Reality
Epistemology is concerned with what can be known or inferred as likely and how, whereby in the modern world emphasis is put on reason, empirical evidence and science as sources and methods to determine or investigate reality.
It is what a world view (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.
The Social Construction of Reality, a book about the sociology of knowledge written by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, was published in 1966.
[12] There are various ways that contemporary philosophers have tried to describe beliefs, including as representations of ways that the world could be (Jerry Fodor), as dispositions to act as if certain things are true (Roderick Chisholm), as interpretive schemes for making sense of someone's actions (Daniel Dennett and Donald Davidson), or as mental states that fill a particular function (Hilary Putnam).
In fact, many analytic philosophers today tend to avoid the term "real" and "reality" in discussing ontological issues.
For example, the scientific method can verify that a statement is true based on the observable evidence that a thing exists.
Berkeleyan idealism is the view, propounded by the Irish empiricist George Berkeley, that the objects of perception are actually ideas in the mind.
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.
Timothy Leary coined the influential term Reality Tunnel, by which he means a kind of representative realism.
The theory states that, with a subconscious set of mental filters formed from their beliefs and experiences, every individual interprets the same world differently, hence "Truth is in the eye of the beholder".
Constructivism and intuitionism are realistic about objects that can be explicitly constructed, but reject the use of the principle of the excluded middle to prove existence by reductio ad absurdum.
The traditional debate has focused on whether an abstract (immaterial, intelligible) realm of numbers has existed in addition to the physical (sensible, concrete) world.
The "system building" style of metaphysics attempts to answer all the important questions in a coherent way, providing a complete picture of the world.
Examples from the early modern period include the Leibniz's Monadology, Descartes's Dualism, Spinoza's Monism.
[36] Phenomenology is a philosophical method developed in the early years of the twentieth century by Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) and a circle of followers at the universities of Göttingen and Munich in Germany.
Subsequently, phenomenological themes were taken up by philosophers in France, the United States, and elsewhere, often in contexts far removed from Husserl's work.
[37] Husserl's conception of phenomenology has been criticised and developed by his student and assistant Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), by existentialists like Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980), and by other philosophers, such as Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005), Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995), and Dietrich von Hildebrand (1889–1977).
The debate over what the success of science involves centers primarily on the status of entities that are not directly observable discussed by scientific theories.
In a work now called the EPR paradox, Einstein relied on local realism to suggest that hidden variables were missing in quantum mechanics.
The predictions of quantum mechanics have been verified: Bell's inequalities are violated, meaning either local realism or counterfactual definiteness must be incorrect.
The founders of quantum mechanics debated the role of the observer, and of them, Wolfgang Pauli and Werner Heisenberg believed that quantum mechanics expressed the observers knowledge and when an experiment was completed the additional knowledge should be incorporated in the wave function, an effect that came to be called state reduction or collapse.
[45] He believed quantum theory offers a complete description of nature, albeit one that is simply ill-suited for everyday experiences – which are better described by classical mechanics and probability.
[46] There are other possible solutions to the "Wigner's friend" thought experiment, which do not require consciousness to be different from other physical processes.
[49] This system, mostly referring to the human brain, affects cognition and behavior and into this complex new knowledge, memories,[50] information, thoughts and experiences are continuously integrated.
[51][additional citation(s) needed] The connectome – neural networks/wirings in brains – is thought to be a key factor in human variability in terms of cognition or the way we perceive the world (as a context) and related features or processes.
Philosophy of perception raises questions based on the evolutionary history of humans' perceptual apparatuses, particularly or especially individuals' physiological senses, described as "[w]e don't see reality—we only see what was useful to see in the past", partly suggesting that "[o]ur species has been so successful not in spite of our inability to see reality but because of it".
For example, a great-grandfather of Ijon Tichy, a character from a cycle of Stanisław Lem's science fiction stories of the 1960s, was known to work on the "General Theory of Everything".
[64][65] Disproportional news attention for low-probability incidents – such as high-consequence accidents – can distort audiences' risk perceptions with harmful consequences.
Cyberspace, the world's computer systems considered as an interconnected whole, can be thought of as a virtual reality; for instance, it is portrayed as such in the cyberpunk fiction of William Gibson and others.
