ABSTRACT
Philosophy has been preoccupied with notions like ‘truth,’ ‘reality,’ and ‘reference’ since the beginning, so it should come as no surprise that the notion of ‘virtual’ entities and environments raises a host of epistemological, ontological, and ethical challenges. The term virtual is used in a myriad of ways, including the generic notion of being ‘almost but not quite’ (e.g., virtually impossible), the engineering sense of simulating a piece of soft- or hardware (virtual desktops, virtual memory), and the philosophical sense of being ‘quasi-,’ ‘pseudo-’ or ‘almost the same as’; something that is almost but not quite real, or something real without being actual (cf. Shields 2003: 25, inspired by Proust and Deleuze). In the same vein, Jaron Lanier, one of the early pioneers in virtual reality (VR) research who also popularized the term virtual reality explains that for something to be virtual “it has to be indistinguishable [from the actual entity] in some practical context, while it remains distinguishable in another” (Lanier 1999).
