Issues with Indirect realism

Question 1

scepticism about the nature of the external world

Answer 1

If all that I directly perceive is a representation of reality in my mind, Then I can never directly perceive the external world, how can I determine how accurate the representations are?

We appear to be trapped in out own minds ;

If you only ever lived in a cinema , watching movies and could never leave the cinema , you would have a distorted image of life outside the cinema and so you would never know what life outside the cinema is truly like, You can’t check if the representations are real.

This shows that we could not prove the relationship between sense data and the external world. Since we can’t get out of our own minds and adopt a God’s eye view.(Cannot escape the cinema)

Question 2

Scepticism about the existence of the external world.

Answer 2

We cannot peer beyond the veil of perception to perceive the world as it really is . Since we can’t penetrate the veil of perception, then we can not be sure that the external world actually exists.

Question 3

Defending Indirect realism ( Defending the existence of a material world)

Answer 3

Locke:

1) If one does not have a sense organ for detecting objects , one cannot have the perception of the material world. We have not crated the ideas ourselves.
2) We have no choice about what we perceive. If there was no material world and our perceptions came from our own minds, then we could choose what we perceive.
3) There is coherence in the senses. I can see , taste and feel coffee, suggesting the perception has been caused by a material object.