Epistemology

Knowledge of the External World

Can we know that a mind-independent external world exists?

Positions

  1. External-World Skepticism

    We cannot know that an external world exists, because no experience rules out that we are dreaming or being deceived.

  2. Moorean Common Sense

    We know ordinary truths about physical objects more securely than we know the premises of any argument against them, so it is the sceptical argument that should be given up.

Methods used to investigate this question

  • Abductive Reasoning

    Abductive reasoning develops or selects an explanatory hypothesis because it would explain the available evidence better than the live alternatives.

    Open in Methods

  • Methodic Doubt

    Methodic doubt provisionally withholds assent from beliefs vulnerable to doubt in order to find a secure basis from which knowledge can be reconstructed.

    Open in Methods

  • Phenomenological Reduction

    Phenomenological reduction brackets ordinary existential commitments so that the inquirer can examine how objects and world are given in experience.

    Open in Methods

Discussion

Even a thinker who finds some truths beyond doubt can ask a narrower question: whether our perceptual beliefs reach a world outside the mind at all. The skeptic argues that no experience distinguishes a veridical perception from a matching dream or deception, so the existence of mind-independent things is never secured by experience.

This is a tighter question than whether knowledge is possible at all: it grants that some things may be known while denying that the external world is among them. The broader dispute over certainty and suspension is treated under The Possibility of Knowledge.

References