Posted by alexandra_k on May 5, 2005, at 22:02:36
If you think about it, the inside of your own mind is the only thing you can be sure of.
Whatever you believe - whether it is about the sun, moon, and stars, the neighborhood in which you live, history, science, other people, even the existence of your own body - is based on your experiences and thoughts, feelings and sense impressions. Thats all you have to go on directly, whether you see the book in your hands, or feel the floor under your feet, or remember that George Washington was the first president of the United States, or that water is H2O. Everything else is farther away from you than your inner experiences and thoughts, and reaches you only through them.
Ordinarily you have no doubts about the existence of the floor under your feet, or the tree outside the window, or your own teeth. In fact most of the time you don't even think about the mental states that make you aware of these things: you seem to be aware of them directly. But how do you know they really exist?
If you try to argue that there must be an external physical world, because you wouldn't see buildings, people, or stars unless there were things out there that reflected or shed light into your eyes and caused your visual experiences, the reply is obvious: How do you know *that*? It's just another claim about the external world and your relation to it, and it has to be based on the evidence of your senses.
But you can rely on that specific evidence about how visual experiences are caused only if you can already rely in general on the contents of your mind to tell you about the external world. And that is exactly what has been called into question. If you try to prove the reliability of your impressions by appealing to your impressions, you're arguing in a circle and won't get anywhere.
poster:alexandra_k
thread:494272
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20050503/msgs/494272.html