It is obvious, indeed, that if any interpretation on these lines _is_
the only true interpretation of our five propositions, none of those
which I have vaguely suggested comes anywhere near to expressing it in
its ultimate form. They cannot do so for the simple reason that, in
them, the conditions under which I _should_ experience certain other
sensibles are themselves expressed in terms of _physical objects,_ and
not in terms of sensibles and our experience of them. The conditions
are expressed in such terms as "if I were to move my body," "if I
were to look straight at the coins," "if I were to turn the coins
over," etc.; and all these are obviously propositions, which must
themselves again be interpreted in terms of sensibles, if our original
five propositions need to be so. It is obvious, therefore, that any
_ultimate_ interpretation of our five propositions, on these lines,
would be immensely complicated; and I cannot come anywhere near to
stating exactly what it would be. But it seems to me possible that
_some_ such interpretation could be found, and that it is the _only_
true one.
The great recommendation of this view seems to me to be that it enables
us to see, more clearly than any other view can, how our knowledge of
physical propositions can be based on our experience of sensibles, in
the way in which principle (_β_) asserts it to be. If, when I know
that the coins are round, all that I know is some such thing as that
if, after experiencing the sensibles I do now experience, I were to
experience still others, I should finally experience a third set, we
can understand, as clearly as we can understand how any knowledge can
be obtained by induction at all, how such a knowledge could be based on
our previous experience of sensibles, and how it could be verified by
our subsequent experience.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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