Let’s start with a story. In a previous job I worked in a busy public building. The building followed a particular 1970’s design: all the walls were plate glass windows and it had a central stairwell. A bomb exploding within half a mile would have caused hundreds of plate windows to shatter, becoming a million flying, pointy, lethal shards of glass. For this reason, we used to have bomb-scare drills. At either side of the building were fire escape routes, built of brick, that led directly away from the risk of flying glass. In bomb scares, the procedure was to herd all members of the public away from the central glass-lined staircase and out through the fire escapes. We had a bomb-scare practice one busy lunchtime. Everyone ran down the central staircase. 
The managers prided themselves on running a ‘learning organisation’. OK, they figured, it’s obviously quicker to use the central staircase. On the face of it, it’s risky but the time saving adds safety anyhow. So they changed the official procedure to reflect this. A couple of weeks later, there was a genuine bomb scare. Some staff knew the new procedure. Some knew there was a new procedure but didn’t know what it was. Some still thought everyone should use the fire exits. The staff conscientiously directed the public to safety - in several competing directions. It took ages. No bomb went off so, luckily, no world-record size pile of sushi resulted.

So what’s that all about? In one sense it’s about philosophy; figuring out how we do things so that maybe we can do them better. The purpose of this article is to shed a little light on one area of philosophy, namely epistemology. Believe it or not, a few minutes from now you’ll be able to say, "Epistemologically speaking, I’m a Causal Realist" with perfect confidence. But there’s a question forming on your lips - "What the hell is this guy going on about?"
What I’m going on about
Epistemology is the study of theories of knowledge: a bunch of questions about whether we actually know what we think we know, and if so how. Sounds like crap, doesn’t it? You know what you know because it’s in your head, right? You know about stuff because you see it or hear it or whatever and then you remember it. That’s pretty much the answer most people would give and it’s straightforward enough. Well, maybe. This view of the world has a name; it’s called Commonsense Realism. I told you this would be useful, didn’t I? We’ve hardly started and already we’re giving names to things. This philosophy thing is a lot easier than people imagine. 
OK, so we’re a bunch of Commonsense Realists. So what? The world is just out there: you can see your cat, you can smell that it’s pissed on the carpet again, therefore the cat exists. There’s a godawful thumping sound coming through the wall, so you know the neighbours and their sucky taste in music still exist. The point is that these are sensory impressions - our senses tell us things and we tend to believe them. But senses deceive us. We’ve all had the experience of being in some dark back room of a night-club, pounding forcefully at the cute hairless butt of our boyfriend, yelling out "Jesus, Rob, this is fantastic. I’ve never known you so tight" and getting the reply "Who‘s Rob?" from the accommodating stranger we happen to have mistaken for our boyfriend from behind. Or perhaps that’s just me. Either way, our senses are not completely reliable. Certain men who one hears are straight don’t always look entirely straight clutching the headboard, begging "Faster, harder, do me" in a hoarse whisper.
In essence, that’s The Illusion Argument. Circular coins look oval, side on. Because we know that our senses don’t always tell the truth, we can’t ever be sure that they’re telling the truth at any given moment. Are you really sitting there, reading this? It could be that you’re just dreaming it. It could be that you’re hallucinating because you took way too many drugs, forgot which ones you’d already had and so took some different ones and stayed out dancing until seven in the morning, forgetting all about your deadline. That’s certainly possible, take it from me. 

On top of the illusions our senses present, there’s another problem with Commonsense Realism. It assumes that memory is reliable too. Twenty years after being taught it, I can clearly remember Sine = Opposite over Hypotenuse, Cosine = Adjacent over Hypotenuse, Tangent = Opposite over Adjacent. The mnemonic is SOHCAHTOA, alternatively Silly Old Harry Caught A Herring Trawling Off Anglesey. What I can’t remember is what sines, cosines and tangents do or are, or what use they could conceivably be to anyone. Not the faintest idea. It’s strange, isn’t it? Current thinking has it that memory isn’t a discrete function of the brain; bits of memories are scattered all over. Memories concerned with movement are kept in the part of the brain relating to that movement, similarly sight or smell memories and so on. The mnemonics must be kept in a totally separate part of the brain from the knowledge they’re supposed to encode. The mnemonics are fresh as a daisy whilst the knowledge itself has long since rotted into the soil, rendering the mnemonics useless. Worse than useless really, because now they’re utterly functionless but still taking up headspace. Incidentally, if anyone does understand what sines and the rest are for and feels moved to explain it to me, I’d be grateful if you’d keep it to yourself. Trigonometry is rather like heterosexuality in one respect. Doubtless it’s essential to someone, but I’ve tried it and frankly life’s too short.
Hello, I’m a Representative from...
So what are the alternatives to Commonsense Realism? Well, there’s Representative Realism for one. This is a variation of Commonsense Realism, attempting to answer the problems of sensory and memory illusion. It hinges on the idea that objects have both primary and secondary qualities. It’s not as complicated as it sounds. What’s meant by primary qualities are the properties that something definitely has, like size or shape. Secondary qualities concern our perception of the object, like what colour it is, and are triggered by the primary qualities. Colour is a useful example because things look to be different colours in different lights. Think about a piece of red velvet: you stroke it one way and the nap is shiny and glamorous. Stroke it the other way and it becomes dark and rich. The velvet hasn’t changed but your perception has. You might be colour-blind, so the velvet might be a luscious crimson or a deep forest green; you probably wouldn’t know the difference. In the world of Representative Realism, what you see isn’t necessarily what you get. Your senses don’t give you direct information. Instead, you get a mental representation of the object, caused by the object itself. Objects don’t have colours or tastes or whatever, they just have the ability to produce these sensations within us. As a consequence, people will see objects differently and we all know from experience that this happens. 
Representative Realism is a step forward from the Commonsense view because it tries to include the unreliability of senses and memory. Nevertheless, it’s a bit of a leap of faith. It also feels rather counter-intuitive, so a lot of people aren’t really comfortable with that leap. And there are philosophical problems with the position too. One is logical; if we can only observe secondary qualities, how can we ever really check that primary qualities exist? Assuming that we can only experience mental representations of objects, we have no method of comparing these to the actual world. One popular analogy is the idea of a cinema. You have to imagine that you are locked inside a cinema, alone, and you’re never allowed to leave. It’s the same sort of feeling you get watching a Meryl Streep movie. You assume that what you see on the screen more or less corresponds with the real world but, as you can’t go outside, how could you ever check?
Primary qualities are also subject to perception and illusion. Think about shape: the only object that looks the same shape from all angles is a perfect sphere. Size appears to change too, depending on distance. One thing I do know for damn sure is that certain items that certain people swear blind measure eight and a half inches look like nothing of the sort to me.
The lack of an Ideal world
So Representative Realism is inadequate too. What else is there? Idealism. In epistemological terms, Idealism isn’t about niminy-piminy notions of "If the armaments budgets were all spent on irrigating the Sahara" spouted by people with ecologically animate clothes. It is, though, a familiar idea to anyone who has either been or known an introspective teenager. The problem we saw with Representative Realism is that it means, logically, that the real world can’t ever be known. Idealism takes a leap forward from this position and argues that there's no reason to assume that the world exists at all. We only ever know our mental experiences, so why assume that there’s a world outside them? To stretch the locked cinema analogy a bit further, now you can’t leave because there isn’t an outside to go to. And if it’s a Jean Claude van Damme season playing, you’re really screwed.
Needless to say, there aren’t that many people who find Idealism plausible (if you ignore introspective teenagers, which is generally the best policy anyway). What Idealism actually means is that things only exist when they’re being perceived. If you stop watching something it just vanishes, rather like my last boyfriend. This business of everything winking in and out of existence the whole time isn’t something I find too convincing, particularly when I think what it could do to my insurance premiums. 

One argument levelled against Idealism is that of dreams and hallucinations: how could we ever know whether anything was ‘real’ or not? Idealists argue that reality has reliable patterns of behaviour and context whereas dreams are more haphazard, less repetitious. I’d point out that there are such things as recurring nightmares; I have an address book full of them. The two killer arguments against Idealism though are these. First, it’s more straightforward to assume that something causes these mental experiences and that may as well be a real world. In other words, Idealism is unnecessarily silly. Second, Idealism is a short step away from solipsism. Solipsism is the theory that all that exists is your mind and everything else is a figment of your imagination. In philosophical circles, this is a big no-no. Mostly it’s regarded as a form of mental illness. So the two killer arguments boil down to this: anyone who believes in Idealism is silly and probably a headcase. As refutations go, it’s not the most scientific but, hey, it suits me.
Dress Causal
Causal Realism seems to bring us full circle. It’s a theory that says we see things because they are there. Causal Realism acknowledges the existence of a real, physical world and allows that we genuinely interact with it. That’s quite a relief after the nonsense that some people would have us believe. It also allows for the scientific view of the world: we hear things because sound vibrations travel from their source to our ears. I guess this is where the neighbours and their terrible record collection come back into the frame. In fact, you might be thinking, this is where Commonsense Realism comes back in its entirety. Well, maybe. Causal Realism is a little more sophisticated than just waking up and smelling the cat piss.
This is where our beliefs start to matter. OK we see what we see, we hear what we hear. But what does it mean? Let’s say that you and me are going out to dinner together (and you might want to take care of the bill because you might get lucky if you do). We walk into the restaurant. What do we see? A select number of tables, starched white tablecloths, candlelight dancing on delicate crystalware. We hear the subdued murmur of conversation and the gentle strains of a Dvorak Cello Concerto in the background. (You’ve taken me somewhere fancy, you see. Stick with it; it’s working.) A waiter appears unobtrusively, guides us to a very good table (you think ahead, don’t you?) and then reappears with an excellent aperitif wine. Full marks to you. Now think what the waiter sees. He sees the table behind us have finished their seafood entrée and that’s two plates to clear, a Salade Nicoise and a Veal Escalope that the morons in the kitchen ought to have ready. Table nine are three-quarters way through their main course so he needs to ask them if they’re enjoying their meal. He hears the badly dressed couple whispering about how they get bigger portions when they go Surf ‘n’ Turf. The real world exists, but it’s different for all of us. What we know and what we’ve done colours what we perceive. 
You’ve probably heard some complex argument about cats in boxes and how the simple fact of observation can make a scientific experiment turn out different. This is an important part of that argument. Every scientist has had a life (or what passes for one among scientists) and brings those experiences, and those prejudices, to every observation they make. For all of us, scientists included, what you see depends on what you know. And when you tell someone about it, you use words that might mean something different to the person you’re telling. That’s the thing with Causal Realism; we all have different experiences of language too. 

As a theory, Causal Realism is hard to criticise. A few people have carped that it assumes the real world exists - it makes assumptions about reality. The thing is, pretty much everyone does. We spend our whole lives trying to deal with the real world; it’s probably safest to assume that the damn thing is there. Anyway, it’s usually Idealists who complain about this and they’re all crazy.
It’s OK, this is the last bit
Philosophy tends not to reach definite conclusions: it deals in thought and intangibles. I can’t tell you that one or other of the theories we’ve looked at is true. It’s up to you to figure out which you find most convincing. Chances are, most people who haven’t examined these ideas will fit in with Commonsense Realism. They won’t know it’s called that, and they won’t much care. Socrates said that an unexamined life wasn’t worth living. You can trust the ancient Greeks to be snotty like that. Personally, I’m not happy with Representative Realism either. It’s got the feeling of an idea someone had towards the end of a good party. I have ideas like that too but I generally don’t publish them the following morning. Idealism has another major fault that I didn’t mention earlier: it was thought up by a bishop. Samuel Johnson’s reaction to Idealism was to kick a big rock and say, "I refute it thus." It might have been better if he’d slapped the bishop hard around the chops to make the same point, but it’s an imperfect world and you can’t have everything.
    For me, Causal Realism is easily the most plausible. I might spend half my life in a fantasy world, but it’s good to know there’s a real one out there if things get messy. I imagine it’s the same for most people. You already know where this is leading, don’t you, so I may as well say it. Epistemologically speaking, I’m a Causal Realist.
 
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