Appearance and Reality

Abstract

1. ‘How do we know the material world?’, ‘What is it to know the material world?’, ‘In what ways is knowledge of the material world like and in what ways is it unlike other sorts of knowledge?’We know how we know the material world and what it is to know the material world and in what ways such knowledge is like and unlike other sorts of knowledge. But a man who knows what poetry is like and how it is like and unlike prose may ask ‘What is poetry?’, and a mathematician who knows what it is like to do mathematics may ask ‘What is mathematics?’ It is in a rather like way that we ask ‘What is knowledge of the material world?’ The ways in which knowledge of the material world is like and unlike other sorts of knowledge are familiar to us but we wish for a still better grasp of these likenesses and unlikenesses.