Saturday, July 12, 2008

What is Reality?

Originally published here on March 5, 2008.

I touched on the concept of reality yesterday and talked a little about what the idea means to me in the context of Constructivism. Because the terms seem to be both ambiguous and important, I thought I'd spend a little time just look at the terminology I think matters...

In my very first blog post here I admitted to being at least partly an objectivist. I believe that reality is, well, real. What I mean by that is this: Had I never lived, reality would still be here (though, obviously, I wouldn't get to write about it). Reality is objective in the sense if we are all in the same place at the same time, what we see tends to be very similar. If all the teachers at my school come to my house and stand in my living room and look out the window, I suspect that all of them would agree that the animal in my neighbor's yard is a dog, and that it's black.

But while reality may be reality, and while we may all agree on what we see, it doesn't mean the same thing to each of us. And that's the second idea that seems central to Constructivism - meaning. Standing in my living room and looking out the window at that dog, my colleagues from school are all likely to attach at least slightly (maybe radically) different meanings to that dog.

  • Some will look at that dog and feel warm and fuzzy thoughts: "That reminds me of the dog I had when I was a child..."

  • Some will look at that dog and feel anger: "Why would someone keep nice dog like that outside on a chain? It's cruel..."

  • Some will look at that dog and feel disgust: "What a nasty creature. I never have understood why someone would own a dog..."

  • Some will look at that dog and feel close to nothing: "Hmm, a dog. Everyone has a dog. I wonder what's on TV tonight..."


All of them attach their own meaning to the dog they see, and it's meaning they've built themselves.

In my short experience with Constructivism, I've decided that there are people who think that reality is not objective and that people really do build their own - so they say that we build our own reality (and they mean it). There are also Constructivists who believe that we build our own meanings to attach to a more-or-less objective reality, and for reasons that seem aesthetic, perhaps poetic, they call those meanings "reality." But they understand that we only build meanings for ourselves to associate with reality, not reality itself...

A couple of other words that come up also create some ambiguity. Those words are knowledge and information. When Constructivism gets applied as a theory to the idea of learning, Constructivists often talk about building knowledge.

Knowledge is a complicated thing. I cant think much about Chinese history without thinking about the development of the Chinese language. The ideas are connected, as I see them. Other people know a lot about Chinese history without knowing much of anything about the language; they don't make the connections that I do. But the fact that the Han Dynasty was founded in 206 BC is a piece of information that stands by itself, relatively undisputed.

My knowledge of China is different from someone else's knowledge of China because I connect this or that singular piece of information (like when the Han Dynasty was founded) to different things than they connect it to. And one result of that is that we form different opinions, analyze the information differently and synthesize it differently. If knowledge is the whole of a body of facts and information (including their connections to one another), we build knowledge. But we do not build information. Information is part of reality...

I could go on. I could go on, mostly because I haven't really clarified completely for myself the ideas involved. Perhaps I never will. But the distinction between reality (which we encounter, I think) and meaning (which we attach to reality), between knowledge (which we build in something like webs that are unique to us) and information (which exists without us) - those are important distinctions, I believe...

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