Q & A

Q: The question of whether reality is objective or subjective has been debated for millennia.  How does Ontological Dualism differ from traditional philosophical approaches?

 A: Although I have some familiarity with philosophy, it’s not my primary field.  Approaching a problem with a fresh mental frame can often bring new insight.  Because we evolved in at least one kind of reality, and our survival in it required adapting to it, my working assumption is that evolution and cognitive science may have a contribution to make to philosophy.

 Q: How can we refer to anything as objectively true (a fact of alpha reality) when by their very nature, any truth claims we make are only what we believe to be true, and cannot be confirmed without a doubt to be anything other than that (i.e., “facts” of beta reality)?

 A: Quite correct.  Any references to objective facts are technically only theoretical or putative objective facts.  Suppose I set sail for 15° 56” S, 5°, 42” W in the S. Atlantic, believing it to be the location of the island of St. Helena.  If, upon approaching that spot, I see the Union Jack flying above the distinctive land contour that is associated with the St. Helena harbor, I’m likely to hold it out as an example of correspondence – a matching of beta reality (my belief of the island’s location) with its location in alpha or objective reality.  Technically, the latter claim is still just a belief – I may be hallucinating; a navigation error may have brought me to a different location; the harbor I’m approaching may actually be an elaborate fake placed there to deceive me.  Those alternative explanations are all possible, but the most plausible and parsimonious explanation for the observed correspondence is that St. Helena objectively exists at that location.

So when something is referred to on this website as an objective fact, it’s with the understanding that this is the most likely explanation for a consistent pattern of fulfilled predictions based on beliefs about it, although there will undoubtedly be instances where this probabilistic conclusion is incorrect, and something is called an objective fact that is not.

 Q: Doesn’t the act of correction imply the existence of an agent that’s doing the correcting?

 A: No more than natural selection requires an agent.  All that’s happening is that animals learn from their mistakes and tend not to repeat them.  If at a global level the net movement of beliefs toward their objective values through this feedback loop seems to imply a guiding hand, that’s an illusion.  No agent is needed.