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Here i discuss an approach to a particular subset of the problem of universals, namely, the reality of ontological concepts such as 'reality'.
"What is reality? Philosophers have treated it as a noun denoting something that has certain properties. For thousands of years, they have debated those properties. Ordinary language philosophy instead looks at how we use the word reality in everyday language. In some instances, people will say, "It may seem that X is the case, but in reality, Y is the case". This expression is not used to mean that there is some special dimension of being where Y is true, although X is true in our dimension. What it really means is, "X seemed right, but appearances were misleading in some way. Now I'm about to tell you the truth: Y". That is, the meaning of "in reality" is more akin to "however". And the phrase, "The reality of the matter is ..." serves a similar function — to set the listener's expectations. Further, when we talk about a "real gun", we aren't making a metaphysical statement about the nature of reality; we are merely opposing this gun to a toy gun, pretend gun, imaginary gun, etc." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinary_language_philosophy
So, if "more real" is just a sort of comparison, then is there any reason to introduce the concept of "reality"?
"Reality" is not something we can know much about; we can only gather evidence from our senses, we can't know about 'things-in-themselves'.
While discussing ideas related to these with a friend, my friend pointed out, "So if you have symbols like 'reality' or 'God', which are totally inaccessible, wouldn't it be more parsimonious to just drop these symbols?"
One answer to that is the following. When we say "a real gun" to indicate a comparison with a pretend gun or an imaginary gun, we are applying a certain cognitive operator (by 'operator' i mean to encompass both the execution of an algorithm (procedural), but also the application of a symbolic operator to construct a symbolic statement eg. when we apply the "<=" operator to the arguments "3" and "5" to generate "3 <= 5" (declarative)). Now that we possess the 'more real' operator, we can apply some sort of process of abstraction (similar to taking the limit, taking the transitive closure, etc; i'm vague about what exactly the process of abstraction is in this case because i don't know) to generate the concept of 'reality'. The concept of 'reality' is useful to us insofar as reasoning about 'reality' forms a sort of template or abstract schema for reasoning about sentences involving the 'more real' operator. The relation between sentences involving "reality" and those involving "more real" is perhaps a homomorphism or something similar to it, eg the way that if you have the concepts of parity eg even and odd numbers, you have a homomorphism from integers to parity equivalence classes, eg 3 maps to 'odd' and 2 maps to 'even', and then you can do some reasoning in the parity domain and then map it back to the original domain, eg 2 + 3 must be an odd number because even + odd = odd (again, i'm being vague with 'template or abstract schema', and about whether there is precisely a homomorphism here or just 'something similar to a homomorphism' because i don't know exactly what the data representation here is).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_universals#Kant uses the phrasing "a heuristic for our cognitive capacities": "Thus we can conceive of a “noumenal” world (noumenal meaning "object of thought") which exists only as a heuristic for our cognitive capacities and not as something directly accessible to experience. The noumenal world for Kant is the way “things in themselves” might appear to a being of uncontingent reason (i.e. “God”). The “phenomenal” world, on the other hand is the world of experience, in which we live and in which objects are given to reason in experience."
In this view 'reality' is a useful abstraction. It might also be considered to be a 'real' one, insofar as eg. the concept of the number 3 is considered to be a 'real' thing.
