What do we mean when we say that something is real? What ought we to mean? I offer the following definition, in the interest of making an operational notion of reality: an entity is real to the extent that there are operationally coherent activities that can be performed by relying significantly on its existence and its properties. Reality (in the sense of real-ness) conceived in this way is a matter of degrees, and it is domain-dependent. Real entities (or, realities) are mind-framed, and crafting better realities is an achievement of conceptual engineering. When we take ontology in the context of practices, ontological pluralism no longer appears absurd: there are different sets of realities operative in different systems of practice. I illustrate these points with a range of examples drawn from the history of the physical sciences. The traditional picture of physical objects constituted as mereological sums of immutable building-blocks is unwarranted and creates undue hindrance to practice-based ontology.

Before developing my ideas further I must explain why I object to the common metaphysical picture behind standard scientific realism, which I call ‘correspondence realism’: the assumption that there is well-defined reality ‘out there’ with all its constituents existing mind-independently. This picture can be put under effective critical scrutiny if we disambiguate the notion of mind-independence. All entities that we can even think about are ‘mind-framed’ (characterized in terms of some concepts supplied by the mind), but real entities are not ‘mind-controlled (they do not do as we wish). The ‘fallacy of pre-figuration’ is to mistake the lack of mind-control as the lack of mind-framing. This fallacy is at the heart of the notion of correspondence between our theories and the mind-unframed ‘world’, and the purely extensional notion of reference according to which our words simply point to pre-figured realities. Such notions are produced through a metaphorical projection of the representation relation in real practices, in which correspondence holds among mind-framed entities. In standard realist discourse in the philosophy of science the fallacy of pre-figuration is reinforced by the faith that science does give us something resembling the ultimate true picture of reality, which must be free of mind-framing.