Locating the Knower

I accept whole heartily the realist claim that there is a real world external to us and that statements can be determined true or false based on weather they match with reality. That being said there are two broad messy points where this clean little system gets messed up. First, we often misperceive and/or misunderstand what is happening in the world, which isn't the worlds fault but our own, and this issue can be gradual overcome by employing such truth finding mechanisms as the scientific method. There is also a very real part of the world that is constructed, though none-the-less really a existing in the world.

Realists tend to neglect that the place where 'we' (the knower, doer, thinker, judger) seem to reside is in the space between the mind and the real world. The mind is a real world unto itself just as the world external to the mind is, though certainly a different sort of place. Human society is a community of subjects all experiencing their own mind and sharing that experience as mediated by the external 'real' world. The messy bit is that we don't really know how to deal with this internal world because we are only one preceiver dealing with a whole internal world.

Maybe this understanding of ontology can be used to build to a more sophisticated and solid ethics.