"Perhaps There is No Table At ALL?
Russell did not ultimately prove there is a real independent table at all.
The way you phrased the question is not my point.Peter Holmes wrote: ↑Thu Apr 08, 2021 12:43 pm perhaps you could get straight to the point I'm making.
For example, do you think that everything that was, is and will be the case in the universe exists only if and because humans exist?
My point is,
everything that was, is and will be the case in the universe CANNOT exist independently of the human conditions.
The above is arrived by starting with what is really real empirically and philosophically at present plus being experienced directly.
Btw, have your read Russell's Problem of Philosophy?
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Prob ... Philosophy
I'll borrow from Russell to explain my point.
- https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Prob ... /Chapter_1
In daily life, we assume as certain many things which, on a closer scrutiny, are found to be so full of apparent contradictions that only a great amount of thought enables us to know what it is that we really may believe.
In the search for certainty, it is natural to begin with our present experiences, and in some sense, no doubt, knowledge is to be derived from them [experience].
But any statement as to what it is that our immediate experiences make us know is very likely to be wrong.
Here we have already the beginning of one of the distinctions that cause most trouble in philosophy -- the distinction between 'appearance' and 'reality', between what things seem to be and what they are.
- It is plain that if we are to know anything about the table, it must be by means of the sense-data -brown colour, oblong shape, smoothness, etc. -- which we associate with the table; but, for the reasons which have been given, we cannot say that the table is the sense-data, or even that the sense-data are directly properties of the table.
Thus a problem arises as to the relation of the sense-data to the real table, supposing there is such a thing.
It will be remembered that we asked two questions; namely,
(1) Is there a real table at all?
(2) If so, what sort of object can it be?
Thus what we directly see and feel is merely 'appearance', which we believe to be a sign of some 'reality' behind.
But if the reality is not what appears, have we any means of knowing whether there is any reality at all?
And if so, have we any means of finding out what it [the object] is like?
Such questions are bewildering, and it is difficult to know that even the strangest hypotheses may not be true.
Thus our familiar table, which has roused but the slightest thoughts in us hitherto, has become a problem full of surprising possibilities.
The one thing we know about it [the table] is that it is not what it seems.
Among these surprising possibilities, doubt suggests that perhaps there is no table at all.
- Of course it is not by argument that we originally come by our belief in an independent external world.
We find this belief ready in ourselves as soon as we begin to reflect: it is what may be called an instinctive belief.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page%3AR ... 12.djvu/41
So he concluded,
- Thus, to sum up our discussion of the value of philosophy;
Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions
since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true,
but rather for the sake of the questions themselves ......
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page%3AR ... 2.djvu/253
It is on this basis that there is no proven independent external world and that it cannot be proven, that I state,
everything that was, is and will be the case in the universe CANNOT exist independently of the human conditions.
The onus is on the realists if they insist,
to prove the real universe can exists independent of the human conditions.
Proofs? anyone?
Eta:
The Full Chapter 1
Here the relevant Chapter 1 in detail from Russell's Book - I posted in one of the post;
viewtopic.php?p=510974#p510974
Chapter 1 in Points
Here is a Summary in points of Chapter 1
viewtopic.php?p=511346#p511346 - Thus, to sum up our discussion of the value of philosophy;