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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.
In the above essay, I presented the opposing views of William Paley and Bertrand Russell on the design argument. I then compared and contrasted the arguments showing that the arguments mostly differed. Finally, I evaluated the two philosophers' arguments and concluded that Paley's design argument was stronger than Russell's argument against it because Paley developed the support for his claims more thoroughly.
For thousands of years, mankind has persistently pursued truth, knowledge, and understanding. For most, this pursuit is a driving force which usually doesn’t end until one finds a “truth” that is satisfying to him or her. Even then, however, one may choose to look for an alternate truth that may be even more satisfying to them. This pursuit does not always follow the same path for everyone as there are different ideas as to how truth is actually obtained and which is the best way to obtain it. Two individuals and great philosophers of their time, Plato and Charles Peirce, each had their own ideas on how truth and knowledge could be obtained.
The simple optical illusions used by Ariely show us just how easily our senses can lead our judgments to be distorted. The first illusion was an animation of Shepard’s Tables; an example of size-constancy expansion first published by Roger Shepard as “Turning the Tables”. We know the two tables are the same length but yet why does one table appear to be longer than the other? In this case it is because the angles suggest depth and perspective and the brain wrongly believes one table is longer and while the other in shorter. It is interesting that despite us knowing that the tables are in fact the same length, we still perceive them to be different lengths; despite us knowing the truth, we could not get our minds to see reality as it really is. In the second example, Ariely shows the ...
Gibson (1979) developed an ecological approach to the study of visual perception, which is a new and radical approach to the whole field of psychology that humans perceive their environment directly without mediation by cognitive process or by mental entities. According to his assertion of direct perception, there is enough information in our environment to make sense of the world (Gibson, 1977). Gibson (1979) said “direct perception is an activity of getting information from ambient array of light” (p. 147), and further called this a process of information pickup. That is, there is no need for mental processing since every object and event in the world have inherent meanings that are detected and exploited by humans. So his perception is based on information, not on sensations, which is in contrast with the conventional perspective of perception.
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.
Aristotle elaborates further that what we might name our power of knowing is not in reference to actual begins, until it truly comprehends. This view is different of the early philosophers, who said that the power of knowing must include all things if it can know all things. But if it knew everything, then it would be an eternal intellect, and not just a possible intellect. Along the same lines he said that of the senses, if they were fundamentally composed of the things they observe, their observations would not assume any external practical things.(4)
Wittgenstein, Ludwig; G. E. M. Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte (eds. and trans.). Philosophical Investigations. 4th edition, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Print.
So that there can be falsehood a relation must involve someone judging or believing. Russell uses Othello as an example in this relation "Desdemona 's love for Cassio" this does not truly exist, what does exist is the relation of Othello 's mind with the objects in the belief which are Desdemona, loving, Cassio and Othello, this is a relation of four terms. Belief is the relation that Othello has to all of these terms, his act of believing unites all of these terms into a complex whole. Belief is what relates the objects or "constituents" Cassio, Desdemona and loving together with the judge or object Othello. There is also a direction or order in which the objects are placed this is acknowledge by "Cassio loves Desdemona" being a different statement then "Desdemona loves Cassio." Within the statement "Othello believes that Desdemona loves Cassio," It is not loving which forms the complex but how the object relates to the subjects that creates the complex unity in this case it is Othello 's act of believing that cements the relation between the subject and objects. This leads Russell to the conclusion that beliefs are true when correspond to an associated complex and false they aren 't. This is the nature of truth. The constituents are put in an order that are united by a relation which in the case of Othello is "Loving" which are also the objects of the belief. This complex unity is referred to as the " fact corresponding to the belief" meaning that statements are true when and if there are existing corresponding
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
This essay is written to introduce the Russell’s Theory on Definite Description. The main content of this essay including: the definition of definite description, the puzzles concerning definite description, Russell’s Theory on Definite Description, how this theory solves the puzzles, Strawson’s objection to this theory, my evaluation on the convincingness of Strawson’s objection and my evaluation on the convincingness of Russell’s Theory of Definite Description.
...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.
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.
Sense perception is the process in which the faculties of sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch, perceive an external stimulus of the knowledge about the outside world. Our senses act as an important source of knowledge about the world but instead of passively reflecting reality, it actively structures it. As such, understanding the world through sense perception is an active process that requires our brain to categorize and interpret what it is we are sensing. Yet, can the knowledge acquired through our senses be entirely trusted, relied and depended upon? There are certain factors that may interfere with how we perceive the world with our senses. Thus, sense perception, as a way of knowing, is selective and subjected to
Thus, in our search to understand that which is intangible, we come to realize that the definitions that we seek are further than meets the eye. For although many may say they understand what is and is not real, they often rely on a surface level of understanding. Yet when the curious seek out a deeper grasp of the words real, surreal, and reality, many would discover that they are, in fact, unsolvable. Thus we will never know the ultimate truth, we only can get closer and closer to