Introductory book about the ideas behind this blog

During the fall months of the past year, it's been a little quieter than usual on this blog. The reason was that last summer I found that I needed something more of a coherent presentation of the ideas behind it — a kind of backgrounder and introductory text. So I sat down to write that. The result has taken the shape of a small book, which is now available in a draft version. (There is still some formatting work I want to do to optimize readability, and possibly smallish corrections in wording and grammar.)

You can download the pdf version here.

The table of contents looks like this:

Preface

Activities

  Living your life · Reflection · Imagination · Philosophy

Goals

  Beauty · Excellence of character · Eudaimonia

Theory

  Unreality · Interplay · Apartness · Present

References

Sedimentation of unreality

Dreams sometimes come true. So do prophecies (sometimes). Jealous fantasies can become so destructive that they actually create what they were about (albeit wrongly) in the first place. Visionary leaders know that they first have to draw a picture before people can start acting towards making it a reality.

A while ago I wrote about some even more complex examples in Hitchcock's movies (Vertigo and North by Northwest), where an elaborate deception creates a dynamic in the world (the world of the movie, that is) which in effect makes it seem as if the deception has become reality.

Even in the real world there are some rare cases of an instance of unreality causing far-reaching developments. The first airing of Orson Welles' radio show War of the worlds (based on H.G. Wells' novel) was so convincing that it caused confusion and panic with some in the show's audience who mistook it for a real report.

Such effects are normally short-lived in the real world — reflection kicks in, people communicate and cross-check, and closeness to reality is restored all the faster the higher the number of people who are affected directly. On the other hand, as long as the feasibility of reality checks is kept low and the subject remains fascinating enough to hold a grip on the imagination, even foggy rumors can be sustained for quite some time. In his 1993 Norton Lectures, Umberto Eco cites the case of the Superb, a British submarine which was rumored to be deployed during the build-up of the Falklands crisis. It wasn't, but a combination of public imagination, media speculation and official secrecy quickly made it into a quasi-fact. "[T]he whole story grew out of vague gossip, through the collaboration of all parties. Everybody cooperated in the creation of the Yellow Submarine because it was a fascinating fictional character and its story was narratively exciting."[1]

What all these examples have in common is that some instance of unreality brings about changes in the real world, gets people to act in a different way than they'd have acted without that instance of unreality. Unreality (sometimes) settles into reality: though unreality is unreality, and reality is reality, part of reality consists of sedimented unreality.

Let's look closer at this. When we say that a dream comes true, it's not that literally the dream events come to have happened. It's still only a dream. What does happen is that I start acting in a way that makes some future situation resemble the situation from the dream. (This future situation can be a desirable state, if the dream expresses some wishes or goals I have; it could be an undesirable state, if it is a nightmare and expresses some of my fears. In either case, the way I act towards the situation I experienced in the dream can be conscious, or unconscious, or both.) If that happens and my actions are successful in bringing that situation about, we have now two different situations: an unreal dream situation and a real situation, which I made happen partly because of my dream experience.

When unreality sediments into reality, that instance of unreality remains what it is (it's not, so to speak, transformed into something real). In the example, there's still that dream, and that is an instance of unreality. It becomes, however, the cause (at least, a partial cause) and reason (possibly one reason among others) why some further, real situation, happens the way it does.

To conclude, here are some random reflections about sedimentation. First, in the case of dreams or visions what the unreal situation (the one that's dreamt or envisioned) and the real situation have in common is some experience you have in it, or a description that applies to it. It's an experience or description that was originally a 'what-if' experience or description. In other cases, such as the panic following a fictional invasion from Mars, there's no experience in common, but rather the real situation contains an 'as-if' perception or even action. (People start evacuating as if there really was an invasion.) In the most intricate cases, a constellation might involve both a 'what-if' experience and an 'as-if' action, leading to a very potent confusion of reality and unreality: this is what Vertigo uses to great and disturbing effect.(Again: read more about it in my previous post about sedimentation of unreality in those Hitchcock movies.)

Second, people who act on the basis of some instance of unreality are sometimes aware of this (when they try to fulfill a dream or achieve a vision, or when they have deliberately assumed a scenario, e.g. as a working hypothesis); sometimes they're not (when they act under a deception or illusion). But since people invest by acting and forming views about the world that contains this sedimented unreality, it's unlikely to be reversed once it's found unreal. (There's only a limited possibility to revert your actions in the world anyway, in particular if they have caused more development already.) I've called this the irreversibility of sedimentation in the previous posts I've already linked.

And finally, not everything in reality is sedimented unreality. (Although many facts about the real world have some sedimented unreality somewhere in the chain of causes that lead up to them.) Neither does all unreality sediment into reality of some form. (Some instances of unreality will remain largely without effect in the real world.)[2]

[1] Umberto Eco, Six walks in the fictional woods. The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures 1993, Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1994, 97–99, the quote is from 99.

[2] Technical side note: I'm using a sketchy notion of cause and effect here that leaves many unclarities and is not (yet) connected to the contemporary philosophical discussion of causation. But note that the idea of sedimented unreality as a cause is no more problematic than any notion of mental causation of events in the world. Sedimentation can unproblematically be analyzed in terms of people's views and actions. It singles out views and actions that are based on an exercise of the imagination, but that's a phenomenon that every account of human action has to deal with anyway.

The iridescent shimmer of nothingness (contd.)

(I continue from an earlier post to explore some similarities and differences in Sartre's talk of being and nothingness, on the one hand, and my notions of reality and unreality in this blog, on the other.)

A second parallel is that reality is primary, in metaphysical terms, before unreality: unreality can only be created from reality, but not the other way round. Every form of unreality relies on a background of reality which is much larger than itself. (For instance, take a fictional story, or a lie: we take in some description of the world in those, but most of that world is not explicitly described; so whenever there remains a gap in the description, we either fill it from what is implicit in it, or else we fill it in from what we assume to be the case in the real world.)

Sartre claims something similar when he says that "[t]he use which we make of nothingness in its familiar form always supposes a prelimiary specification of being." And he continues with some examples:

We say, pointing to a particular collection of objects, "Touch nothing," which means, very precisely, nothing of that collection. Similarly, if we question someone on well-determined events in his private or public life, he may reply, "I know nothing." And this nothing includes the totality of the facts on which we questioned him. Even Socrates with his famous statement, "I know that I know nothing," designates by this nothing the totality of being considered as Truth.[1]

Even the nothingness of what was there before a world existed would be based on the world which is now, and from within we can ask such a question. Such a nothingness (the 'nothing' we mean when we answer the question: "What was there before our world?" with "Nothing.") emerged only on top of our reality. If we did analyze it and strip it from "its characteristic of being empty of this world and of every whole taking the form of a world" as well as from its "characteristic of before, which presupposes an after", then we would end up with "a total indetermination which it would be impossible to conceive, even and especially as a nothingness."[2]

"This means", Sartre concludes, "that being is prior to nothingness and establishes the ground for it. [...] nothingness can only have a borrowed existence [...], and the total disappearance of being would not be the advent of the reign of non-being, but on the contrary the concomitant disappearance of nothingness."[3] There can't be any nothingness without being (or before, or after it), just as there couldn't be any unreality without reality.

(As a side-note: the process I have labeled sedimentation of unreality into reality also relies on this grounding of unreality in reality. Sedimentation happens when on the basis of some instance of unreality action is taken, in reality. Real events happen in response to unreality just as well as they are caused by something within reality. But all this presupposes an underlying reality as basis on which that unreality was formed. There is a hint to a parallel to this also in Sartre when he remarks that "it is from being that nothingness concretely derives its efficacy."[4])

[1] Being and Nothingness, 48–49.
[2] Ibd., 48–49.
[3] Ibd.
[4] Ibd.

The iridescent shimmer of nothingness

When Sartre writes, in Being and Nothingness, that "we see nothingness making the world iridescent, casting a shimmer over things" (58)[1], his notion of nothingness is not quite the same as my notion of unreality, and his 'iridescent shimmer' not the same as my concept of beauty. But they're close enough to venture a comparison.

1) For one thing, both Sartre's nothingness and my unreality come into the world because of us human beings, who have consciousness and can take various attitudes towards what's going on around us. There wouldn't be nothingness (or unreality) if there were no human (or other conscious) beings, if the world consisted only of rivers and stones, trees and insects.[2] The key to these attitudes seems to be an ability to think of possibilities, of ways the world might be (in contrast to how it actually is, or at least seems to be). "[n]on-being always appears within the limits of a human expectation", and "negation[3] appears on the original basis of a relation of man to the world. The world does not disclose its non-beings to one who has not first posited them as possibilities." (38)

However, compared to unreality (in my sense), these possibilities may remain implied—and will remain so, in fact, in the majority of cases. They form a much more pervasive background in Sartres universe than instances of unreality (which must play out in the world) could produce. Whenever something is missing, absent, or lacking, there's nothingness; Sartre himself brings examples such as the notions of destruction (39–40) and distance (54–55); and eventually lists "absence, change, otherness, repulsion, regret, distraction, etc. [...] which in their inner structure are inhabited by negation" (55). Thus his notion of nothingness is much more inflationary than my unreality, which implies the deliberate creation of what is at least in some respects a 'candidate reality'.

He also has (I think) a much heavier burden of argument to carry for his claim that these négatités, as he calls them, are a feature of objective reality. They're not subjective in the sense that we merely produce them in judgments, i.e. in our descriptions of the world, but there is something in objective reality that precedes them, and is in fact what such judgments are about: "non-being does not come to things by a negative judgment; it is the negative judgment, on the contrary, which is conditioned and supported by non-being." (42) Now, on my account, unreality does come into the world by mere mental activity (thinking, imagining, remembering, and so on), and so it has obviously no claim for belonging to objective reality. Of course, unreality it doesn't come into the world by simple negative judgments, but instead by a rather more complex human activity (for which I've used the broad term 'imagination'). Yet at the same time, the paradigm examples of forms of unreality (the various sorts of fiction, scenarios, lies, dreams, and the future as well as the past) seem to me more specific and concrete in their phenomenology than Sartre's négatités.

2) This may make the scope of these two notions look rather different, and yet there are also some more (and deep) points of agreement.

(Of which there'll be more later.)

[1] Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness. A phenomenological essay on ontology. Translated and with an introduction by Hazel Barnes. NY: Washington Square Press 1992. Quoted with page numbers in the text.
[2] Where exactly does the line run? Do animals count as conscious beings? In some sense, of course, but I think the way Sartre uses the term it would require more than (most) animals are capable of. At the very least, none of the forms of unreality in my sense are within reach for (most of) them. (I say 'most' because, again, we may have to qualify this a little since latest research seems to find rudimentary forms of self-consciousness in some primates. Some rudimentary forms of unreality, then, might be in play for these as well.)
[3] A judgment about some instance of nothingness is called a 'negation' in the context from which I'm quoting.

Modeling in the Magician's Manual, and some Ways of Worldmaking

In The Structure of Magic,[1] one of the founding books of Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP), Richard Bandler and John Grinder explain the basic idea behind their approach as follows: people's behavior can be explained (and influenced) by looking at (and changing) the way they represent reality; each person represents reality by building up a model in their mind; people differ in their particular models (because we're all subject to different experiences in the world, and thus the input for our models is unique to each person); and models always differ from reality as well, just in the way a map would differ from the territory it represents (even though there are also similarities between the map and the territory, for otherwise the map would be useless). NLP, then, is a technique for manipulating such models, originally for purposes of therapy and education. Such manipulation results in richer models and enables more choice and control in the patients or students subjected to the technique.

Three ways of model-forming that are explicitly listed and discussed are: Generalization, Deletion, and Distortion (SM 14–16). For each of them, Bandler and Grinder are careful to show that they can be helpful and useful techniques for people when coping with the world, but can also result in limiting choices and thus impoverishing their lives; much depends on the context and the manner in which they are used. Generalization is defined as "the process by which elements or pieces of a person's model become detached from their original experience and come to represent the entire category of which the experience is an example." (SM 14) Next is deletion, "by which we selectively pay attention to certain dimensions of our experience and exclude others." (SM 15) And finally, distortion "allows us to make shifts in our experience of sensory data." (SM 16) Examples of this latter form include fantasy, allowing us to "prepare for experiences which we may have before they occur", such as when we rehearse a speech in private before giving it in front of the actual audience. (This list is not exhaustive, as Bandler and Grinder point out, and of course the borders of these categories can be fuzzy; also, these forms of modeling influence and amplify each other via various sorts of feedback loops.)

Now, this sort of account of what goes on in people's minds in terms of representation (forming models that represent reality) has been severely criticized in recent decades by philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists; but for some practical purposes it may still by a helpful picture, and although I largely agree with the criticism, I'm not going further into it here. Instead, I'd like to draw attention to a certain parallel with Nelson Goodman's list of 'ways of worldmaking'[2]; I think there's something to be learned from both accounts if we're interested in the ways of forming unreality (both out of reality and out of antecedent instances unreality — preexisting 'versions', as Goodman would call them).

In Goodman's view, there are many different worlds, or world-versions, which come about by our uses of symbol systems. Whenever we describe or depict what's going on around us, we produce another version of the world, potentially different from any other version that previously existed. Since versions are created in various ways and in different contexts (a version may well be unique to a particular person's viewpoint at a given place and time), there is a multiplicity here comparable to the one pointed out by Bandler and Grinder in The Structure of Magic. And since every version came into being by a creative process that included a symbol system (such as a scientific description language or a conventional style of artistic expression), there is not really a point in speaking of a world-in-itself, a world that isn't a version — versions, in Goodman's sense, are all there is to the world. Thus talk of multiple versions and talk of many worlds comes down to practically the same thing. (Goodman makes it clear from the outset hat this doesn't imply an arbitrary anything-goes relativism, see WWM 17–21.)

Goodman enumerates various ways of how world-versions are produced: Composition and Decomposition, Weighting, Ordering, Deletion and Supplementation, and Deformation (WWM 7–17). He makes pretty much the same observation about deletion as Bandler and Grinder, noting that "what we find what we are prepared to find (what we look for or what forcefully affronts our expectations), and that we are likely to be blind to what neither helps nor hinders our pursuits are commonplaces of everyday life [...] And even within what we do perceive and remember, we dismiss as illusory or negligible what cannot be fitted into the architecture of the world we are building." (WWM 14–15) He includes under the heading of deformation a somewhat different sort of phenomenon than distortion in Bandler and Grinder's sense: for him, this includes changes such as a physicist's smoothing out of a diagram curve to emphasize the underlying simple kind of shape, even though the data are actually off that shape a little, or a related distortion in caricatures that have the job of emphasizing a detail in the caricatured person (WWM 16). It's not quite clear to me why Goodman thought this a sufficiently different category from his second one, namely weighting. In any case, while his discussion of deletion and supplementation of details is richer than that in The Structure of Magic, and his discussion of weighting and ordering has no counterpart there, he doesn't explicitly include the process that Bandler and Grinder call distortion. The reason is probably to be found in a difference of perspective which he mentions before giving his list: "Actually, I am more concerned with certain relationships among worlds than with how or whether particular worlds are made from others" (WWM 7). The focus is rather on formal properties and relationships of world-versions than on the psychological or creative processes that bring them about.

This difference in focus is even clearer with respect to the first category in The Structure of Magic: generalization. The term is used there to refer to the formation of a rule of behavior, caused by some experience (possibly repeatedly made). Rules of behavior, although they can be formulated in a linguistic description (in the words and sentences of a natural language) or even in an artificial symbolic form (such as in a logical calculus or a computer programming language), are basically habits of perceiving and acting. Thus, they're not in the focus of Goodman's discussion. Still, the labeling and classification processes he refers to in the section about composition and decomposition cover the process of generalization that Bandler and Grinder describe (see esp. WWM 8–9), and much more.

[1] Richard Bandler and John Grinder, The Structure of Magic. A book about language and therapy, Palo Alto: Science and Behavior Books 1975, 5–20. References to The Structure of Magic are given with SM and page numbers.

[2] Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, Indianapolis: Hackett 1978. Quoted as WWM with page numbers.

Layers of study

There are different layers to the study of unreality which I'm doing. First, there is the surface. That's where phenomenology is done: I look at different forms of unreality, such as novels, movies, dreams, lies and the past, describing concrete instances. Most often that is triggered by some interesting detail in them which I report and then reflect on. Sometimes I will connect these instances with deeper layers and then dive into those, at other times I'll just describe them as examples.

The second level is what I call substance, mostly the theory that guides my looking at examples, the concepts and their interconnections, also their connections with other sorts of theory (like film theory, or the psychology of dreaming).[1] This is the condensed, sedimented basis of everything that happens on the surface layer. For instance, the rough division into areas of the instances of unreality is based on a structure which is itself part of the substance layer. Concepts such as that of spaces of possibilities which I recently looked at, or broader accounts such as that of the interplay of imagination and reflection belong here. These are what is applied at the surface level. They are, however, not just applied, but also extended and corrected by insights found on the surface. Discussion on the surface has a validating role for the elements in the substance layer.

On the third level, I explore connections, similarities and differences with philosophy. Mostly, this means studying philosophy for analysis that might come in helpful, for precursors or providers of frameworks which bring a basis for my own project, and possible objections to my views.

The philosophy layer is a reflective one; it reflects on theory, not on the forms of unreality themselves. Concepts from philosophical works or contemporary debates might also appear on the substance level. If they do, they throw light at surface phenomena (such as what happens in a novel). If they appear on the philosophy level, however, they help explain underlying theories or concepts (which are on the substance level and thus in turn help explain surface phenomena). And finally, the relation between substance and surface itself, and other relationships between layers, are reflected here.

There is (I think) another, fourth layer, which I call the ground. That's where the philosophy parts are based in. For instance, I have to decide sometimes which philosophical frameworks I would accept for my purposes. I think there must be something in which such a decision would be founded, though I find myself unable to articulate this any clearer right now. I thus won't say much about that level, though it may happen that I'll from time to time allude to it. (Probably primarily in the form of appeal to deep intuitions.)

These layers imply no ranking (working on the surface level is no less important that working on the philosophy level). They're rather intended as a quick help for orientation for me, while writing, and for you, while reading. If you like, you can consider them as a tool for roughly grouping or classifying my postings: usually you should be able to tell at which level we're currently discussing things. Also, don't interpret too much into the terms I've used for the layers. They're chosen in part for their suggestive and pictorial characteristic; there is no deeper truth (or even a metaphysics) to be found in them. (At least none that I intended to put there.)

[1] This is another term that has a long history; I don't want to allude to the more technical uses of this term in older philosophy; the use that I have primarily in mind is rather as in "His allegations have substance." As a name for one of the deeper layers, it connects also to the original Latin substare, from which it is derived.

The varieties of unreality

I started the introduction to the central topic of this blog with a few simple examples of unreality: mistaken descriptions, lies, and fictions. Let's survey the area we are discussing a little more systematically.

We are interested in anything that can provoke the response: "But that's not really so" — discourse that has been made up at least in part (with whatever intentions).

1. The obvious examples are all the established kinds of fiction. They include literary forms such as novels and short stories, poems and cartoons; dramatic forms such as theatre plays and ballets, operas and musicals, movies, television series', and video games; and pictorial forms such as paintings and photography, and sculpture (perhaps even architecture, as a border case). Part of all fiction is a fictional world of some kind. (That's not all there is to fiction, of course: what it is to be fiction is not exhausted by giving rise to a fictional world. In many cases, that world is not much more than a framework or vehicle for something else which is the proper focus; for instance, a painting might depict a certain scene involving a couple of people, but the whole point may be to make a display of great beauty in the portrayal of the people in the picture. The fantasy world in which they appear is of secondary importance.)

In the kinds of fiction listed so far, fictional worlds are described, depicted or staged in a relatively concrete way. Next, there are more abstract forms of art, which also create, in a sense, their own 'worlds'. Abstract painting comes to mind here, or generally all music which doesn't rely on words or drama (i.e. what is sometimes called 'absolute music'). These worlds are much more strange and interesting: they may still share some very general structures, such as time structure, with the real world, but on the other hand can come to eliminate other aspects completely and so create a purity that just by itself has its own aesthetic quality. (There are none of the familiar physical objects, no artifacts or persons in them; they may consist of highly symbolic or abstract representations, or they may be constructions built mostly for reflection on social or artistic constellations.)

An example for an analysis of the world of sounds which underlies most Western music is the first chapter, on the metaphysics of sound, in Roger Scruton's Aesthetics of Music,[1] from which I've also taken the idea of metaphysical apartness that I've used already several times in my postings here. The qualities of such a hypothetical world of sounds have also been made the basis for philosophical reflection, perhaps most famously by Peter Strawson in the second chapter of his Individuals,[2] where he uses the idea of a world of pure sounds to discuss whether a concept of space is required for the possibility of objectively existing individual items in the world.

2. Closely related to fiction, but with a more practical purpose that influences how they are created, are the various sorts of scenarios used for hypothetical reasoning in situations where trying out things for real, or in all possible combinations, would not be feasible (or practical). Scenario construction goes on when business plans are made, when military operations are planned; generally it's commonly employed in planning activities of all sorts, down to very simple everyday situations. ("This is the last train; what if we miss it?" — "Well, we'd have to find a hotel then.")

Somewhat similar to scenarios, thought experiments are used in science and philosophy to conceptually isolate certain aspects of a theory and test whether the results of that theory would make sense under the conditions in the world of the thought experiment.

An influential recent philosophical thought experiment is Hilary Putnam's 'twin earth' example (follow the link for bibliographic references), with the goal of demonstrating that the meaning of words in a natural language cannot be fully determined by the psychological state of a speaker of that language. The Wikipedia article on thought experiments includes a list of other examples from many areas.

As with fiction, the 'worlds' created when scenarios are built aren't the primary purpose; scenarios are made for a purpose (for 'what-if' exploration, hypothetical reasoning, or conceptual exploration).

3. Fiction and hypothetical scenarios have in common that their character as unreal, as made-up for some purpose (whether it is aesthetic enjoyment or practical exploration of possibilities) is usually known to all involved. It would defeat the purpose of a fictional world or a hypothetical scenario if you hadn't known that it's fictional or hypothetical. (How would you enjoy its aesthetic qualities, or pursue its practical purpose, if you weren't aware of that status?) There is another cluster of forms of unreality where this character isn't known, however. It comprises any sort of (intended or unintended) misinformation: lies, misperception, misremembering, falling for rumours; cases of being deceived (both simple and elaborate deceptions, like those engineered in con tricks, even deep deception such as in Othello); superstition may count among them, illusions, and perhaps as border cases also delusions, such as those caused by mental illness.

Not every kind of false statement generates unreality. (If we'd take the set of all false descriptions, unreality would be a proper subset of it.) In order to be an instance of unreality, it must be taken as a candidate reality, so to speak. Merely false statements (such as, for instance, imprecise answers to questions) may not be able to fulfill this role. There might be a grey zone here, but I think its intuitively clear what this condition means, at least in the paradigm cases.

4. There are two more fields of unreality which both deserve a more extensive exposition of their own; therefore I shall merely list them here without commentary, and defer further discussion to later postings. (I'm aware that these two may be a little harder to recognize as fields of unreality somewhat contiguous to those enumerated above; that's another reason why I think they deserve dedicated introductions of their own. For the moment, you simply have to take them on good faith.) One is that of dreams, which I'd extend to a more broad category including also phantasy and daydreaming. The other encompasses the past and the future: what we can access in memories, history, records, and testimony; and what we find in projections, projects, and predictions.

5. With this, we've walked the main areas into which the terrain of unreality can be divided, by its various forms. In this blog, everything is centered around these, qua being forms of unreality. I've already indicated that its their phenomenology as forms of unreality I'm interested in, where phenomenology is taken in a somewhat relaxed sense. In addition, I will of course explore some theoretical aspects, both of the theory of unreality I'm bringing to bear and from many other theoretical fields from which something can be learned about these instances of unreality.

[1] Roger Scruton, "Sound", in: The Aesthetics of Music. Oxford: Oxford UP 1997, 1-18.

[2] Peter F. Strawson, "Sounds", in: Individuals. An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics. London: Routledge 1996, 59-86.

Phenomenologizing

A note on my use of the term 'phenomenology', in the title, and also throughout this blog. What I mean by doing phenomenology is looking at the forms of unreality, describing exemplars, showing their relationships with each other and their connection with the theory underlying this blog (what I sometimes refer to as the substance layer). Thus what I'm doing is in part applicative (applying concepts to instances of unreality), in part corrective (delineating the correct use of such concepts by considering border cases, false applications vs. correct applications and so on), and also in part generative (exploring constellations where concepts have to be formed in the first place).

There's a notable difference here to a much more strict, and differently defined, sense of the term in the 20th century philosophical movement, originating in the work of Husserl, which is itself called Phenomenology. The term has been used before, though, in the broader sense I have in mind here, most prominently in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit; and it's also been used so recently, even if influenced and informed by the ideas of the Phenomenologists. In line with a convention you'll occasionally see in the philosophical literature, I shall use 'phenomenology' in this broad sense, but spell it with a capital 'P' (i.e. 'Phenomenlogy') in the few cases I intend to refer to the movement of the same name, or when I want to employ the strict methodological sense attached to it by that movement.

Introduction

(Although this is going to be much more specific and less theoretical in the future, I think a little introduction to the philosophy of unreality might be helpful here — to give you at least some idea of the underlying background theory which provides the structure and motivation behind the observations and reflections in this blog.)

We sometimes talk about things that aren't so. It can happen accidentally, when we relate something to someone about which we are actually mistaken, or deliberately, when we're lying. In the latter case, we are typically doing so with the intent to deceive: we know things aren't as we are telling them, but whoever we are talking to doesn't. There are, however, other cases where the receiver is aware of what is and what isn't the case, and actually needs to be — most commonly when what is taken in is a work of fiction, such as a novel or a movie.

In all these situations, we can indicate the divergence of what we are describing from what is the case by using phrases such as: "It wasn't really so — I was mistaken about it", "I was lying — in reality things went differently", "This isn't real — it's just a movie". Terms such as 'real' (and others, such as the 'is the case' or the 'things aren't so' which I used above) have the function to make us aware of that divergence. They're not used in the description, or the telling, of something — they are necessary for saying something about the description, or the telling, namely, that it is not true to what is the case.

In many cases, at least someone knows about the divergence. This is easy to see in the case of lies or fiction. Someone knows that a description has been made up. (At the very least the person who did make it up knows that!) Unless the main goal is deception, there are normally also other signals that can be taken from the context: if you are reading a book with the words 'A novel' on its title page you'll take its contents as a fictional narrative, that is, as about something that didn't really happen.

In theory, if we could develop an account of all the ways (and motives) of making up things, we might be able to approximate the border between reality and unreality — we might be able to map out, as it were, the territory of the real and the adjacent areas of the unreal. (Much philosophical work has been dedicated to this quest over the centuries, mostly coming from a desire to get clear about the concept of reality.) At least we could do so in principle, for very probably in practice many potentially made-up stories will remain that we aren't going to verify (or falsify), and so won't be able to sort them into those which describe things as they are and those that don't — that is, some fuzziness might remain in practice. But the ideal limit of this process should give us a demarcation of reality, as distinguished from unreality.

There may, however, not be a single, reliable criterion (or set of criteria) for determining whether something is really as it is told, or whether it has been made up. Although we seem to have a pretty good idea in many cases, there are probably others where we don't. And there is much diversity among the forms and occasions of talking about things differently than they really are. Perhaps it isn't such a good idea then, to try and draw a line somewhere between what is real, i.e. what makes up reality, and what is not.

It also might be questionable whether reality is that interesting, after all. True, we have an interest, in many situations, not to be mislead, or at least not to be deceived. But if we were to proceed as described above, by studying all the ways of unreality, we would get that (at least as far as would be practicable), even if we didn't succeed eventually in getting a clear grip on reality.

What is more: we have a good starting point in our intuitive ability, in many cases, to tell reality and unreality apart. Looking more closely at these cases, and carefully analyzing the details of what is going on there, seems to be a path that is at least likely to provide some insight — if not about reality, at least about the varieties of unreality.