Imagine a world like the movie The Matrix where everything people experience is controlled by a massive computer. Let us assume that in this virtual world, there are ogres but no gorillas. Consider the following conversation between a woman named Bernice and her child:
child: Uncle Joe told me I should check for gorillas under the bed!
mother: Gorillas aren't real. (B1)
child: He also said ogres aren't real; they are just men in suits.
mother: Ogres are real. (B2)
However, someone outside the virtual world, let's call him Angel, might observe this conversation and comment on it:
Angel: Gorillas are real. (~B1)
Angel: Ogres are not real. (~B2)
My intuition is that all four statements are true despite that each statement is contradicted by another statement. Bernice, after all, isn't a philosopher; she's a mother who wants to make her child understand the world in which she lives--the only world she or her child will ever have access to. In this world there are objects of perception called ogres, and there are no objects of perception corresponding to gorillas. She is telling her child about what he might possibly encounter as he goes through life, and how to react if he thinks he sees an ogre or thinks he sees a gorilla.
The alternative is to put some metaphysical meaning on the word real, such that a thing is real only if it is real in some abstract metaphysical sense, but that has the odd implication that if your metaphysics happens to be wrong then no one has ever used the word correctly.
