“If It Drives Like a Car…”: Towards a Partialist Account of Virtual Objects
Most of us interact with and through virtual entities every day. Yet debate about their reality status is often dislocated from quotidian concerns. The reality status of virtual things is often discussed using artificially tidy, sometimes absolute categories: Real, fictional, and virtual, per the oft-named ‘realist’ and ‘fictionalist’ positions (Chalmers 2017; Park 2025; Murphy 2025). We show that unlike generalizing metaphysical arguments, non-experts use a range of cues to intuit and talk about the ontology of virtual things; that people approach virtual objects tentatively and pragmatically, employing varied and ad hoc strategies, gauging designerly intent and reality status.
We conducted three studies to probe how laypeople (n = 40) perceive, act towards, and rationalise virtual objects. Findings will be shared at the workshop.
We propose that virtual entities are best understood as having partial, tentative, and fuzzy reality statuses (Juul 2019; Tavinor 2021). Per empirical ‘folk’ wisdom, we suggest that the context and purpose(s) of virtual entities, as well as the detail to which they’re simulated, bears on the kind(s) and degree(s) of reality we should extend them.
If philosophy can inform societal attitudes and decision-making, then it’s suboptimal to ground virtual realness in material–conceptual minutiae and decouple it from experience. Hence in addition to oft-named realist and fictionalist accounts of virtual objects, we propose that partialist perspectives capture the tentative and often almost paradoxical nature of virtual things’ reality status. On this view, the virtual things that users interact with can have both real and fictional aspects (Juul 2005), and implementation is always partial such that objects are never designed as generic rocks or calculators, but as selective implementations for set purposes (Juul 2019; 2021).