Appearance vs Reality
Chapter 1 of Russell’s “Problems of Philosophy” (POF) highlights one of the key metaphysical problems namely is there a reality behind the appearances we see. The three main questions he highlights are as follows:
Does matter exist?
If so, what is the nature of matter?
What is the relationship between sense data and physical objects?
Quick summary.
A sense datum is a piece of experience like the color blue at a certain point in your field of vision.
Sensation is the experience of being aware of sense data.
A physical object it “what lies behind” sense data.
The collection of all physical objects is called matter.
The majority of philosophers believe something underlies our experience, e.g. if you look at the table you sit at, there is a real table there that you don’t know directly. This is partly because it is the simplest explanation for our experience.
Not all philosophers believe in matter as we typically do. Berkely suggests matter is an idea in a mind, perhaps the mind of God, while Leibniz suggests physical objects are collections of rudimentary souls.
With this it struck me that questions 1 and 2 seem a bit misleading. Without some sort of answer to the second question it seems like the first question cannot even be asked, we don’t really know what would count as an answer to “Does matter exist?” if we don’t know what we mean by matter. We did say matter was what lay behind our perception but this suggests a convenient reduction of our two questions: “What is the origin of the information in our sense data?” This accounts for both 1 and 2 by including the trivial case, where everything is mere appearance. It also allows anything we can interact with to be included and thereby allows for more than one nature.
