John T. Langton : philosophy : relative reality

I've seen the quote, "Men willingly believe what they wish," attributed to both Virgil and Caesar. Kuhn, Popper, Feyerabend, Hume, and many others have revealed a great deal about the nature of scientific discovery, reality, and truth. This one quote seems to be at the core of their positions. In this short essay, I do not aim to prove that reality exists the way I perceive it, or defend the objectivity of science (well, maybe a little), or attack the issue of truth (truth always seems to get mired in issues of classification). Instead I just want to argue against the notion that reality is relative and/or created by human perception, something I first heard put forward by inebriated friends during late night talks.

Some (including those inebriated friends, namely Ben Tiger) have stated that reality is constructed by a consensus of scientists or socially accepted paradigms; that reality does not in fact exist outside of these paradigms. Though I think there are many important and valid points in examining the subjectivity of science (which I do not argue for here), I do not believe reality is contingent on the beliefs of humans.

I do have a theory of perceptual relativism which is mentioned below, but I believe reality itself must be objective outside of human perception. That is not to say that we can perceive this objective reality. I think this position is closest to the philosophy of Kant, though many disagree as to what that is (in fact I disagree with the link I provided here, but what do I know, I'm just a computer scientist). Below I go through a quick laundry list of reasons why I DO NOT believe reality is subjective, in and of itself, outside of perception.

In a social idealism, reality would be comprised of the scientific paradigms that are socially accepted i.e. if the majority of scientists believe it, then it is real. However, this would not allow for the existence of phenomena that occur outside of these paradigms, that may expand upon them or even contradict them - the kind of phenomena observed by revolutionary thinkers such as Galileo. Science, therefore, would have no impetus for moving forward or discovering new information, since no information could outside of the accepted paradigms. Furthermore I have never heard a compelling explanation of how these paradigms would be established and accepted socially in the first place or why they change over time.

A defense against this argument might be that Galileo and scientists like him are simply very good debaters; that the phenomena they observe do not really exist before they convince everyone else that they do. My response to this is: how did they observe these phenomena in the first place? Are all pioneering scientists delusional but convincing? The "convincing" in science occurs in the ability to replicate results. Thus, how was this replication possible before the paradigm was socially accepted and thus before the reality existed? If people can't replicate scientific results, then how can they convince others?

Now, for a taste of my perceptual relativism. The important part to remember is that, though I believe reality is objective, I do not believe we can perceive it objectively. In fact, I think the post-modernists were pretty dead on and that most people have no idea what each other perceives as reality; thus communication is often futile, fleeting, and/or incomplete. However, I believe there is room for a relative realism between two people who perceive reality very differently. They could see the same thing entirely differently but if both had always referred to it by the same name, and viewed its dynamics in proportional relation with the rest of reality (or their views of it), then they could constructively talk about it. Hmmm, that was vague. Sorry, not much time to go into it more.