Three Realist Claims

A famous philosopher has told us that if we take a synoptic view of philosophical problems, the power of scepticism over the mind will greatly abate, if not entirely dissolve away. For my part, I find that the wider I cast my view, the more difficult it becomes to defend realism. But I shall here confine myself to three problems, the problems of perception, memory, and induction. I maintain that if one does examine these problems together, the plausibility of a fashionable attempt at defeating the sceptic greatly abates, if not entirely dissolves away. In the course of the discussion, I shall argue that a question debated over many years, namely the question of whether the future will resemble the past, does not have the importance traditionally assigned to it. Let us begin with the problem of perception. I take it that, in raising this problem, the sceptic is not essentially raising a problem above the structural nature of the external world; that is, he is not basically asking whether, granted experience of an external world, it can be shown to be a world of stable, law-like, objects. Nor is he essentially concerned with the problem of the reliability of the senses. What fundamentally concerns him is the ground for believing there is an external world at all. I agree that once it is realized what the sceptic is driving at, it is natural for the realist to claim that the belief is justified because one perceives an external world. For the most obvious and, perhaps, the only way of justifying belief in a world exterior to the mind depends on the evidence of the senses. The sceptic, accordingly, attacks one's right to hold that the senses are ever externally informative. His point is that if one has no right to think that one's evidence for the existence of an external world is good evidence, one cannot claim to be justified in believing in an external world. So although the sceptic is not essentially interested in the question of the reliability of the senses, it is easy to understand the attention that question has attracted. For the problem of grounding belief in the very existence of an external world quickly develops into the problem of whether the senses are ever reliable

Epistemology · Classical Philosophy and Thought · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics · Philosophy · Philosophy and Theoretical Science