Mona has asked me to create a list of philosophical terms that I sometimes use, so I thought I would just post them on my blog.
Subjective vs. Objective Reality
Subjective Reality: This is the reality that we experience inside our heads. These include our sense impressions (seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, and tasting), plus inner thoughts, feeling, memories, and imaginations.
Objective Reality: Objective reality is whatever remains true whether you believe in it or not. It is the world outside our senses, thoughts and feelings.
To make these ideas clear suppose you are cleaning dishes and you drop a plate that shatters on the ground. In the objective reality, the shattering causes waves to ripple in the air around you. But you don’t experience waves in the air. What happens is that your ear catches those waves and interprets them into what you subjectively experience as sound. Again, in the objective world sounds are just waves, but in the subjective world you experience sound.
Epistemology is that part of philosophy that asks, "what can we know?" "What can we be sure of?" "How do we get beyond mere opinion to real knowledge?" Some of the methods for obtaining knowledge are observation (empirical), logic, testimony, and revelation.
Empiricism focuses on empirical truth, which we derive from our sensory experience of the world. The simplest form of empirical truth is that based on direct observation -- taking a good hard look. Now this is not the same as anecdotal evidence, such as "I know a guy who has a cousin in Topeka who married a woman whose college roommate saw a UFO." It’s not really even the same as "I saw a UFO." It means that there is an observation that I made that you can make, too, and that, were it possible, everyone should be able to make. In other words, here’s a UFO: Take a look!
Metaphysics: Branch of philosophy concerned with providing a comprehensive account of the most general features of reality as a whole; the study of being as such. Questions about the existence and nature of minds, bodies, god, space, time, causality, unity, identity, and the world are all metaphysical issues. From Plato onwards, many philosophers have tried to determine what kinds of things (and how many of each) exist. But Kant argued that this task is impossible; he proposed instead that we consider the general structure of our thought about the world. Strawson calls the former activity revisionary, and the latter descriptive, metaphysics.
Dualism: Dualism states that there are two substances in the world. The first is material reality and the second is the supernatural. The two usually interact with each other.
I will probably continue this list in the future.
