ABSTRACT
The physical objects of enlightened common sense have so maintained their appearance in the face of increasing knowledge that philosophers have reached an almost unshakable conviction of their reality. In the course of testing the reality of any perceptual object philosophers co-operate with other people, communicating philosophers’ experience and understanding theirs by means of language and other forms of gesture and related activities. The road to reality looks very different when philosophers recognize the significance of the distinction between the act of experiencing and the object experienced. The former is said to be “objective” or have “objective reality,” while the objects which appear different to each observer are called “subjective,” or have only the lower order of “subjective reality.” The objective reality of the visual datum in the case of rainbows and mirages; and human beings believed in the reality of something there, and wondered at its delusiveness, for many generations before they found out the explanation.
