I have referred to myself elsewhere (Dempster 2002)^ref as an "ontological agnostic." Since this still seems a reasonable assessment, it behooves me to provide some explanation...

There is no single reality, but rather multiple realities, and what is represented depends on one's position in the field of negotiation... It is about an ongoing process of negotiating reality (Bird 1987:^ref 258).

I consider myself an ontological agnostic - generally unconvinced about the certain existence of reality, the certain lack thereof, or any certainty regarding its constructedness. In manifesting, experiencing, and understanding daily life, considering a continuum of realities seems most reasonable. At one end is physical reality: I sit in chairs, bump into tables and occasionally worry, when backpacking, about people falling off cliffs. At the other end is constructed or abstracted reality: I wonder about meaning, bump into social norms and occasionally worry, when writing, about falling into reification. Between and around these ends are negotiated realities - trade-offs between the problematic extremities. Bird, quoted above, refers to an 'ongoing process of negotiating reality.' While my reality might be constructed, there seem to be limitations to what I can construct.

I make these as ontological claims, but acknowledge their political and epistemological implications. By drawing such distinctions, I imply that constructed realities such as social norms are more malleable and less solid or harmful to bump into [**] - yet the solid walls of social norms can be as hard and immovable as solid rock. In a similar vein, it is crucial to recongize that physical reality is only 'real' because I am a physical being. Neutrinos and ghosts do not bump into tables.

Fundamental to the process of negotiating reality is the need for, and use and development of, instruments and heuristics for conceptualizing those realities. We rely on tools and concepts to gather and organize our perceptions and sensations into understandings and ideas that enable our capacity to learn and to move successfully through our lives. Yet these tools and concepts themselves arise from our negotiated realities. This raises the question: How much do our heuristics, our interpretations of reality, and our realities influence the 'negotiation' each of us engages in? How much do the tools and schema we use for conceptualizing reality determine our 'reality'? There is need to attend to the weight and degree of - or at least acknowledge the presence of - the influences involved in developing our understanding. For example, how much does our reality have boundaries simply because we use boundaries to conceptualize it?

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