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30.3: Appearance and Reality

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    95315

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    Bertrand Russell had an interesting response to skepticism. To make his point, Russell made a distinction between appearance (how things seem to us) and reality (how things really are). Ultimately, he says it doesn’t really matter if appearance and reality correspond; all that matters is that we agree on appearance. Russell’s goal was to get us to just move on from attempting to “defeat” skepticism. The information cost is just too high (think of all the time and energy put into trying to solve the problem) and there isn’t much to be gained (even if we did somehow successfully argue against, it our lives would remain the same). If we all agree on how things appear to us, there isn’t anything for us to compare those experiences to in an effort to disconfirm or falsify. So, Russell says we might as well move on to other problems.

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