Quratulain’s Reviews > Seeing Things as They Are: A Theory of Perception > Status Update

“...on Locke’s account, Primary Qualities are observer independent and Secondary Qualities are observer relative....the impact of the combination of Primary Qualities on our sense organs gives us the ideas of the Secondary Qualities.”

“...the real object is not some technical difficulty. The real objection is that the theory just seems to be inadequate to our own experiences. It is just a fact about our experiences that they reach right out to independently existing objects and state of affairs in the world.”

“If the meaning of a statement as its method of verification and the methods of verification reduces all of my empirical statements to my experiences, then the meaning of those statements is solipsistic. Solipsism is a reduction ad absurdism of any theory.”

“...because sense data are ontologically subjective...always in the mind of individual human subjects... I have no access to your sense data and you have no access to mine.”

“When you say any empirical statement can be analyzed into a set of statements about sense data, that must have the consequence that any empirical fact amounts to a lot of ontologically subjective facts about personal experiences and these always have to be in the minds of some individual human being....The objective ontology of the real world is eliminated in favor of subjective ontology of sense data.”

“What is wrong with saying that all that exists are really private experiences in your mind and in other people’s minds? The answer is that this results in Solipsism.”

“...the particular details of the form of Hegelian Idealism seem to be extremely obscure, but the rejection of physical particles as the rock bottom of ontology is very clear in German Idealism.”

“...the account bottoms out in what I think of as the real world that exists in a way that is totally observer independent and ontologically objective. One of the tasks of philosophy is to explain the constitution of these higher-level systems and how they bottom out into the entities of atomic physics.”

“What, if anything, is that in terms of which everything else has to be explained, but which does not itself have to be explained in terms of something else?”

“Of course I might be mistaken , but the dimension of the mistake is different from having an absence of evidence or insufficient evidence.”