Reality and Artificial World
The human being creates a number of artificial representations of reality. They are drawings, paintings, sculptures, visual pictures on TV and computer screens, descriptions in oral speech, written texts, including literature, philosophy, science.
Such representations are impossible without material bearers: stone, canvas, speech sounds, paper, screens etc. Activity of constructing and using such representations presupposes consciousness. But these representations, being constructed, form a special form of reality, as they exist independently of their cognition by a certain individual. The latter can know not all the ideal contents of such representations. But the function of these representations is not that they are a form of reality existing in itself, but that they represent the outer reality. A content of perception is determined by interactions of a cognizing being with a real situation: so it is possible to separate illusion and reality. But it is often not easy to distinguish between what are real referents of artificial representations and what belongs to them as such, because it is impossible to examine them as it is possible in relation to real situations. But the human being lives in a world of such representations, which form her/his nature in a certain sense.Nowadays an opinion is popular according to which artificial representations don't represent anything, but create what seems to be an outer reality. This is constructivism in epistemology and human sciences. From this point of view unobservable theoretical objects in science don't have real referents, and a psychologist, studying a human being, constructs psychic states in the latter in a process of interacting with her/him.
It is true that there are such theoretical objects that have no real referents. These are the so called idealized objects (a point mass, an ideal solid body etc.).
Their real existence is excluded by scientific theories. But there are other unobservable objects (atoms, electrons etc.) whose real existence is presupposed by contemporary science. What is a difference between the first and the second kinds of objects?Some specialists in philosophy of science (Hacking 1983; Agazzi 2014) think that it is the activity of an experimenter, a possibility of manipulating unobservable objects (for example, measuring coordinates or impulses of elementary particles) that confirms the real existence of such objects.
A psychologist can create some psychological states in a person with whom she/he interacts, in particular, certain understanding of the past events, some features of self-image and so on. But a human being is not only an object of psychological study. She/he lives a real life, interacts with other people, is doing something. If she/he is engaged in life with representations about oneself which don't correspond to whom she/he really is, it is discovered very soon and compels such a person to change her/his own self-image.
Realism is the most fruitful strategy of cognitive research. I called earlier my understanding of epistemological realism a constructive realism (Lektorski 2013). Now I think that it can better be called Activity Realism. It is close to that conception of realism which has been elaborated by Agazzi (2014), (Lenk 2003)Lenk. In my opinion Activity Realism includes the embodied, situated, inacted approach of contemporary cognitive science.
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- Reality and Artificial World
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- Agazzi E. (ed.). Varieties of Scientific Realism: Objectivity and Truth in Science. Springer,2017. — 411 pp., 2017
- A Theory of Knowledge
- DOING EXPERIMENTS
- Conclusion
- Conclusion
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