"And we must always be particularly wary of the philosophical habit of dismissing some of (if not all) the ordinary uses of a word as ‘unimportant’, a habit which makes distortion practically unavoidable. For instance if we are going to talk about ‘real’, we must not dismiss as beneath contempt such humble but familiar expressions as ‘not real cream’; this may save us from saying, for example, or seeming to say that what is not real cream must be a fleeting product of our cerebral processes."
— J.L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia p63-4
"There is no natural situation on earth in which someone could ask this strangest of all questions: “Do you believe in reality?” To ask such a question one has to become so *distant* from reality that the fear of *losing* it entirely becomes plausible—and this fear itself has an intellectual history."
— Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope
"If we misprepresent reality as we apprehend it as no more than a picture, then the reality as it is in intself of which we take ourselves to have a picture is a conception projected solely by analogy: it must be to reality as we apprehend it as a painting is to a painted landscape. We know what it is to view a real landscape; but a reality that we can never apprehend, because any apprehension of it will neccessarily be no more than a picture, is a phantasm produced by pushing analogy beyond its legitimate limits."
— Michael Dummet, Thought and Reality
"What is wrong with this view of a representable world and a representing mind, in mutual interaction? One thing which is wrong is that the social and cultural dimension of mind seems to be shortchanged by it. All the interactions between minds, and all the influence of custom, convention, and tradition is left out."
— Annette Baier, Postures of the Mind, p3
"But the scientists still retain the idea that the latest product of the scientific imagination is not merely an improvement on what was previously imagined, but is also closer to the intrinsic nature of things. That is why they found Kuhn’s suggestion that they think of themselves as problem-solvers so insulting. Their rhetoric remains “We have substituted Reality for Appearance!” rather than “We have solved some long-standing problems!” or “We have made it new!"
— Richard Rorty, “Philosophy as a transitional genre” p99
