PHILOS 1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Regular Sequence, Phenomenalism, Logical Positivism
Document Summary
According to phenomenalism, the orderly sense-data are obtainable because it is the most fundamental fact of subjective reality. Nevertheless, this doesn"t seem to be a satisfactory answer to a skeptical view. Phenomenalism must be able to account for the content of propositions about material objects purely in terms of sense-data, nonetheless, the content of some propositions seemingly has nothing to do with sense-data. Logical positivists might have an answer to this problem: Phenomenalism seems to entail solipsism, which is a version of skepticism that there are no other minds but my own. This is because, given phenomenalism, my mind and mental states (ex. Immediate experience) is the only mind and the only collection of mental states that genuinely exist. In other words, the only kind of knowledge is knowledge of my own sense-data. Nothing exists except sense-data and patterns of sense-data. Representationalist arguments for the existence of the external world.
