I think one would have to accept that the word "reality" has many meanings.
For example, we say "Well, in reality it is otherwise" - meaning that we are hypothesizing about something but know (or assume) it is not correct.
Or we say "it is not for real" meaning that it is a lie, a joke, or otherwise "not fact"
And that connection is interesting. Is "reality" the same as "fact"? It would depend, since there are many meanings to the word "fact" as well.
"The sun emits solar rays" is a fact - if one can agree that solar rays are in fact what are emitted by the sun. Could we then say that in "reality" the sun emits solar rays? How could we be sure? (Plato would probably say "the sun only mimics the ideal sun" - implying that we live in a world which is a shadow of the ideal world, that reality is only what we perceive it to be).
"The sun shines" - is it a fact? Well, again we need to define the word "shines". If we look up at the sun and it is indded shining, then yes, it is shining. But 10 miles down the road there are clouds and showers. So the statement only has local and temporal reality.
My point with this little exercise
is to point out that I consider "reality" to be what we think of as "the truth". We may know that we don't have all the facts and thus don't know the entire truth, or we may think that we know everything and thus that we know that something is "real".
Take particle physicists - they work with things we can only have theories about. Yet we use those things, without seeing them, to create nuclear weapons or fusion drives. So learning about the unknown is how we uncover "reality" - but I don't think we can ever know all there is.
A great book about this is John D Barrow's "Impossibility - The limits of science and the science of limits".
Tormod
Your Friendly Neighborhood Administrator
