Reality of the external world

Reality of the external world, in modern Western philosophy, a central problem of metaphysics (one of the four main branches of philosophy, the others being logic, ethics, and epistemology). The reality of the external world is among a handful of fundamental issues that together defined the nature and scope of metaphysics from the 16th through the 20th century.

The problem in early modern philosophy

Although sensations (i.e., the conscious experiences that result from stimulation of the sense organs) are mental events, they seem to most people to be a source of information—fallible, perhaps, but in the main reliable—about a nonmental world, the world of material or physical objects, which constitutes the environment of the perceiver. Regarding such an “external world,” many philosophers have attempted to answer the following related questions:

• Is there an external world?
• If there is, do the senses provide reliable information about it?
• If they do, do human beings know—or can they come to know—what the external world is like?
• If they can, what exactly is the source or basis of that knowledge?

To attempt to answer such questions is to address the problem of the reality of the external world.

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nonfictional prose: Reality and imagination

This problem belongs entirely to modern—that is, to postmedieval—philosophy; no ancient or medieval philosopher so much as considered any of the questions mentioned in the previous paragraph. First explored by the French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650), the reality of the external world was not regarded as a fundamental or especially important issue—i.e., as a problem that every philosophical system with any pretense to comprehensiveness was obliged to address—until the work of the Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkeley (1685–1753) became widely known. Berkeley devised very able and ingenious arguments for a thoroughgoing form of idealism, according to which nothing exists but ideas (i.e., sensations and mental images), things composed of ideas, and the minds within which ideas exist. Although few philosophers accepted Berkeley’s idealism—his arguments were notorious rather than famous—it was generally considered important that the doctrine should be refuted. The typical attitude of 18th-century philosophers toward the problem of the reality of the external world was well summarized by the German Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), who wrote (in a footnote to the introduction of the second edition [1787] of his Critique of Pure Reason):

It remains a scandal to philosophy, and to human reason in general, that it is necessary to take the existence of things outside us…merely on faith, and, if anyone should happen to doubt it, no adequate proof can be produced to oppose him.

Descartes’s formulation of the problem is presented in his Meditationes de Prima Philosophia (1641; Meditations on First Philosophy)—a record, in the form of a first-person narrative, of its author’s search for an absolutely reliable foundation of human knowledge. Descartes assumed that each person, in order to have knowledge, required such a foundation, and he further assumed that the foundation of each person’s knowledge would be a set of propositions whose truth it was impossible for that person to doubt and on the basis of which additional propositions (further knowledge) could be inferred. He proposed to demonstrate to each reader of the Meditations how that reader could find such a set of propositions by using himself, Descartes, as an example. He therefore set out to identify the propositions that it was impossible for him to doubt. Those propositions, Descartes argued, were precisely those that he could be certain of even in the following worst-case scenario: “I will suppose that…some malicious demon of the utmost power and cunning has employed all his energies to deceive me.” In such a case, Descartes decided, what he could be certain of (besides a few self-evident necessary truths, like “1 + 1 = 2” and “Things equal to the same thing are equal to each other”) would be only his own present existence as a thinking, sensing being and his present thoughts and sensations. Such was the foundation upon which the edifice of his knowledge was to be constructed. The “ground floor” of the building would be a proof that the sensations that he had found within himself—sensations that seemed to him to represent physical or material objects like the body he animated and the pen in his fingers and the paper and writing table before him (each of them with a determinate set of physical properties)—were veridical (truth-telling). If Descartes’s sensations were veridical, then an external world would exist, since “an external world” is no more than a name for the totality of objects of the kind (material or physical) whose existence Descartes’s sensations testified to. And if Descartes knew that his sensations were veridical, he would know that there was an external world, and he would know that it was (locally, at least) more or less as his sensations indicated that it was. (It should be noted, however, that Descartes, writing in Latin, used neither the word veridicus [“veridical”] nor any phrase that could be translated as “the external world.”)

The central argument of the Meditations aims to establish the conclusion that its author’s sensations are veridical. The core of the argument consists of two subordinate arguments, each of which seeks to prove the existence of a perfect being—that is, of God. The purpose of the current discussion does not require an exposition of those arguments; it suffices to point out that Descartes maintained that each of the subordinate arguments is valid and that one can recognize their validity without having to assume that one’s sensations are veridical.

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Having demonstrated (to his own satisfaction) the existence of a perfect being, Descartes proceeded to argue that if his (Descartes’s) sensations were not veridical, the perfect being just established—the Creator of all things and hence of all sensations—would be a deceiver. His argument concludes with the observation that deceit is an imperfection and hence incompatible with the nature of a perfect being. The hypothesis that his sensations are not veridical thus leads to a contradiction, from which it follows that his sensations are veridical after all (see reductio ad absurdum). Descartes assumed that each of his readers would be able to establish the same conclusion with respect to the reader’s own sensations.

Very few philosophers have found the argument of the Meditations convincing, if for no other reason than that very few of them have been convinced by either of the subordinate arguments for the existence of God (and theists have been hardly less critical of those arguments than atheists). Moreover, very few philosophers have supposed that some other argument for the veridicality of sensations or for the existence of an external world succeeds where Descartes’s argument fails. (The above quotation from Kant reflected his belief that he had presented a new, and of course successful, argument for the reality of the external world. His argument, however, is notoriously obscure, and in any case it relies so extensively on the elaborate philosophical apparatus that is unique to Kantian philosophy that it is hardly possible for anyone who is not a full-fledged Kantian to accept it.)

Berkeleyan idealism

Although Berkeley denied the existence of anything besides ideas, things composed of ideas, and the minds within which ideas exist, he did not explicitly deny the existence of objects such as “the body Descartes animated,” “the pen in his fingers,” and “the paper and writing table before him.” Berkeley instead affirmed the existence of those objects but insisted that they were composed of ideas. His argument was straightforward. Adapted to the present case, its central point can be formulated as follows:

Take the whiteness of the sheet of paper before Descartes—or its (perceived) shape. Those properties cannot exist outside the mind—that is, outside anyone’s mind. Thus, the properties of a sheet of paper exist in the mind. Furthermore, there is nothing more to a thing than its properties—in particular, there is no imperceptible “substrate” in which properties “inhere,” as the English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) held. (If there were such a thing, how would anyone know about it, given that all knowledge is derived from perception, and the substrate is by definition imperceptible?) Therefore, sheets of paper and all other objects of the kind that philosophers call “material” exist only in the mind. Indeed, there is nothing wrong with anyone’s calling the sheet of paper “material,” if by that word the speaker means that it is extended in space and impenetrable (it cannot be penetrated by another extended object without suffering damage). But extension and impenetrability are properties like any other, and as such they exist only in the mind.

In a sense, therefore, Berkeley accepted the existence of an external world, because he affirmed the existence of “material” objects, of which the external world is ordinarily said to be composed. Moreover, for Berkeley, there are things that exist partly or wholly outside each person’s mind—namely, ideas that are not in that person’s mind, and minds that are not identical to that person’s mind. But most philosophers who speak of the problem of the reality of the external world would deny that Berkeley’s idealism is consistent with the reality of an “external world” as they understand that phrase. Kant is a case in point. His proof of the existence of “things outside us” occurs, in the Critique of Pure Reason, under the heading “Refutation of Idealism,” and by “idealism” he meant Berkeleyan idealism (or “dogmatic” idealism, as he also called it—that is, an idealism that is defended on the basis of metaphysical reasoning of the kind that Kant’s Critique was designed to refute). Indeed, almost all philosophers who have used the phrase “external world” would join Kant in regarding Berkeleyan idealism as inconsistent with the reality of an external world. Specifically, they would insist that at least one of the two following statements (both of which Berkeley affirmed) must be false:

1. Extension and impenetrability exist only in the mind.
2. A thing is material if and only if it is both extended and impenetrable.

Berkeley never used the phrase “external world,” and he might well have said that philosophers who wished to use that term of art were free to use it in any sense that pleased them. He would, however, have vehemently rejected the thesis that either statement 1 or statement 2 must be false. His argument against that thesis would have proceeded along the following lines:

Statement 2 is true by definition, so its denial is nonsensical. As to statement 1, extension must mean either visual extension (the quality called “extension” when one is speaking of ideas presented by the sense of sight) or tactile extension (the quality called “extension” when one is speaking of ideas presented by the sense of touch). It follows that neither visual extension nor tactile extension can exist outside the mind. Similar reasoning applies to the term impenetrability. Therefore, neither extension nor impenetrability exists outside the mind; that is, statement 1 is true.

Because Berkeley explicitly affirmed the existence of “material” objects and implicitly accepted the existence of an “external world,” the problem of the reality of an external world cannot simply be identified with the question of the truth of Berkeleyan idealism (i.e., the external world is real if and only if Berkeleyan idealism is false). As indicated above, however, most philosophers regard the problem of the reality of the external world as practically equivalent to the question of the truth of Berkeleyan idealism, in part because they reject Berkeley’s eccentric understandings of the terms in which the problem is typically formulated.

The problem in 20th-century philosophy

In his famous 1939 British Academy lecture, “Proof of an External World,” the English philosopher G.E. Moore (1873–1958) offered a very simple “proof” of the reality of an external world. The importance of the proof, however, lies not so much in the proof itself as in certain arguments that Moore presented to establish that it was indeed a proof. The proof was essentially this: Moore displayed one of his hands to his audience and said, “Here is one hand.” He then displayed his other hand and said, “and here is another.” He continued by presenting a careful and very precise piece of reasoning intended to establish the conclusion that the “here-is-a-hand” argument was indeed a proof of the reality of an external world—that, considered in relation to the proposition “there is an external world,” the here-is-a-hand argument satisfied all the requirements for being a proof that anyone could reasonably impose. One essential premise of the reasoning by which Moore claimed to have demonstrated that the here-is-a-hand argument was a proof of the existence of an external world was the assertion that he and everyone in his audience knew that there was a pair of hands before them.

Notwithstanding the blunt simplicity of Moore’s proof—a characteristic that struck some philosophers as slightly absurd—it is undeniable that Moore regarded the problem of the reality of the external world with deep seriousness. In his view, “Is there an external world?” is a legitimate philosophical question, just as “Did the human species die out in the 13th century?” is a legitimate historical question.

Many later philosophers, however, differed from Moore on this point. In various ways, they attempted to show that the question was not genuinely philosophical or that it was not even a real question but instead a form of nonsense. Those philosophers held that the historical problem of the reality of the external world was the product of fundamental misunderstandings of the nature of human knowledge, the nature of language, or even the nature of human being (i.e., the human mode of being, or existence).

Such criticism was characteristic of logical positivism, an important school of analytic philosophy that flourished between the two World Wars. For the logical positivists, the sentences “There is an external world” and “There is not an external world” are both literally meaningless, as are many other metaphysical utterances. That position is a consequence of the logical positivists’ “verifiability principle” (also called “verificationism”), according to which a sentence is literally meaningful if and only if it is either in principle empirically verifiable (or falsifiable) or a tautology. Because no possible experience (no possible experiment or observation) could either prove or disprove that there is an external world, all statements about its existence or nonexistence are nonsensical.

The Austrian-born philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) and the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), who are widely regarded as the two most important philosophers of the 20th century, believed that the question of the reality of the external world could be meaningfully posed only within philosophical traditions that were founded upon, and perpetuated, misapprehensions of some fundamental aspect of human experience or the human condition. For Wittgenstein, the misapprehensions concerned human language and thought; for Heidegger, they concerned human being.

Wittgenstein’s famous “private-language argument,” which appears in his posthumously published work Philosophische Untersuchungen (1953; Philosophical Investigations), can be read as implying that, if there were no “external world” (a term, however, that Wittgenstein did not use), all language would be without meaning—from which it would follow that the question “Is there an external world?” is itself meaningless unless there is an external world. If Wittgenstein is correct, the question “Is there an external world?” is effectively answered in its being posed, as are (for example) “Is there such a thing as language?” and “Does anyone ever ask a question?” In a later work, Über Gewissheit (1969; On Certainty), Wittgenstein insisted on a radical distinction between certitude and knowledge, holding that the former is not merely a surer form of the latter. Instead, certitude is the background or setting in which the “language games” of knowing, doubting, and believing (among others) take place. Ultimately, what is certain is that which is presupposed or taken for granted in the social activities of a community.

In his early masterpiece Sein und Zeit (1927; Being and Time), Heidegger characterized the philosophy of Descartes—and, by extension, all of modern metaphysics and epistemology—as positing a division between an “inner” world of subjective mental experiences and a hypothetical “outer” world of objective material things. The two worlds were in principle completely independent of each other (the existence of the one did not imply the existence of the other), and the only possible relation between the two was that of “representation,” whereby certain elements of mental experience could represent or correspond to certain features of the objective material world. The task of philosophy, according to the Cartesian conception (as Heidegger and others interpreted it), was to show how or to what extent the relation of representation might be veridical.

According to Heidegger, however, the two “worlds” were not at all independent; to the contrary, each was a distorted abstraction of a primordial and unified Dasein (literally, “being-there”)—the mode of human being—which was inherently already involved with and caught up in a world that the Cartesian tradition had misconceived as independent of isolated human subjects. Commenting on Kant’s “scandal to philosophy,” Heidegger wrote (in Being and Time), “The ‘scandal to philosophy’ does not lie in the fact that this proof has not yet been given, but rather in the fact that such proofs are continually expected and attempted.”

It should be remarked, however, that in the 20th century—Heidegger’s century—such proofs were not actually continually expected or attempted. Even Moore’s “proof” was best understood not as a genuine attempt to prove the existence of an external world but rather as a way of raising a pointed philosophical question about what the skeptical demand for a proof of the reality of the external world really amounted to. And that question is, “Why does a certain trivial exercise (presenting one’s hands to an audience and saying, ‘Here is one hand’ and ‘here is another’) not count as a proof of the reality of an external world?”

The remarkable revival of metaphysics among analytic philosophers in the last quarter of the 20th century did nothing to reawaken interest in the question of the reality of the external world. Subsequent analytic metaphysics was concerned either with problems that had no bearing on that question (e.g., those regarding modality, ontology, and the nature of time) or with problems having to do with the nature of the physical or material world. Philosophers writing on the metaphysics of the material world were content to take its existence for granted and devoted themselves entirely to questions about the kinds of objects it comprises and their properties. The sole exception to this trend was provided by a few defenses of idealism, such as the journal articles “Idealism Vindicated” (2007), by the American philosopher Robert Merrihew Adams, and “A World for Us: The Case for Phenomenalistic Idealism” (2008), by the English philosopher John Foster.