Do Our Models of Reality Describe Anything Real?

Every conflict I have ever covered has had at least two official accounts and one actual one. The governments each assert facts. The intelligence briefings construct a reality. The courts — when they convene at all — adjudicate between competing versions of what happened. And then there are the people who were present, whose accounts rarely survive translation into the documents that become history.

I think about this problem constantly. Which is why a debate between three philosophers — Hilary Lawson, Jessica Frazier, and Graham Priest, hosted by the Institute of Art and Ideas — caught my attention in a way that a seminar on epistemology usually wouldn't. The question they are circling is one I have watched play out in press briefings, UN resolutions, and post-conflict tribunals: when we construct an account of what is real, are we ever actually describing something, or are we just building a framework that functions well enough to act on?

Lawson, whose non-realist metaphysics is laid out in his 2001 book Closure: A Story of Everything, opens with a move that is philosophically aggressive but logically tidy. He argues that "reality" has become what God used to be: notionally concrete, actually unobtainable, and structurally indescribable. "Reality has some strangely similar characteristics to God," he says. "It's also unobtainable and indescribable, which are pretty much exactly the characteristics that we apply to God." The twentieth century's entire philosophical project — working out how language refers to the world — he calls a failure, citing Wittgenstein's point that you cannot step outside language to verify its relationship to the thing it names. You are always already inside the framework.

His conclusion is that our models of the world — scientific, cultural, perceptual — are not descriptions of reality but structures that work within their own terms. Truth, on this account, is internal to the model. He marshals support from neuroscientists including Anil Seth, whose 2021 book Being You frames conscious experience as a "controlled hallucination," and from Stephen Hawking's 2012 shift away from a unified theory of everything toward what Lawson calls "model-theoretic" accounts — theories that are true within a framework rather than true of the world as it is.

Priest, Professor of Philosophy at CUNY and known for his work in non-classical logic, takes a different entry point. He is not dismissive of Lawson's position, but he is more cautious about abandoning reference entirely. His anchor is Alfred Tarski's T-schema: the proposition that "there is gas in my tank" is true if and only if there is gas in my tank. It sounds almost aggressively mundane, but Priest's point is precise — scientists explain phenomena without needing a resolved theory of truth. They check the tank; they observe light emission from black bodies; they invoke quantum states. The metaphysical question of what truth is runs parallel to the practical question of how science works, and conflating them does neither any favors.

Frazier, an Oxford philosopher working at the intersection of Indian philosophy and European phenomenology, mediates with some dexterity. She wants to sidestep the Cartesian theater — the image of a mind sealed inside itself, peering outward at a world it can never quite touch. Descartes posed the questions that phenomenology later inherited and transformed; thinkers like Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger eventually argued that wrestling over whether the perceived world matches an outer world is the wrong fight altogether. The perceived world is the real one. That is what we have always been working with. As Frazier puts it: "The outer world, in a way, we can't know. We've only ever had the perceived world. This is the real. This is what we're dealing with."

But she does not dissolve all constraint into subjectivity, and this is where her contribution sharpens the debate rather than softening it. She invokes philosopher of science P. Kyle Stanford's concept of the "problem of unconceived alternatives" — developed in his 2006 book Exceeding Our Grasp — which holds that any account of reality may be superseded by a better account we have not yet imagined. Science has a track record of discovering that its previously confident theories were incomplete. Epistemic humility is not optional; it is empirically mandated. And yet, Frazier insists, something pushes back. "If I come to the front of the stage right now and launch myself into the air to fly — unfortunately, it won't work. There are structures in reality that push back against us. They push against the will. Whatever they're made out of, it's not subjective in the sense that I get to matrix it up."

That pushback — the world's resistance to arbitrary construction — is the crux. Lawson accepts it while disputing what it tells us. When a model fails, he argues, we do not abandon it; we extend it. We bolt on additional components. He uses the example of dark matter and dark energy, which together account for roughly 95 to 96 percent of the universe's mass-energy content according to current cosmological models, yet have not been detected as direct particles — they are inferred from gravitational lensing, galaxy rotation curves, and cosmic microwave background data. His point is not that these inferences are fraudulent, but that they reveal the machinery of model-maintenance: when the numbers don't work, you posit what is needed to make them work, and the model survives. "If the model's not working," he says, "we just make up stuff which tries to get it to work."

Priest's counter is brief but carries weight: "When you create a theory, you don't create reality. There was stuff out there before you and I existed, before the human race existed." The theories came after the universe. That sequencing matters.

The part of this debate I find most clarifying — and most directly relevant to the kind of coverage I do — is not the disagreement about reference, but the convergence around constraint. All three philosophers, regardless of their metaphysical commitments, agree that not just any model will do. There is something that pushes back. The question is whether that pushback constitutes evidence that our models are about something, or merely evidence that reality exerts pressure on us without ever becoming legible to us.

That question is not abstract to anyone who has had to report a conflict in which two governments, each invoking their own model of what happened, produce documentation that is internally coherent and mutually exclusive. Official frameworks are model-theoretic in exactly Lawson's sense: true within their own terms, effective for the institutional purposes they serve, and resistant to the kind of ground-level evidence that would require rebuilding them from scratch. The framework rarely collapses even when evidence accumulates against it. You bolt on components — new intelligence assessments, revised timelines, alternative perpetrators — and the structure holds.

What Frazier's pushback principle captures is something I have seen work only slowly and unevenly: eventually, something resists the model so forcefully that the bolt-ons become untenable. Bodies don't disappear because the official account says they shouldn't be there. Numbers don't balance regardless of how the ledger is arranged. The mass won't support the bridge.

Whether that resistance amounts to "objective reality" in Lawson's theological sense — a final, describable truth to which we are converging — is a question these three philosophers leave open, with good reason. But it is worth sitting with what Priest's minimalism and Lawson's anti-realism and Frazier's structural pushback share: none of them are saying that all accounts are equal. They are saying that some accounts are better — more constrained, more durable, more capable of surviving contact with what resists them.

For those of us whose job is to produce accounts of contested events in contested places, that may be the only epistemology that actually works.

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Aminata Diallo is BuzzRAG's Foreign Affairs Correspondent, covering Africa, the Middle East, and global conflicts.