Reality has a deep dimension often operating below the surface of empirical experience. To think otherwise is to commit what critical realists call the “epistemic fallacy,” namely, to reduce what is to what we can empirically observe. That is a debilitating move.… I follow the critical realist lead in conceptualizing the real primarily, though not exclusively, according to a causal criterion instead of an exclusive perceptual or materialist criterion. Most of the real, in short, possess ordered and structured causal capacities to behave, under certain conditions, according to particular tendencies that exert influences that bring about changes in material or mental phenomena. The real may consist of material things, such as chemicals and hurricanes, or of nonmaterial entities, such as structures of memory or identity or personhood. What matters in establishing their reality, in most cases, is their possessing or being endowed with some properties, mechanisms, forces, characteristics, powers, tendencies, or interactive relations capable of producing causal effects in the world. Entities that do are real; they are the things that constitute the intransitive objects of scientific inquiry. They exist and operate objectively, whether or not we are aware of them or understand or conceptualize them well.

From Christian Smith’s, What Is a Person?: Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up