Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle) / quote 24 of 138
The greatest single disaster in the history of philosophy
Descartes presents very little by way of an argument to show that we cannot directly perceive tables, chairs, mountains, etc. but can only perceive our ideas of these things. He makes the transition from perceiving real objects to perceiving only the contents of our own minds very casually. Though he was by no means the first philosopher to hold this view, the move from the view that we really perceive real objects to the view that we only perceive our ideas of objects is a move of decisive importance in the history of philosophy. Indeed, I would say it is the greatest single disaster in the history of philosophy over the past four centuries. In contemporary jargon, it is put by saying: we do not perceive material objects, we perceive only “sense data.”