Walk up to a table, and you can see and feel that the table is there. Indeed, your concept of what a table is has been shaped by your experience seeing and feeling tables your whole life. But what if you walk out of the room? It seems like your change of location shouldn’t concern the hypothetical table and its state of existence. However, you’ve never experienced a table's existence continuing unperceived for the very reason that you were not, then, perceiving it! A troubling question follows from this line of reasoning; if our experience contributes so directly to our concept of objects, how can we justify the concept of an object existing independent of mind? To push the issue even further: how can we even conceive of the concept of mind-independent objects at all, if every concept is inherently experience driven? This seems highly paradoxical.
See Berkeley philosopher John Campbell's interesting radio-snippet about this.
No comments:
Post a Comment