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Question I hope you can help me answer a question I've been thinking about for some time... How do we really know if objective reality exists at all and, even if it does, what is to say that our view on objective reality is correct?

Accepted:
October 26, 2006

Comments

What do you mean by an "objective" reality? Do you mean a reality that exists outside of my mind? It isn't obvious to me that there is any better answer than that given by the British philosopher G. E. Moore: I know that I have two hands, and my hands are certainly not inside my mind but attached to my arms. So, well, there you go. There are all kinds of questions about what, exactly, Moore's argument shows and what it doesn't show. But one of Moore's points, I take it, was that the question whether there exists a world outside my mind is one that is to be answered, if at all, in terms of whether there is anything outside my mind, and my hands are as good an example as any there could be. And that just seems right.

Regarding the second question, nothing guarantees that our view of the world is correct. I can imagine, just barely, that I do not have two hands but seem to myself to have two hands because of some weird brain injury. I suppose that is, in some sense, possible. But the mere fact that it is possible, in the relevant sense, simply doesn't imply that I don't know that I have two hands. Now, as things become more and more complicated, the chances of our being wrong become better. But, again, the mere fact that we might be wrong doesn't imply that we don't know, if we are, as things happen, right.

This has been a consistent theme in answers to epistemological questions on this site: Notions like proof, certainty, infallibility, and the like simply aren't the right ones for discussing questions about what we know. You can know without proof; know without being certain; know without being infallible; and so forth. At least, it wants argument that one can't.

Question I hope you can help me answer a question I've been thinking about for some time... How do we really know if objective reality exists at all and, even if it does, what is to say that our view on objective reality is correct? Accepted:October 26, 2006

Question I hope you can help me answer a question I've been thinking about for some time... How do we really know if objective reality exists at all and, even if it does, what is to say that our view on objective reality is correct?

Accepted:
October 26, 2006