CONCEPT
The Sense of Reality
Berlin's name for the irreducibly experiential form of knowledge that allows statesmen, physicians, and artists to
perceive the specific character of a situation and respond appropriately — neither theoretical deduction nor empirical measurement but something closer to
Aristotle's
phronesis.
In lectures delivered in 1953 but not published until 1996, Berlin articulated what may be his most underappreciated contribution: an account of the form of knowledge that neither science nor philosophy has ever been able to formalize, the knowledge that allows certain individuals to perceive the specific character of a situation and respond to it appropriately without being able to articulate fully the principles on which their judgment rests. He called this capacity the sense of reality, and he distinguished it sharply from both
theoretical knowledge (general principles, abstract laws) and empirical observation (particular facts that can be measured and verified). The sense of reality is neither. It is the capacity to perceive the configuration of a situation as a whole, to weigh the relative importance of factors that cannot be precisely measured, to recognize patterns that cannot be formalized into rules, to make judgments that are neither deductions from general principles nor inductions