ABSTRACT
We assume that in our social life, our trading and in political matters we are always dealing with a real world that exists independently of ourselves, and independently in particular of our thoughts about it. We deal with people as they are, with cars, houses, food and drink which can be seen, touched and smelt. We attend to political policies about roads and bridges, immigrants coming into the country, and the state of hospitals and their staff. We are aware that, through misunderstanding, we can ‘get the wrong idea’ about what is the real situation, or that we can be deceived by others into adopting wrong ideas, but still we assume that, by and large, we are dealing with the realities of life. We may qualify what we are dealing with through words such as ‘seems to be’ and ‘apparently is’, but we are mostly confident that we are penetrating beyond the ‘seems’ and the ‘apparent’ to the reality.
