1.2.1.1 Appearances & Scepticism

Version 1.0 July 2016                                    (Previous Version)

Philosophers have from the very beginnings been sceptical about the link between appearances and reality.  Eastern philosophers started thinking about these issues a few thousand years ago.

•        From its earliest days, about 1500 BCE, the Hindu Vedas talked about maya (‘that which is not’ i.e. illusion), which explains that what we think we perceive is not how things really are.  Under maya’s influence the soul mistakenly identifies with the body, accepting the temporary as having lasting value, thinking “I am a person.  This is my house, my country, my religion.â€�.  In the twilight, one may easily mistake a rope for a snake. In so doing, we feel fear. Hence fear and other emotions may often be based on illusion, an incorrect perception of reality.

•        Buddhism grew out of Hinduism and adopted many of its ideas, including the misleading nature of reality.  But the Buddha (about 500 BCE) went further than most Hindus by claiming  that even our selves do not really exist but are very convincing illusions.  We are certainly different to what we were 10 years ago: every molecule in our body has probably changed, our mind is completely different.  The Buddha says there is no thing that endures from birth to death, only continual change: our mind is just a sequence of uncontrolled thoughts.

•        The ancient Greek philosopher Pyrrho (c. 360 BCE – c.270 BCE) had apparently been to India (following Alexander the Great) and brought back to Europe Hindu or Buddhist scepticism about the validity of our sense perceptions, thought and beliefs. 

Western European philosophers started thinking about these issues a few hundred years ago.

•        The English philosopher John Locke (1632 – 1704 CE) defined an object by its primary and secondary qualities.  Primary qualities are perceived directly such as colour, shape and size.

Locke takes heat as an example of a secondary quality. If you put one hand in a bucket of cold water, and the other hand in a bucket of warm water, then put both hands in a bucket of lukewarm water, one of your hands is going to tell you that the water is cold and the other that the water is hot. Locke says that since two different objects (both your hands) perceive the water to be hot and cold, then the heat is not a quality of the water.

•        Locke’s successor, Bishop George Berkeley (1685 – 1753 CE) said that even size is not a primary quality of an object because the perceived size of the object depends on the distance between the observer and the object, or the size of the observer. Since an object is a different size to different observers, then size is not a quality of the object.  Berkeley rejected shape with a similar argument and then asks: if neither primary qualities nor secondary qualities are of the object, then how can we say that there is anything more than the qualities we observe?