Thus, while some of the uses of virtual environments presuppose that old and entrenched ideas (about essences or optimality) have been superseded, these abstract worlds can also be used to synthesize the intuitions needed to dislodge other ideas blocking the way to a better understanding of the dynamics of reality. -- DeLanda This is a good one-sentence summary of DeLanda's realism. He gives examples as follow: Population thinking seems to have vanished "essences" from the world of philosophy once and for all. Nonlinear dynamics, and more specifically, the notion of an "emergent property" would seem to signal the death of the philosophical position known as "reductionism" (basically, that all phenomena can in principle be reduced to those of physics). A relationship to phatics has to do with the nature of virtual environments , which themselves need to be synthesized. So, here we have a connection between the theme of realism -- the idea...