Richard Karash had a dandy approach to the reality question.
Here's slightly different angle:
Does the proposed piece of "reality" depend on the vision of any
particular person or group of people?
- If so, it's probably best thought of as art or religion. The
particular gifts of the perceivers and the particularity of their
expressions of reality are the real value of this form.
- If not, if the source of the statement about reality doesn't matter,
then it's probably best thought of as a scientific expression of
reality. It's repeatable, not idiosyncratic, and that makes it
cumulative, and that's precisely its value.
Everything we perceive and everything we express about those perceptions,
including science, is a construct in some fashion. Hence the suggestion
of a different way of sorting the reality sheep from the reality goats.
It's not whether we've nailed what is really, really out there ... really,
really real in some absolute sense divorced from the fact that we're human
beings asking the questions. It seems more useful to ask whether
something is "objective" in the scientific sense above or "subjective" in
the artistic sense above (or pick your own labels, but I wouldn't buy
"true" and "false" as candidates, nor "real" and "unreal").
Cheers,
Bill Buxton (probably, though one never knows)
--"William Buxton" <wbuxton@hns.com>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>