Empiricism and reality
devoid from any perspective, transcendentally. He argued that any attempt to do so must end in failure. Kant did, however, suggest a legitimate use of this search which was to allow us to define the limits of our knowledge, purporting knowledge of the world transcendentally to be an ideal. Kant suggested arguably the most subtle and nuanced view on this topic. While his ideas are complex, they appear, nevertheless, to have set a new start point for subsequent philosophers’ deliberations on these issues. Russell also recognized the importance of perspective in sensory data. He noted that if one moved position then sense-data of the same object would change. It was not possible to determine whether one of these sets of sensory perceptions was objectively correct and therefore one must assume that one cannot definitely know about real objects. He nevertheless thought it legitimate to assume that sense-data reflected real objects which he labelled ‘physical objects’ and that it was the relative positions of us to the physical objects which caused the change in sense data; this explained why much of our knowledge is relative. Russell, like Hume, suggested that as part of our nature we believe in an external and independent reality which our sense perceptions reflect. He maintained that although the idea of dreaming may cast doubt over this, as it did for Descartes, we can reasonably make this assumption. Russell accepted the existence of the innate ideas of logic but asserted that they could only be realized through experience of sensory perception and thus could only help us to understand what he described as the ‘private space of perception.’ They could not help us to understand reality, the ‘public physical space’.
Relativity, as shown by the foreword, written in 1924, to the German translation of The Problems of Philosophy . The theory caused Russell to drop this private and public space distinction and adopt the view, akin to the American philosopher William James, that reality was made of one neutral property which was formed in various ways to create reality, a view commonly called Neutral Monism. The General Theory of Relativity fitted into his view because of the idea that all events were held within the neutral property of a four dimensional frame – the Space Time Continuum. Progress in physical science and the development of philosophical ideas in relation to reality have been clearly interlinked since Descartes. However twentieth-century theories in physics, such as Einstein’s relativity, Dirac’s antimatter and Everett’s multiverses, have created new levels of uncertainty as to what constitutes reality. These advances and their consequences have made it very difficult for the philosophical discussion in this area to progress. There has been work that involves modern physics in a philosophical concept of reality such as that by Diederik Aerts on relativity, but, so far, there has not been a Kant-like whole theory encapsulating the intricate metaphysical and epistemological difficulties of the area whilst conforming to the views of accepted scientific theory of the time. To conclude, I think that empirical evidence, our sense perceptions, is not completely effective in our understanding of reality. All the above philosophers accept that error is possible in sensory perception and, more problematically, that the data we gain purely from our senses is not reality in and of itself. The best we can say is that sense perception reflects reality. There yet remains a need for a new theory of our understanding of reality which is capable of encompassing the output of quantum physics.
Russell’s views changed significantly following the publication of Einstein’s General Theory of
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