Is there any kind of philosophical consensus on what it means for something to be real?
I was thinking about mereology, and whether objects like tables are "real". I don't think they are, but there is obviously a sense in which they are. Obviously, words can have multiple definitions, and can mean different things in different contexts. I'm a mereological nihilist, but I still think my car is real in the colloquial sense.
What I'm curious about is whether "real" means something particular in philosophy, or if the meaning is always context dependent.
Posted Feb 25, 2026, 9:10 PM UTC
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