ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how to find a way forward by thinking about matters of concern, critical realism and speculative realism. Arguments against the idea of construction often return to basic relations of materiality. Unlike Berkeley's subjective idealism – the denial of external existence – Kant argued that mental images do not reflect an outside world, which was essentially unknowable, but rather reality must conform to the concepts in the human mind. In order to find a way out of these concerns over reality and social construction the chapter considers what it means to perceive and report on some form of reality, in particular a cat at the bottom of the garden. Reality cannot be objective but it may be independent. The chapter shows how to respond to the concerns raised by Latour and Luke that the critical project has gone off the rails if it cannot make claims to reality, if the central focus is on the construction of reality.
