 For our purposes, the importance of this distinction is two-fold. Firstly, the (transcendental) distinction is not the ordinary distinction between how objects appear to us in sense perception and the properties they actually have. Kantian appearances are not the objects of ordinary sense perception, for Kant holds that appearances in themselves (things in themselves, in the empirical sense) lack sensory qualities like color, taste, texture, etc. In scientific research, we may discover how appearances are in themselves (in the empirical sense) but in so doing all we discover is more appearance (in the transcendental sense); scientific investigation into the ultimate constituents or causal determinants of objects only reveals more appearance, not things in themselves. Secondly, there is an appearance/reality distinction at the level of appearances. This provides a further sense in which Kant is an “empirical realist”: appearances in themselves have properties quite different than they seem to have in sense perception.