The relation between language and reality

Abstract

In previous centuries philosophers were preoccupied with questions of how our Minds come to be filled with experience and knowledge of the world (or rather with “perceptions” and “ideas” about the world), and also whether this experience and knowledge were really in accordance with a reality existing independently of our experience and cognition of it. These discussions left philosophers with a number of unsolvable problems. The most prominent was that since all we have access to is our experience and cognition of reality as it appears in our Minds, then how can we possibly settle the question of whether our knowledge is in accordance with reality existing independently of and “external” to our Minds? Indeed, the assumption of a reality existing independently of our experience of it would be an assumption of a reality beyond our experience and, therefore, unknowable to us. It seemed inevitable that our notion of what exists in reality depends on our experience and cognition of it —and hence that reality does not exist independently of our cognition, nor independently of being experienced.