-realists, the inaccessibility of any final, objective truth means that there is no truth beyond the socially-accepted consensus. (Although this means there are truths, not truth).For realists,
the world is a set of definite facts, which obtain independently
of humans ("The world is all that is the case" —
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus), and these facts are the final
arbiter of truth. Michael
Dummett expresses this in terms of the principle of bivalence: Lady Macbeth had
three children or she did not; a tree falls or it does not. A
statement will be true if it
corresponds to these facts — even if the
correspondence cannot be established. Thus the dispute between the
realist and anti-realist conception of truth hinges on reactions to
the epistemic
accessibility (knowability, graspability) of facts.
Fact
A fact or factual entity is a phenomenon that is perceived as an elemental principle. It is rarely one that could be subject to personal interpretation. Instead, it is most often an observed phenomenon of the natural world. The proposition 'viewed from most places on Earth, the sun rises in the east', is a fact. It is a fact for people belonging to any group or nationality, regardless of which language they speak or which part of the hemisphere they come from. The Galilean proposition in support of the Copernican theory, that the sun is the center of the solar system is one that states the fact of the natural world. However, during his lifetime Galileo was ridiculed for that factual proposition, because far too few people had a consensus about it in order to accept it as a truth. Fewer propositions are factual in content in the world, as compared to the many truths shared by various communities, which are also fewer than the innumerable individual worldviews. Much of scientific exploration, experimentation, interpretation and analysis is done on this level.This view of reality is well
expressed by Philip K.
Dick's statement that "Reality is that which, when you stop
believing in it, doesn't go away."
What reality might not be
"Reality," the concept, is contrasted with a wide variety of other concepts, largely depending upon the intellectual discipline. It can help us to understand what we mean by "reality" to note that what we say is not real because we see it through different perspectives, therefore there is no basis for reality. But usually if there is no original and related proofs, it isn't reality.In philosophy, reality is
contrasted with nonexistence (penguins do
exist; so they are real) and mere possibility (a mountain made
of gold is merely possible, but is not known to be real—that is,
actual rather than possible—unless one is discovered). Sometimes
philosophers speak as though reality is contrasted with existence itself, though
ordinary language and many other philosophers would treat these as
synonyms. They have in mind the notion that there is a kind of
reality — a mental or intentional reality,
perhaps — that imaginary objects, such as the
aforementioned golden mountain, have. Alexius
Meinong is famous, or infamous, for holding that such things
have so-called subsistence, and thus a kind of reality, even while
they do not actually exist. Most philosophers find the very notion
of "subsistence" mysterious and unnecessary, and one of the
shibboleths and
starting points of 20th century
analytic
philosophy has been the forceful rejection of the notion of
subsistence — of "real" but nonexistent
objects.
Some schools of Buddhism hold that
reality is something void of description, the formless which forms
all illusions or maya.
Buddhists hold that we can only discuss objects which are not
reality itself and that nothing can be said of reality which is
true in any absolute sense. Discussions of a permanent self are
necessarily about the reality of self which cannot be pointed to
nor described in any way. Similar is the Taoist saying, that
the Tao that
can be named is not the true Tao, or way.
It is worth saying at this
point that many philosophers are not content with saying merely
what reality is not — some of them have positive theories
of what broad categories of objects are real, in addition. See
ontology as well as
philosophical
realism; these topics are also briefly treated
below.
In ethics, political
theory, and the arts,
reality is often contrasted with what is "ideal."
One of the fundamental issues
in ethics is called the is-ought
problem, and it can be formulated as follows: "Given our
knowledge of the way the world 'is,' how can we know the way the
world 'ought to be'?" Most ethical views hold that the world we
live in (the real world) is not ideal — and, as such,
there is room for improvement.
In the arts there was a broad
movement beginning in the 19th
century, realism
(which led to naturalism),
which sought to portray characters, scenes, and so forth,
realistically. This was in contrast and reaction to romanticism, which portrayed
their subjects idealistically. Commentary about these artistic
movements is sometimes put in terms of the contrast between the
real and the ideal: on the one hand, the average, ordinary, and
natural, and on the other, the superlative, extraordinary,
improbable, and sometimes even supernatural. Obviously, when
speaking in this sense, "real" (or "realistic") does not have the
same meaning as it does when, for example, a philosopher uses the
term to distinguish, simply, what exists from what does not
exist.
In the arts, and also in
ordinary life, the notion of reality (or realism) is also often
contrasted with illusion. A painting that precisely indicates the
visually-appearing shape of a depicted object is said to be
realistic in that respect; one that distorts features, as Pablo
Picasso's paintings are famous for doing, are said to be
unrealistic, and thus some observers will say that they are "not
real." But there are also tendencies in the visual arts toward
so-called realism
and more recently photorealism that invite a
different sort of contrast with the real. Trompe-l'œil
(French, "fool the eye") paintings render their subjects so
"realistically" that the casual observer might temporarily be
deceived into thinking that he is seeing something, indeed, real
— but in fact, it is merely an illusion, and an
intentional one at that.
In psychiatry, reality, or
rather the idea of being in touch with reality, is integral to the
notion of schizophrenia, which has
often been defined in part by reference to being "out of touch"
with reality. The schizophrenic is said to have hallucinations and
delusions which concern people and events that are not "real."
However, there is controversy over what is considered "out of touch
with reality," particularly due to the noticeable comparison of the
process of forcibly institutionalising individuals for expressing
their beliefs in society to reality
enforcement. The practice's possible covert use as a political
tool can perhaps be illustrated by the 18th century
psychiatric sentences in the U.S. of black slaves for 'crazily'
attempting to escape. See also anti-psychiatry
and one of its prominent figures, the psychiatrist Thomas
Szasz.
In each of these cases,
discussions of reality, or what counts as "real," take on quite
different casts; indeed, what we say about reality often depends on
what we say it is not.
Reality, Worldviews, and Theories of Reality
A common colloquial usage
would have "reality" mean "perceptions, beliefs, and attitudes
toward reality," as in "My reality is not your reality." This is
often used just as a colloquialism indicating that the parties to a
conversation agree, or should agree, not to quibble over deeply
different conceptions of what is real. For example, in a religious
discussion between friends, one might say (attempting humor), "You
might disagree, but in my reality, everyone goes to
heaven."
Reality can be defined in a
way that links it to worldviews or parts of them (conceptual
frameworks): Reality is the totality of all things, structures
(actual and conceptual), events (past and present) and phenomena,
whether observable or not. It is what a worldview (whether it be
based on individual or shared human experience) ultimately attempts
to describe or map.
Certain ideas from physics,
philosophy, sociology, literary criticism, and other fields shape
various theories of reality. One such belief is that there simply
and literally is no reality beyond the perceptions or beliefs we
each have about reality. Such attitudes are summarized in the
popular statement, "Perception is reality" or "Life is how you
perceive reality" or "reality is what you can get away with"
(Robert
Anton Wilson), and they indicate anti-realism -
that is, the view that there is no objective reality, whether
acknowledged explicitly or not. These topics will be discussed in
greater detail below.
Many of the concepts of
science and philosophy are often defined culturally and socially. This idea was well
elaborated by Thomas Kuhn
in his book
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962).
Philosophical views of reality
Philosophy addresses two different aspects of the topic of reality: the nature of reality itself, and the relationship between the mind (as well as language and culture) and reality.On the one hand, ontology is the study of being,
and the central topic of the field is couched, variously, in terms
of being, existence, "what is", and reality. The task in ontology
is to describe the most general categories
of reality and how they are interrelated. If — what
is rarely done — a philosopher wanted to proffer a
positive definition of the concept "reality", it would be done
under this heading. As explained above, some philosophers draw a
distinction between reality and existence. In fact, many analytic
philosophers today tend to avoid the term "real" and "reality" in
discussing ontological issues. But for those who would treat "is
real" the same way they treat "exists", one of the leading
questions of analytic philosophy has been whether existence (or
reality) is a property of objects. It has been widely held by
analytic philosophers that it is not a property at all, though this
view has lost some ground in recent decades.
On the other hand,
particularly in discussions of objectivity
that have feet in both metaphysics and epistemology, philosophical
discussions of "reality" often concern the ways in which reality
is, or is not, in some way dependent upon (or, to use fashionable
jargon, "constructed" out
of) mental and cultural factors such as perceptions, beliefs, and
other mental states, as well as cultural artifacts, such as
religions and political
movements, on up to the vague notion of a common cultural world view, or
Weltanschauung.
The view that there is a
reality independent of any beliefs, perceptions, etc., is called
realism.
More specifically, philosophers are given to speaking about
"realism about" this and that, such as realism about universals or
realism about the external world. Generally, where one can identify
any class of object the existence or essential characteristics of
which is said not to depend on perceptions, beliefs, language, or
any other human artifact, one can speak of "realism about" that
object.
One can also speak of
anti-realism about the same objects. Anti-realism
is the latest in a long series of terms for views opposed to
realism. Perhaps the first was idealism,
so called because reality was said to be in the mind, or a product
of our ideas. Berkeleyan
idealism is the view, propounded by the Irish empiricist George
Berkeley, that the objects of perception are actually ideas in
the mind. On this view, one might be tempted to say that reality is
a "mental construct"; this is not quite accurate, however, since on
Berkeley's view perceptual ideas are created and coordinated by
God. By the 20th century, views similar to Berkeley's were called
phenomenalism.
Phenomenalism differs from Berkeleyan idealism primarily in that
Berkeley believed that minds, or souls, are not merely ideas nor
made up of ideas, whereas varieties of phenomenalism, such as that
advocated by Russell,
tended to go farther to say that the mind itself is merely a
collection of perceptions, memories, etc., and that there is no
mind or soul over and above such mental
events. Finally, anti-realism became a fashionable term for any
view which held that the existence of some object depends upon the
mind or cultural artifacts. The view that the so-called external
world is really merely a social, or cultural, artifact, called
social
constructionism, is one variety of anti-realism. Cultural
relativism is the view that social issues such as morality are
not absolute, but at least partially cultural
artifact.
A Correspondence
theory of knowledge about what exists
claims that "true" knowledge of reality represents accurate
correspondence of statements about and images of reality with the
actual reality that the statements or images are attempting to
represent. For example, the scientific
method can verify that a statement is true based on the
observable evidence that a thing exists. Many humans can point to
the Rocky Mountains and say that this mountain range exists, and
continues to exist even if no one is observing it or making
statements about it. However, there is nothing that we can observe
and name, and then say that it will exist forever. Eternal beings, if they exist, would need
to be described by some method other than scientific.
Quantum physical views of reality
Quantum
mechanics (QM) has kept physicists and philosophers in debate on
the nature of reality since its invention. QM states that prior to
observation, nothing can be said about a physical system other than
a probability function which seems to be definable to a degree by
assumptions about the system's elements. With observation a
system's probability wave function will collapse into a precise
quantity which is observable by the means of measuring the device
applied.
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle states that there are
certain measurements that reduce the accuracy of other measurements
of the same system. Primarily, one cannot measure the location and
velocity of sub-atomic elements such as an electron precisely
because the more one looks for the former the less accuracy one can
achieve for the latter. This imprecision introduces an uncertainty
into the overall state of the system and the necessity of a choice
on the part of the one making the measurement, namely which aspect
will he find accurately at the cost of the other. This decision on
the part of the measurer has created no small problem for
objectivists who insist that at its core reality is objectively
present whether anyone notices or not. Several experiments such as
the double-slit
experiment, and tests of Bell's
theorem and the CHSH
inequality have confirmed that the simple act of observing does
impact the system's state in a noticeable way; since the detector
itself has to be changed to detect anything at all, there is
necessarily a change in the observed particle because of quantum
entanglement. But also the state of correlated particles which have
not been measured appears to be affected. Even the notion of cause
and effect is brought into question in the quantum world where
irreducible randomness cannot currently be avoided as a basic
assumption. In theory large numbers of random quantum elements seen
as a group from a very great distance can seem like cause and
effect which is why our level of experience appears to function
almost completely deterministically.
It has led some such as
Amit
Goswami, a theoretical nuclear physicist and member of The
University of Oregon, to assume that there is no reality existing,
independent of our own consciousness as observer. However, there is
no clear evidence that human consciousness has any special role to
play beyond the influence of instrument-settings on result. These
phenomena can also be given the more cautious interpretation that
quantum systems do contain properties, but not properties directly
corresponding to measurements performed on the system by
macroscopic instruments.
See also
References
reality in Belarusian
(Tarashkevitsa): Рэальнасць
reality in Catalan:
Realitat
reality in Danish:
Virkelighed
reality in German:
Realität
reality in Estonian:
Reaalsus
reality in Modern Greek
(1453-): Πραγματικότητα
reality in Spanish:
Realidad
reality in Esperanto:
Realaĵo
reality in French:
Réalité
reality in Hindi:
वास्तविकता
reality in Icelandic:
Raunveruleiki
reality in Italian:
Realtà
reality in Hungarian:
Valóság
reality in Macedonian:
Стварност
reality in Malay
(macrolanguage): Realiti
reality in Dutch:
Werkelijkheid
reality in Japanese:
実在
reality in Norwegian:
Virkelighet
reality in Polish:
Rzeczywistość
reality in Portuguese:
Realidade
reality in Romanian:
Realitate
reality in Russian:
Реальность
reality in Albanian:
Realiteti
reality in Simple English:
Reality
reality in Slovak:
Skutočnosť
reality in Finnish:
Todellisuus
reality in Swedish:
Verklighet
reality in Turkish:
Gerçeklik
reality in Ukrainian:
Реальність
reality in Volapük:
Lejenöf
reality in Chinese:
現實
Synonyms, Antonyms and Related Words
accomplished fact, actuality, adventure, authenticity, circumstance, confirmability, demonstratability,
doubtlessness,
entelechy, episode, eternal verities,
event, experience, fact, factuality, fait accompli,
genuineness, good
sooth, grim reality, hap,
happening, happenstance, historical
truth, historicity,
in reality, incident,
incontestability,
incontrovertibility,
indisputability,
indubitability,
indubitableness,
irrefragability,
irrefutability,
materiality, matter
of fact, not a dream, objective existence, occasion, occurrence, particular, phenomenon, provability, questionlessness,
really, sooth, the true, trueness, truth, truthfulness, turn of
events, ultimate truth, unconfutability,
undeniability,
unerroneousness,
unfallaciousness,
unfalseness,
unimpeachability,
unquestionability,
unrefutability,
veracity, verifiability, verity, very
truth