We tend to think reality is out there waiting to be discovered. But philosopher Manuel Delaflor argues that experience, meaning, and ontology are active constructions, not passive receptions of a knowable world. Once we see that categories are created, not discovered, realism gives way to responsibility, and the question shifts from what reality is, to what reality are we choosing to create.
My sister is a graphic designer, someone who has spent two decades swimming in colour palettes. She once laid out some blues on her screen and asked me to name them. Azure, cerulean, cobalt, sapphire, she rattled off, pointing at squares I could only call “blue.” To her, they were as different as a dog and a horse. Her visual system had carved the continuous spectrum into slices mine simply could not access. That moment has stayed with me. If her blues are not my blues, and if training made the difference, then what else have I been missing? What categories do we walk around believing we discovered in the world, when in fact we manufactured them ourselves, through language, through habit, through purpose? And if this is true of something as basic as colour, what does it mean for everything else we think we see?
We tell ourselves a flattering story: out there is a world, pre-sorted into kinds, and our job is to discover those kinds. Rocks as rocks. Faces as faces. Colours sit waiting in the spectrum like crayons in a box. This is the myth of discovery, and it runs so deep we rarely notice it. It feels grounded, and we need grounding. It feels like the opposite of arrogance. Right? But examine it closely and the story collapses. I give you a hint on the reason: when something makes sense, it never means it is right. It means it clicks into place inside your existing maps. And that is why when we go around pretending to be certain about what “makes sense” is the easiest form of self-deception.
Return with me to the blue. Russian speakers make an obligatory distinction between lighter blues (goluboy) and darker blues (siniy), a division as fundamental as the English distinction between green and blue. This touches on the linguistic relativity Benjamin Lee Whorf hinted at. Now, of course we could console ourselves by saying this is just language, just words, but that consolation evaporates the moment we look deeper. The implication is merciless. The blues my sister sees were not discovered. They were instantiated. Brought into being by attention, vocabulary, and purpose. And it goes further still. Researchers Gabriele Jordan and John Mollon report rare cases consistent with tetrachromacy: four cone photopigments instead of three, and in some cases colour discriminations most of us cannot make. These individuals are not seeing the same spectrum more accurately. They are seeing a different spectrum altogether.
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Even the most fundamental boundary we take for granted, the boundary of the self, is an achievement of an active model.
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23rd January 2026
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