Realists and anti-realists about abstract objects debate whether, or in what sense, such entities form part of reality. Nominalism, another anti-realist view, rejects both mental and non-mental interpretations of universals. For example, a person may be a realist about universals and an anti-realist about values.

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• For instance, causality, virtue, life and justice are abstract concepts.
• Anti-realism questions the prospect of achieving a true description of a mind-independent world.
• For example, David Lewis’s modal realism asserts that there exist countless spatiotemporally unified possible worlds, each just as real as the actual world.
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• Various categories of being or constituents of reality are discussed in the academic discourse.

In a slightly different sense, reality is not the totality itself but an aspect shared by all its constituents. Contemporary technology in the form of augmented and virtual reality can inform experience and raises questions about the ontological status of virtual objects. Various criteria for distinguishing real from unreal entities have been proposed, including causal powers, mind-independence, and being non-illusory. It is often contrasted with appearance, opposing what is with what seems to be, although the accuracy and fundamentality of this contrast are disputed.
Some outlooks suggest that only the fundamental level is ultimately real, arguing that non-fundamental entities are in some sense eliminable since reality can be described without them. For example, one view suggests that macroscopic objects, such as a chair, depend on the microscopic objects that underlie them, such as elementary particles. Another structural feature concerns the idea that some entities depend on, or are grounded in, other entities. According to a common view, concrete objects exist in space and time, such as a flower, a horse, and a ship. Events are proposed constituents of reality that occur in time, such as the discovery of penicillin and the Second World War. As individual entities, they contrast with universals, which are general, repeatable entities that can have many instances, such as the color blue, the shape roundness, and the property of being a mammal.

Viewpoints on reality

Formalism, another form of anti-realism, understands mathematics as a practice of symbol manipulation, suggesting that mathematical truth is grounded in whether the manipulation rules permit the construction of a proof. According to conventionalism, the truth of mathematical statements rests on linguistic conventions or definitions, rather than on their relation to language-independent reality. Anti-realists hold that there are no abstract objects and offer alternative explanations.

• Realism and anti-realism are families of views concerning the mind-independence of reality.
• According to this view, even a complete understanding of physics would not render sciences dedicated to higher levels, such as psychology, obsolete.
• In the social sciences, critical realism holds that observable events in the social world only partially disclose reality.
• It opposes the idea that world and mind are essentially correlated, emphasizing the mind-independent nature of reality beyond the way humans perceive and think about it.
• A central topic in ontology is the categories of being—fundamental classes that map out a comprehensive inventory of reality.

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Lower levels, by contrast, operate according to more basic mechanisms and are prior to the higher ones. On this view, higher levels show greater complexity and new phenomena but depend on the lower ones and could not exist without them. Some philosophical approaches rely on the idea of fundamentality and dependence to analyze the world in terms of levels or layers, such as material, biological, psychological, and social reality. In the Hindu tradition, it is often identified with Brahman as the all-pervasive reality and the supreme principle grounding all being.

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Reason is the ability to draw logical inferences and arrive at truths independent of immediate sensory input. Dummett concludes that, according to realism, a sentence is either true or false, while according to anti-realism, there is a third option for undecidable sentences that can be neither verified nor falsified. Anti-realism is understood as a view that identifies the meaning of a statement with the evidence that would support it or the conditions under which a person is justified in asserting it.

Another influential proposal treats mind-independence as a criterion of reality, arguing that real entities do not depend on how people think about them. The Eleatic principle is controversial because it is typically taken to deny that abstract objects studied in fields like mathematics, such as numbers, are real. However, stories about Santa Claus, such as written texts in children’s books, are part of reality since they can influence how people think. Discussed in ancient Greek philosophy as the Eleatic principle, it states that to be real is to be able to produce changes and to be affected by zumospin casino them. Criteria of reality are proposed features or standards that distinguish real entities from unreal ones. In this sense, it is the state of being real or what all real entities have in common, separating them from unreal or illusory ones.
It denies the existence of knowledge in any form or domain, arguing that knowledge is impossible. Some forms target specific domains of knowledge, such as religious skepticism, which denies that beliefs about God or other religious doctrines amount to knowledge. These limitations indicate a gap whereby reality is not fully captured and exceeds knowledge. More general constraints arise from limits of human cognitive faculties rather than situation-specific circumstances, such as facts too complex for anyone to conceive. Testimony is a transmission of knowledge from one person to another through communication.k Memory is the capacity to store information from other sources and make it available to cognitive processes when needed.

Values

A central topic in ontology is the categories of being—fundamental classes that map out a comprehensive inventory of reality. Becoming, by contrast, covers change, like when an entity shifts from one state of being to another. Other suggested criteria identify reality with what is observable, measurable,a coherent,b useful, objective, intersubjective, or fundamental. This view emphasizes that reality is encountered, rather than invented, and can resist or frustrate beliefs and desires, unlike malleable imaginary creations.
In ancient Greek philosophy starting in the 6th century BCE, the pre-Socratics discussed the first principles from which all things arise. The school of Vaisheshika arose roughly in the 2nd century BCE and developed a system of six fundamental categories of being. Various historiographical debates address the question of whether a truly objective account of the past is possible. Some doctrines hold that God constitutes the most fundamental level of reality as the divine origin of all creation. One strand of the field analyzes culture-specific worldviews and compares them across societies.
Various categories of being or constituents of reality are discussed in the academic discourse. Similarly, the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics suggests that in quantum measurements, not only one but all possible outcomes occur, interpreted as a branching of the universe into multiple worlds. It is often contrasted with essence, which denotes the nature or characteristic features of an entity.