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The philosopher Bertrand Russell in his work, “The Problems of Philosophy,” comes to some conclusions of the truth of objects in our world. Through questioning certain ideas and problems in our world, he breaks down what can know what really exists in the world and what does not.
Russell, an empiricist, believes that through our sensory perception of our environment. However, our own individual perception can be skewed, and therefore is susceptible to err. Russell gives an example of three people, one is color blind, one is sick, and one is inebriated sick, and one is inebriated, and ask them to describe the same chair, they will all give you slightly different answers. Then if you take that chair and put it behind a distorted plane of glass, or underwater, it will appear increasingly different. Therefore must be a difference between appearance and reality. If our perception can be so skewed, what can we actually conclude is real and what is not?
Russell uses a method of cross referencing our sensory data and our knowledge of certain realities in order to define what we can really know what exists. Russell uses the phrase “sense data to differentiate the difference between reality and appearance. Sense data is the information that our senses take in during an act of sensation, such as smelling or seeing. When you walk into a kitchen, you smell the food, see the color of the table tops, and feel the heat from the stove you intake different sense data of the kitchen. Sense data are the mental images and memories that we obtain from a particular object in the real physical world. As shown in the chair example, one object can have a multitude of sense data. Sense data are correlated to the objects they represent. Howev...
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...own to “There is an x such that x is a present king of France, nothing other than x is a present king of France, and x is bald,” (On Denoting Mind 1905). This is an example of how his views of senses affect his view on knowledge, we cannot take the originally quote at face value of what it is, just like we cannot truly accept the fact that something is a couch and not a bed, we must break it down and use our logic of other things and infer a conclusion from this information. We need to make sure each individual facet of the statement is true before concluding the whole statement is true, or else we could be misled to believe something that is not true.
So, through Russell’s search of true knowledge we can infer certain truths and ideas from our senses. With the data received from our senses we can use our facets of knowledge to come to conclusions about an object.
The problem I hope to expose in this paper is the lack of evidence in The Argument from Analogy for Other Minds supporting that A, a thought or feeling, is the only cause of B. Russell believes that there are other minds because he can see actions in others that are analogous to his own without thinking about them. He believes that all actions are caused by thoughts, but what happens when we have a reaction resulting as an action of something forced upon one’s self? Such as when a doctor hits your patellar tendon with a reflex hammer to test your knee-jerk reflex. Russell does not answer this question. He is only “highly probable” that we are to know other minds exist through his A is the cause of B postulate.
Let us take the example of knowledge of the perfectly equal -- the Equal. Nothing in the world of space and time can teach us about the Equal: there are no examples of perfectly equal objects in our world. Therefore, to first identify two equal objects, we must have had implicit knowledge of the Equal at birth. By continuing to use our senses to identify objects that are approaching the Equal, we are able to recollect - make explicit - this knowledge.
...he physical world, and believing that knowledge comes from what is seen and heard can confuse what reality is perceived as. Plato’s “The Allegory of the Cave” and Salvador Dali’s painting “The Persistence of Memory” show us how realities can be confusing and turn out to be something different. However, each and every one has a reality of his or her, to which they believe is true. If so, hopefully that reality is rational.
Irvin, Andrew. "Bertand Russell." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. N.p., 18 Oct 2013. Web. 22 Mar 2014. .
Without perception, in our illusions and hallucinations, we lose “our sense of beings,” (Capra). Lost in “isolation,” (Capra) perhaps lost within our own illusion, our abstractions, we lose the ability to judge, to dichotomize, reality from illusions, right from wrong.
In his essay “Veridical Hallucination and Prosthetic Vision” David Lewis demonstrates through a vignette called “The Censor” why a suitable pattern of counterfactual dependence is required to for a subject to experience ‘genuine sight’. A subject’s experience of a scene has counterfactual dependence if, and only if, the subject is capable of distinguishing the scene from possible alternative scenes. If the scene were different, the subject would have a different experience. Thus, the subject’s particular experience is dependant on the particular scene being for the eyes. If the subject would be unable to distinguish the scene from possible alternative scenes, then according to Lewis, even if all other requirements for genuine sight are fulfilled (such as a standard casual process, rich
I have tried not to simply re-write what Russell has said, but rather endeavoured to explain, in an original way, each part of Russell's theses, and in the order that they are found in the article.
The Transcendental Deductions of the pure concept of the understanding in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, in its most general sense, explains how concepts relate a priori to objects in virtue of the fact that the power of knowing an object through representations is known as understanding. According to Kant, the foundation of all knowledge is the self, our own consciousness because without the self, experience is not possible. The purpose of this essay is to lay out Kant’s deduction of the pure concept of understanding and show how our concepts are not just empirical, but concepts a priori. We will walk through Kant’s argument and reasoning as he uncovers each layer of understanding, eventually leading up to the conclusion mentioned above.
...mean to discover truth through accepting all particulars as true. Fernando Savater's idea of finding objective truth through a field of truths is an excellent example of how an individual is able to discover truth. Since perception is limited to the individual, one could say that the only possible way of finding a universal truth is though accepting a field of truths. An individual must accept all perceptive and subjective truths as truthful in their individual reality. Therefore, one could say that universal truth as we acknowledge it, is no more that the acceptance of an intersubjective frame of mind, the acceptance of all perceptions as indifferent in form. Since a person can change their opinion on a topic, it is impossible to conjure every person's perspective on that topic, consequentially making it impossible to find truth when perception is never constant.
First, Russell theory show a scientific method in analysing a proposition which replace Frege theory that use sense to explain and solve the puzzles. In Frege thought, he explained the problem of identity by the different sense of a denoting phrase. Compare with Russell, Russell is more reliable for me which can show me a concrete step of thinking instead of using a sense, which is difficult to recognize by me to explain the answer.
The first sentence of Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy expresses his skeptical roots: "Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?" (Russell 7). His answer to the question is clearly no, and before we come to the end of the second page he claims that "anything. . . may be reasonably doubted" (Russell 8). He questions everything from the existence of the table to whether other minds exist. He asserts that reality is not what it appears and that "even the strangest hypothesis may not be true" (Russell 16). Regardless of this fact, Russell proceeds to explain which things are self-evident truths for him; i.e. that which is certain knowledge for him. He claims that the most certain kind of self-evident truths are the "principles of logic" (Russell 112). The only other kinds of self-evident truths for Russell "are those which are immediately derived from sensation" (Russell 113). These are what Russell calls sense-data. Examples of sense data are things like "brown colour, oblong shape, smoothness, etc." all of which are associated with external objects (Russell 12). The immediate perception of a patch of blue is, therefore, intuitively certain according to Russell. Despite all this certain knowledge, Russell still admits that the possibility "that [the] outer world is nothing but a dream and that [I] alone exist…cannot be strictly proved to be false" (Russell 17). I find it astonishing that he concedes that all knowledge is ultimately uncertain and then goes on to proclaim some semblance of certainty for himself. Also, he concludes by saying that it is the process of asking skeptical questions that is important to philosophy, not whether an answer can be found. Thus, Russell’s doubt is not evidently driven by the sense of separateness that Cavell refers to. He is by no means despairing.
Bertrand Russell is a very influential writer within the realm of philosophy. His specific work titled, The Problems of Philosophy discusses the many things that he believes is wrong with the way people think, act towards, treat, and study philosophy as a whole. The one specific essay focused on was titled The Value of Philosophy in chapter xv. This essay focused on why he believes that philosophy was worth studying and why he believes that those who don’t see his vision are wrong and at a disadvantage. More specifically he addresses the “practical man”, which he defines specifically as “one who recognizes only material needs, who realizes that men must have food for the body, but is oblivious of the necessity of providing food for the mind”
The way that each individual interprets, retrieves, and responds to the information in the world that surrounds you is known as perception. It is a personal way of creating opinions about others and ourselves in everyday life and being able to recognize it under various conditions. Each person’s perceptions are used as a kind of filter that every piece of information has to pass through before it determines the effect that it has or will have on the person from the stimulus. It is convincing to believe that we create multiple perceptions about different situations and objects each day. Perceptions reflect our opinions in many ways. The quality of a person’s perceptions is very important and can affect the response that is given through different situations. Perception is often deceived as reality. “Through perception, people process information inputs into responses involving feelings and action.” (Schermerhorn, et al.; p. 3). Perception can be influenced by a person’s personality, values, or experiences which, in turn, can play little role in reality. People make sense of the world that they perceive because the visual system makes practical explanations of the information that the eyes pick up.
Bertrand Russell explains in his article that the value of philosophy is not in the definite answers, but in the questions and possibilities that it raises. He states that “The value of philosophy is, in fact, to be sought largely in its very uncertainty.” This can relate to the Milesians, the answers they came up with weren’t important, but the process used to get them. He says that the more we practice philosophy the more we begin to question everyday things in our life, and we come to find that the answers are only bigger questions. These questions lead to limitless possibilities, broadened horizons, and freedom from what we “know”. Russell hints that philosophy can help you see things in a different light, in a sense taking off the rose colored glasses and seeing the world for what it is.
Moreover, as mentioned before, in my opinion, Strawson’s objection is not convincing enough to reduce the strength of Russell’s Theory of Definite Description.