Here Is A Hand - Explanation

Explanation

Moore famously put the point into dramatic relief with his 1939 essay Proof of an External World, in which he gave a common sense argument against skepticism by raising his right hand and saying "here is a hand," and then raising his left and saying "and here is another". Here, Moore is taking his knowledge claim (q) to be that he has two hands, and without rejecting the skeptic's premise, proves that we can know the skeptical possibility (sp) to be not true.

Moore's argument is not simply a flippant response to the skeptic. Moore gives in Proof of an External World, three requirements for a good proof. (1) the premises must be different from the conclusion, (2) the premises must be demonstrated, and (3) the conclusion must follow from the premises. He claims that his proof of an external world meets those three criteria.

In his 1925 essay A Defence of Common Sense he argued against idealism and skepticism toward the external world on the grounds that they could not give reasons to accept their metaphysical premises that were more plausible than the reasons we have to accept the common sense claims about our knowledge of the world that skeptics and idealists must deny. In other words, he is more willing to believe that he has a hand than believe the premises of a strange argument in a university classroom. "I do not think it is rational to be as certain of any one of these ... propositions".

Not surprisingly, those inclined to skeptical doubts often found Moore's method of argument not entirely convincing. Moore, however, defends his argument on the surprisingly simple grounds that skeptical arguments seem invariably to require an appeal to "philosophical intuitions" that we have considerably less reason to accept than we have for the common sense claims that they supposedly refute.