A common colloquial usage would have reality mean
"perceptions, beliefs, and attitudes toward reality," as in "My
reality is not your reality." This is often used just as a colloquialism
indicating that the parties to a conversation agree, or should agree, not to
quibble over deeply different conceptions of what is real. For example, in a
religious discussion between friends, one might say "You might disagree,
but in my reality, everyone goes to heaven."
Reality can be defined in a way that links it to world views
or parts of them. Reality is the totality of all things, structures events and
phenomena, whether observable or not. It is what a world view ultimately
attempts to describe or map.
Certain ideas from physics, philosophy, sociology, literary
criticism, and other fields shape various theories of reality. One such belief
is that there simply and literally is no reality beyond the perceptions or
beliefs we each have about reality. Such attitudes are summarized in the
popular statement, "Perception is reality" or "Life is how you
perceive reality" or "reality is what you can get away with", and
they indicate anti-realism that is, the view that there is no objective
reality, whether acknowledged explicitly or not.
Many of the concepts of science and philosophy are often
defined culturally and socially. This idea was elaborated by Thomas Kuhn in his
book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The Social Construction of
Reality, a book about the sociology of knowledge written by Peter L. Berger and
Thomas Luckmann, was published in 1966.
