Sunday, July 07, 2019

Real and Unreal

There is a recurring pattern of possible positions considered with the range of possible accounts you could give of something's apparent existence. You could, first of all, take it to exist really, or not to exist really. If you take it to exist really, positions seem naturally to break into two groups: it really exists as a natural thing or as an artificial thing. Positions on natural real existence tend to break into two groups: either it really exists in its own right (like a body), or it really exists because it shares existence with something else (like the color of a body). If it's artificial, it could exist due to individual artifice (like a chair) or due to social convention (like a language). On the other side, if it does not have real existence, its apparent existence could be either by fiction or by illusion. If it is fictional, it is put forward as if real, despite not being so; it could either be a theoretical posit that sums up or approximates things that really exist (like a center of gravity), or it could be something put forward for some other purpose as if it were real (like a character in a story). If it is illusion, the illusion could either be defeasible (like a stump mistaken for a dog) or indefeasible (like a hallucination or an optical illusion); 'defeasible' and 'indefeasible' here mean the illusion itself. A hallucination is an indefeasible illusion in this sense, but of course one can know that it is an illusion; indeed, that's a sign that it might be indefeasible, it's consistently still as if there even if you have good reason to think it's not really so. We can roughly see these as going from 'most real' to 'least real', with the border between reality and unreality fuzzily lying somewhere between artificial and fictional:

natural
      in itself (strong)
      in another (weak)
artificial
      due to artifice
      due to convention
fictional
      loosely connected to what is real
      purely a matter of story or imagination
illusory
      defeasible
      indefeasible

For anything that seems to exist, you can divide up possible positions to the an sit roughly according to this taxonomy, although, of course, depending on the evidence and the like available, some will be more or less plausible. We can call the first 'naturalism', the second 'constructionism', the third 'fictionalism', and the fourth 'illusionism'. So a few examples, gone through roughly and loosely just to make the point and sketch out better what these options mean in practice. Let's start with an obvious one.

A. Santa Claus. Little kids are strong naturalists about Santa Claus; Santa Claus exists like you or me, in his own right. A 'Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus' position is an alliance-building position -- it is deliberately ambiguous between weak naturalism and constructionism: Santa Claus exists, but not in his own right; he exists in our hearts or as part of our social good-will. The ambiguity makes it possible for weak naturalists and constructionists to conspire to keep the little kids strong naturalists. Fictionalists treat Santa as a fictional character, useful for a certain purpose, but that is all -- it's only sometimes as if there were a Santa; illusionists are the obnoxious kid insisting that Santa is not real, he's just a made-up deception by your parents.

B. The Self. Most people in the West are strong naturalists, taking their selves to exist in their own right as subsisting substances. If you hold that your self exists, but is only part of a greater thing, like a world-soul or God, you are a weak naturalist about the self. Constructionists take the self to be something we make as we go along; it is not a substance but something made by bundling things together (which can be done either on the fly, a la Hume, or by society). Fictionalists hold that there is no self, either natural or artificial, but it's handy to act as if there were one for certain practical purposes, just like it's handy to treat a center of gravity as if it were a real thing. Illusionists hold there is no self, of course, it's a provably bad or incoherent idea; they either think we can overcome this (eliminativists) or that we're stuck with this appearance of having a self we know we can't have (error theorists).

C. The External World. Most people take the external world, as we experience it, to exist naturally in its own right; idealists are weak naturalists, holding that it really exists in nature, but only in minds and perhaps ultimately the mind of God. Some people, like logical empiricists, have argued that it is constructed by the mind out of sensations. That's only a step or two away from fictionalism, which holds that there is no external world, we're making it up, but not arbitrarily. And illusionists, of course, hold that there is no external world at all, it's just an illusion, not even a useful fiction; as it would be difficult to hold such a position without being a solipsist, it is not a popular view.

D. Other Minds. Other minds is a sort of complement to positions about the self; most of us are strong naturalists about other minds, but you can find people here and there who think that other minds only exist in something else, as parts of a world-soul or something. Anything weaker than that starts looking like a kind of solipsism, although you might not even be a solipsist if you think all minds are illusions -- it's hard to make sense of the notion of an illusion when there are no minds for whom there can be illusory appearances, so it's not a common view.

E. Abstract Objects. Strong naturalism about abstract objects is usually called platonism, and sometimes, more tendentiously, exaggerated realism; weak naturalism about abstract objects is usually called aristotelianism or moderate realism. Conceptualists about abstract objects are constructionists. Illusionists about abstract objects are sometimes called concretists or particularists; they hold that only concrete, non-abstract things exist.

F. Funniness. There are lots of moral and aesthetic notions that will tend to conform fairly closely to the patterns for abstract objects. I know of no strong naturalists for funniness -- nobody who believes that there is a real thing, the Funny, that exists in its own right -- but a surprising number of people are 'comic realists' and think that real natural things can be really and naturally funny in themselves. Most people, however, are probably social constructionists about funniness; things are really funny, but only insofar as they are made so within a social framework. Denying that anything is really funny at all is a hard sell. I know of no fictionalists about funniness, who hold that nothing is funny but it's convenient to act as if some things were, nor of any illusionists about funniness, who hold that, despite appearances, nothing is funny, period, but in this world I would not rule out people that humorless.

G. The State. Strong naturalism about the state is not popular position, but Hegel, for instance, sometimes talks as if it's true. If you hold that the state is a sort of natural outgrowth of people getting together in certain ways, you are a weak naturalist about the state. Social contract theorists are the preeminent examples of social constructionists about the state. I don't know of anyone who is an illusionist about the state, but perhaps there are anarchists somewhere who have such a view.

H. The Resurrection of Christ. By its nature it would have to be 'in' Christ, i.e., something He does or endures, so there isn't much room for a strong naturalism. Christian orthodoxy is weak naturalist about Christ's Resurrection: Christ's Resurrection is something that really happened to Christ. Modernism about the Resurrection is the heresy that is either constructionist or fictionalist about it: the constructionist holds that Christ really rose, but in the Church community, and the ficitonalist holds that Christ did not really rise, but it is a powerful and valuable story we tell. Illusionists, of course, deny it altogether.

I. God. People we call 'theists' are generally strong naturalists, and this is the most common position on the subject. People who try to treat God as a sort of aspect of the universe or ourselves are weak naturalists. Everyone else usually gets called an atheist. Although we usually are thinking of illusionists when we talk about atheism, I find in practice that there are a surprising number of both constructionists and fictionalists about God. They tend to be hard to pick out; they will often say exactly the same things about God, but just mean it figuratively, and I suspect you can find at least one or two of each in almost every church in the world, and I would guess that there are probably more of both than there are of illusionists. Most people that we think of as atheists obviously take God to be a defeasible illusion -- you may think that it looks like there's a God, but that's because you aren't looking at it the right way. The other kind of illusionism, the position that all indications of God are illusory but are an inevitable illusion was once not common at all; but it seems to be getting more traction -- the usual view is that God definitely does not exist, but we are hardwired to think socially, so our interaction with the world is social, and thus even the most rigorous atheist will naturally sometimes respond to the world as if it were a Person or had a Person behind it.

J. Atheism. Since atheism, as a position, is something attributed to persons, there is no strong naturalism associated with it (the idea that Atheism is a really existing being would be a weird position); some (we have to say 'purported') atheists try to argue that we should be weak naturalists about atheism, that atheism is a real natural position, but most people in fact are constructionists about atheism, for the same reasons that they are constructionists about most philosophical positions on most things: you can really be an atheist, but you make yourself one -- or are made one by society. A remarkable number of theists, however, are fictionalists about atheism -- they deny that anyone is really an atheist, it's just sometimes convenient to treat them as if they were. Illusionists about atheism are rare, but you do find here and there someone who speaks as if they were one: there is no atheism at all in the world, and (perhaps) we should stop coddling 'atheists' who are treating themselves as atheists, in the same way we tend not to coddle people who think they are Napoleon.

All of these, of course, are only examples, roughly and not precisely sketched, and a few of them, of course, are simply to make the point that you can apply the template quite widely. There are a great many things that tend to have a default position associated with them, a 'common sense view' as we would usually say. Almost everyone is fictionalist about Superman; almost everyone is constructionist about DC Comics; almost everyone is naturalist about comic books. People are overwhelmingly naturalists about landmasses, constructionists about national borders, and fictionalists about the equator. You do get cultural differences; people in Iceland are much more likely to be naturalists about elves than people outside Iceland, and people outside Iceland are much more likely to be illusionists about elves than people inside Iceland. 'Common sense view' should not be confused with 'respectable view'; sometimes it's treated as the vulgar or uneducated view, and even when it's not, there might be perfectly respectable views other than the common sense one (as you find if you are ever in a crowd of philosophers, for whom there is a always a wider range of respectable views than just the common sense view). There are probably also things about which there is no 'common sense view'; people just can't agree about what they are.

And you do get ambiguities; I think most people in practice waver a lot on things like ghosts or clairvoyant dreams, for instance, and it's only very die-hard folks who stay within the lines. The line between constructionism (X is a really existing, but artificial, thing) and fictionalism (X does not really exist, but is artificially treated as if it did) is sometimes subtle, and I think people are often not precise about which of the two they actually hold. Even philosophers get confused on that line; 'legal fiction' was a phrase coined to indicate things that were real but constructed by law ('fiction' originally indicating 'made' rather than 'false'), but most philosophers of law have tended to be fictionalists about legal fictions because of the name, leading to some really complicated theories due to the fact that in law some of them are, in fact, usually treated as if they were real artificial things and not as if they were unreal fictional things, and yet some things that are clearly fictional (like the posit of the 'reasonable person', which is just a fictional summary of reasonable people in general) have also come to be counted as legal fictions.