Among the most persistent fallacies, and one that is probably unavoidable even for the most trained scientists and philosophers, is naïve realism. This is the view that there are simply objects “out there” in the world that can be readily identified on the basis of sensory perception or some other conventional experiential means, and that every experiencer or observer is a perceiving subject capable of identifying those objects “as they are” by simply experiencing them with the senses and interpreting them with the mind. This viewpoint, while probably based on the need to filter out large portions of the world in order to continue surviving as a mortal organism in a dangerous and ultimately deadly biosphere, is nonetheless at odds with the best available evidence.

The philosopher Immanuel Kant was the first to note that there is an impassable chasm between things as they appear based on experience and things as they are in themselves, and there is now overwhelming evidence that cognitive processes create representations of the world rather than direct copies of the world “as it is.” Even though it is certainly convenient, and quite possibly inevitable, for humans to believe their experiences reproduce the world to consciousness as it really is, this does not mean that human experiences actually do this.

The fallacy of naïve realism is so pervasive that the degree to which humans understand or are even capable of understanding natural laws is questionable, particularly at the very small and very large scales that constitute the subject matter of quantum mechanics and the theories of general and special relativity, respectively. On an everyday basis, even philosophers and scientists who have a full understanding of the fallacy of naïve realism behave as though their minds accurately reflect the world as it is. The notion that people’s minds create representations of the world and don’t simply reflect the world as it “actually exists” is so abstract and removed from everyday experience that it is impossible to act in accordance with it at all times.

To be clear, not all varieties of realism are naïve. Realism is only naïve when it posits that people’s experiences of the world disclose the way the world as it “actually is.” A non-naïve realism would instead posit that, while experiences of the world are necessarily filtered through the minds and bodies of the individuals having them and these minds and bodies create representations of the world, it is possible to infer that such experiences indirectly reflect a real world made up of real objects and real occurrences.

And indeed, there are consistent patterns in the world that have been observed by every person with functional sensory organs, such as the effects of gravity. Even if people’s observations of patterns in the world like the effects of gravity are technically based on their own representations of the world to themselves, these experiences are so consistent from person to person that the only logical inference that can be drawn is that they reflect a real property of a real world, even if that real world cannot be directly experienced.