Volume 48, Number 6 · April 12, 2001
Can You Believe It?
By Colin McGinn
The Threefold Cord: Mind, Body, and World
Hilary Putnam
Columbia University Press,234 pp., $27.50, $17.50 (paper)
As I look out over Broadway, I have a series of experiences of people, cars, and buildings that inform my beliefs about what is going on outside me; but how exactly do these experiences relate to the actual material objects in space that I believe to exist, and can they supply me with genuine knowledge of the material world? That is the question posed by the philosophy of perception. The key issue about perception has always been how our inner subjective experience is connected to the external object that sits there in the objective world, sometimes millions of miles away. How intimate is this connection? Do we have direct mental contact with the external object or is our knowledge at best a matter of inference? Do we really see material objects themselves or just appearances of them? Can our experiences serve to ground our knowledge claims about external reality?
Review, 5826 words
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