Knowledge, Theory of; Metaphysics; Philosophy -- Introductions
Now in so far as the above considerations depend upon supposing that
there are other people besides ourselves, they beg the very question at
issue. Other people are represented to me by certain sense-data, such as
the sight of them or the sound of their voices, and if I had no
reason to believe that there were physical objects independent of my
sense-data, I should have no reason to believe that other people exist
except as part of my dream. Thus, when we are trying to show that there
must be objects independent of our own sense-data, we cannot appeal to
the testimony of other people, since this testimony itself consists of
sense-data, and does not reveal other people's experiences unless our
own sense-data are signs of things existing independently of us. We must
therefore, if possible, find, in our own purely private experiences,
characteristics which show, or tend to show, that there are in the world
things other than ourselves and our private experiences.
In one sense it must be admitted that we can never prove the existence
of things other than ourselves and our experiences. No logical absurdity
results from the hypothesis that the world consists of myself and my
thoughts and feelings and sensations, and that everything else is mere
fancy. In dreams a very complicated world may seem to be present, and
yet on waking we find it was a delusion; that is to say, we find that
the sense-data in the dream do not appear to have corresponded with such
physical objects as we should naturally infer from our sense-data. (It
is true that, when the physical world is assumed, it is possible to
find physical causes for the sense-data in dreams: a door banging, for
instance, may cause us to dream of a naval engagement. But although, in
this case, there is a physical cause for the sense-data, there is not a
physical object corresponding to the sense-data in the way in which an
actual naval battle would correspond.) There is no logical impossibility
in the supposition that the whole of life is a dream, in which we
ourselves create all the objects that come before us. But although this
is not logically impossible, there is no reason whatever to suppose that
it is true; and it is, in fact, a less simple hypothesis, viewed as a
means of accounting for the facts of our own life, than the common-sense
hypothesis that there really are objects independent of us, whose action
on us causes our sensations.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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