In this summary step, we revisit how the different perspectives on reality relate to influential epistemological perspectives in philosophy and psychology.

Throughout this chapter, we have distinguished four meanings of reality and explored their connections to different epistemological positions. You can download the following table as a cheat sheet from the download section below.

SENSE OF REALITY	DEFINITION	DISTINCTION	EPISTEMOLOGICAL POSITION	EXAMPLE
Reality as objective	Reality is external, physical, and independent of perception.	Objective (real) vs. Subjective (unreal)	Physicalism, Behaviorism	An object exists whether someone perceives it or not.
Reality as phenomenal	Reality is what is directly experienced; beyond subjective perception, nothing can be known.	Phenomenal (real) vs. Transcendent (unreal)	Idealism, Constructivism	„If I close my eyes, the world ceases to exist for me.“
Reality as perceivable	Reality is what can be encountered through perception, distinguishing external reality from imagination.	Perceivable (real) vs. Imaginal (unreal)	Naïve Realism, Phenomenology	Hallucinations feel real to the individual but cannot be externally verified.
Reality as credible	Reality is what we determine to be true through reasoning, knowledge, and critical evaluation.	Credible (real) vs. Apparent (unreal)	Critical Realism, Evolutionary Epistemology	Perceptual illusions show that perception does not always reflect reality accurately.

In this chapter, we learned that we can approach reality from two fundamental perspectives:

• The External Perspective: Reality is objective, independent, and measurable (physicalist view).
• The Internal Perspective: Reality is subjective, experiential, and immediate (idealistic view).

An emphasis on the external perspective is compatible with physicalism, the view that everything is physical or ultimately depends on the physical. In psychology, a related emphasis on external observation appeared in Watson’s behaviorism, which prioritized observable behavior over introspection. Conversely, an emphasis on the subject’s contribution to experience is associated with forms of idealism, including Kant’s transcendental idealism. Related ideas appear in constructivism, which emphasizes the active construction of knowledge and experiential reality. In this course, we adopt a realist framework that acknowledges both an observer-independent world and our subjective experience of it. We distinguish two forms of realism:

• Naive Realism: Assumes that the world is as we perceive it.
• Critical Realism: Acknowledges an observer-independent world while recognizing that our perception of it is shaped—and limited—by our cognitive systems.

Evolutionary epistemology adds an account of how these systems evolved.

Distinguishing two forms of realism. Based on Bishop (2014), p. 110.

Moving forward, we adopt critical realism as our guiding epistemological stance. While we acknowledge that an objective reality exists independently of human perception, we also recognize that our access to it is shaped by biological and developmental factors. This perspective provides a balanced epistemological lens through which we explore how humans developed their understanding of the world.

In line with evolutionary epistemology, we will draw on biology to examine how our cognitive systems—and the models of the world they enable us to construct – has been shaped throughout the course of our developmental history.

With this foundation, we now turn to the next major epistemological question: How true is what we can say about reality? In the next chapter, we will explore how evolutionary constraints have shaped cognition and what this implies for the reliability of our understanding of the world.

Authors: Fabian Mueller & William Palmer

References

Bischof, N. (2014). Psychologie: Ein Grundkurs für Anspruchsvolle. W. Kohlhammer Verlag.

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