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Updated: May 8, 2025
It is a metaphysical question whether all sensibilia are sense-data, and an epistemological question whether there exist means of inferring sensibilia which are not data from those that are. A few preliminary remarks, to be amplified as we proceed, will serve to elucidate the use which I propose to make of sensibilia.
Hence, also, provided certain waves reach the eye, we shall see a certain colour, whether the object from which the waves start has any colour or not. Thus it is quite gratuitous to suppose that physical objects have colours, and therefore there is no justification for making such a supposition. Exactly similar arguments will apply to other sense-data.
Hence we can never know any proposition of the form 'this is a physical object', where 'this' is something immediately known. It follows that all our knowledge concerning physical objects is such that no actual instance can be given. We can give instances of the associated sense-data, but we cannot give instances of the actual physical objects.
This discovery, however which is not at all paradoxical in the case of taste and smell and sound, and only slightly so in the case of touch leaves undiminished our instinctive belief that there are objects corresponding to our sense-data.
But this is an entirely different point from the one by which Berkeley seeks to prove that whatever can be immediately known must be in a mind. For this purpose arguments of detail as to the dependence of sense-data upon us are useless. It is necessary to prove, generally, that by being known, things are shown to be mental. This is what Berkeley believes himself to have done.
Thus we can only say that the sense-data are found to permit a hypothetical complement of "sensibilia" such as will preserve continuity, and that therefore there may be such a complement. Since, however, we have already made such use of hypothetical "sensibilia," we will let this point pass, and admit such "sensibilia," as are required to preserve continuity.
If we have been right in our contentions, sense-data are merely those among the ultimate constituents of the physical world, of which we happen to be immediately aware; they themselves are purely physical, and all that is mental in connection with them is our awareness of them, which is irrelevant to their nature and to their place in physics.
It has appeared that, if we take any common object of the sort that is supposed to be known by the senses, what the senses immediately tell us is not the truth about the object as it is apart from us, but only the truth about certain sense-data which, so far as we can see, depend upon the relations between us and the object.
There are a number of other principles which cannot be proved or disproved by experience, but are used in arguments which start from what is experienced. Some of these principles have even greater evidence than the principle of induction, and the knowledge of them has the same degree of certainty as the knowledge of the existence of sense-data.
Thus every principle of simplicity urges us to adopt the natural view, that there really are objects other than ourselves and our sense-data which have an existence not dependent upon our perceiving them. Of course it is not by argument that we originally come by our belief in an independent external world.
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