Our part in creating the universe

But the problem here is not so much whether something's "out-there", but what it ultimately is as opposed to how we represent or conceive it. There are deeper ways of describing and explaining Bossie the cow and the car besides the superficial "empirical object that you milk" and "empirical object that you drive". Those other interpretations also have practical application (especially when it comes to curing the bovine entity of disease or repairing the mechanical contraption). While nature or the real world itself is surely not divided-up into our multiple conceptual levels (the result of changing analytical focus, and a stratified description --or any description-- not being the original it is trying to represent), it must be considered that the emergence of rival ways of understanding an object or system (that have useful value) and which go beyond the empirical appearance of the entities nevertheless topples naive realism from its once lonely perch. In An Inquiry Into Meaning and Truth Bertrand Russell remarked upon the consequences:

Physics assures us that the occurrences which we call "perceiving" objects, are not likely to resemble the objects except, at best, in certain very abstract ways. We all start from "naive realism," i. e., the doctrine that things are what they seem. We think that grass is green, that stones are hard, and that snow is cold. But physics assures us that the greenness of grass, the hardness of stones, and the coldness of snow are not the greenness, hardness, and coldness that we know in our experience, but something very different. The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself. Thus science seems to be at war with itself: when it most means to be objective, it finds itself plunged into subjectivity against its will. Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows that naive realism is false. Therefore naive realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false.

Fodor also mentions the ancestry of Frayn's view: ....it belongs to a philosophical tradition that reaches back at least as far as Kant and which persists in the neo-pragmatism that is as close as anything gets to being the current philosophical consensus.

Since some neo-pragmatists are antirepresentationalists who seem to want to eliminate consideration of a metaphysical or human-independent world altogether, Kant's stance upon this should be clarified, as he did believe in a human-independent world, a noumenal world, a real world beyond the phenomenal or representational world (that had an effect upon the latter). According to G. J. Mattey, (from UC Davis Philosophy 22N, Kant lecture Notes):

Kant wished to distinguish "ideality" from "idealism." An idealist believes that only thinking things and their representations exist. Kant maintained, on the contrary, that there are existing things which are not the same as representations, but which are only known through representations. We call the representations "bodies," to be sure, but bodies correspond to existing beings.

Kant compared his move to that made by those who distinguish primary and secondary qualities [John Locke]. Stripping the secondary qualities from an object does not remove the object. So, stripping the primary qualities from it [Berkeley] will leave some residue as well. "The existence of the thing that appears is thereby not destroyed, as in genuine idealism, but it is only shown that we cannot possibly know it by the senses as it is in itself" (First Part, Remark III).

The fact that the residue remains means that Kant has not turned the world of the senses into illusion. We can distinguish between "truth and dreaming" by appeal to coherence, which is the basis of our judgments. . . . Kant held that Descartes and Berkeley were the true idealists. That Descartes should be called an idealist is puzzling, since he held that bodies exist independently of the mind. But Kant thought that Descartes also acknowledge that this could not be proved, and so he was an "empirical" idealist. (Kant also calls it "dreaming" idealism here, because it makes representations, dreams, into things, at least possibly. In the Critique of Pure Reason he calls it "problematic" or "skeptical" idealism.)

Berkeley flat-out denied the existence of anything but spirits. Kant called his idealism "mystical and visionary." He converts things into representations, by denying that mind-independent things exist at all. Both these types of idealism are refuted by Kant's own "transcendental" or "critical" idealism, or so he claimed.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n18/fodo01_.html

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