Knowledge, Theory of; Metaphysics; Philosophy -- Introductions
What we have found as regards space is much the same as what we find
in relation to the correspondence of the sense-data with their
physical counterparts. If one object looks blue and another red, we may
reasonably presume that there is some corresponding difference between
the physical objects; if two objects both look blue, we may presume a
corresponding similarity. But we cannot hope to be acquainted directly
with the quality in the physical object which makes it look blue or red.
Science tells us that this quality is a certain sort of wave-motion, and
this sounds familiar, because we think of wave-motions in the space we
see. But the wave-motions must really be in physical space, with which
we have no direct acquaintance; thus the real wave-motions have not that
familiarity which we might have supposed them to have. And what holds
for colours is closely similar to what holds for other sense-data. Thus
we find that, although the _relations_ of physical objects have all
sorts of knowable properties, derived from their correspondence with the
relations of sense-data, the physical objects themselves remain unknown
in their intrinsic nature, so far at least as can be discovered by means
of the senses. The question remains whether there is any other method of
discovering the intrinsic nature of physical objects.
The most natural, though not ultimately the most defensible, hypothesis
to adopt in the first instance, at any rate as regards visual
sense-data, would be that, though physical objects cannot, for the
reasons we have been considering, be _exactly_ like sense-data, yet they
may be more or less like. According to this view, physical objects will,
for example, really have colours, and we might, by good luck, see an
object as of the colour it really is. The colour which an object seems
to have at any given moment will in general be very similar, though
not quite the same, from many different points of view; we might thus
suppose the 'real' colour to be a sort of medium colour, intermediate
between the various shades which appear from the different points of
view.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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