Appearance and Reality

Colin is developing this article.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the distinction between appearance and reality is, and always has been, one of principal the focal points of philosophy. The chief question raised by the distinction is epistemological: how can we know the nature of reality when all that we have immediate access to are appearances? Broadly speaking, responses to the question fall into one of three classes: those that argue that we are unavoidably 'cut off' from reality, those that argue that we do have some way of 'getting at' reality through the appearances, and those that reject the distinction. This article will consider some of the most historically influential examples of each type of response.

Motivation for the Distinction

There are both common-sense and historically contingent sources of motivation for the distinction between appearance and reality.

In our everyday experience, we frequently find ourselves in situations where we are presented with appearances that we know are misleading. Some instances of this are dramatic, such as crafted perceptual illusions that immediately come across as unbelievable. In other cases, the knowledge that the appearances are misleading requires more experience and investigation (e.g. rainbows). In general terms, these are cases which we can report in a sentence of the form, "It seemed to me that P, but really, it's not the case that P." Further, we might compare two instances where things seemed to us the same way, whereas there was a difference in reality. One way to report that would be to say that the appearances were the same in both instances, though the 'underlying' reality differed.

Though the above motivations for the distinction are common to all human experience, philosophical discussions of the distinction have been fueled by scientific advances which seemed to yield the result that certain features of our experiences are only 'appearance-deep.' The gradual acceptance of Copernicus' heliocentric model of the solar system in the 16th and 17th centuries came with the realization that the apparent rising and setting of the sun were in fact illusions. This fact made a deep impression, and lead towards a new philosophical picture of the universe in which things like colors and sounds were deemed 'mere appearances,' while only properties susceptible to geometric analysis (such as shape and motion) were kept as part of the picture of true reality.

More recent developments in science have had similar effects. Einstein's theories of relativity, and the advances in quantum mechanics have led some scientists and philosophers to claim that even 3-dimensional space and a universal, uniform temporal structure are mere appearances. Various feminist and postmodernist thinkers have gone so far as to claim, sometimes on the basis of scientific advances, that objective reality itself is, to some degree, an illusion (for an important clash between those thinkers and their philosophical opponents, see the debate ignited by physicist Alan Sokal's 1996 Hoax). The actual argumentative path between the scientific advances and such conclusions is extremely subtle, however. It is a matter of substantive debate whether the fact that a given scientific model has a certain type of explanatory power implies that it tells us something about which objects or properties are real and which are merely apparent.

Skeptical Responses

When faced with the distinction between appearance and reality, and the worry of how we can know reality on the basis of the appearances with which we are presented, the most straightforward response may be to simply deny that we have any reliable access to reality. This sort of position is often described as 'skepticism.'

In ancient Greece, there were two prominent schools of thought which identified themselves as skeptics: the Academics and the Pyrrhonists.

Academic vs. Pyrrhonist skeptics

Descartes' First Meditation

Epistemically-Optimistic Responses

Descartes' later meditations.

Kantian idealism - a limited optimism

Responses that Reject the Distinction

Berkeley's idealism

Reid

References and Further Reading

• Sokal, Alan. (1996) "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," in Social Text, Spring-Summer 1996. Some of the fallout from the article is collected in Lingua Franca (eds.), The Sokal Hoax: The Sham that Shook the Academy. University of Nebraska Press (2000).