The Nature of Sense Data
The idea that our perceptions are based on sense data is supported by a number of arguments. The first is popularly known as the Argument From Illusion. From a subjective experience of perceiving something, it is theoretically impossible to distinguish perceiving something which exists independently of oneself from an hallucination or mirage. Thus, we do not have any direct access to the outside world that would allow us to reliably distinguish it from an illusion that caused identical experiences. Since (the argument claims) we must have direct access to some specific experiential entity in order to have the percepts that we do, and since this entity is not identical to the real object itself, there must be some sort of internal mental entity somehow correlated to the real world, about which we afterwards have perceptions, make judgments, etc. This entity is a sense-datum.
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Famous quotes containing the words the nature, nature, sense and/or data:
“Let us, then, take our compass; we are something, and we are not everything. The nature of our existence hides from us the knowledge of first beginnings which are born of the nothing; and the littleness of our being conceals from us the sight of the infinite. Our intellect holds the same position in the world of thought as our body occupies in the expanse of nature.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
“If only nature is real and if, in nature, only desire and destruction are legitimate, then, in that all humanity does not suffice to assuage the thirst for blood, the path of destruction must lead to universal annihilation.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“I am using it [the word ‘perceive’] here in such a way that to say of an object that it is perceived does not entail saying that it exists in any sense at all. And this is a perfectly correct and familiar usage of the word.”
—A.J. (Alfred Jules)
“To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it—all my life.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)