external world
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English
[edit]Noun
[edit]external world (plural external worlds)
- (philosophy) The world consisting of all the objects and events which are experienceable or whose existence is accepted by the human mind, but which exist independently of the mind.
- 1882, Josiah Royce, “Mind and Reality”, in Mind, volume 7, number 25, page 30:
- Human beings are able to form ideas that correspond in some way with a real world, outside of themselves. . . . [T]o each necessary relation a:b in human consciousness, there corresponds a relation A:B in the external world.
- 1954, Daniel Cory, “God or the External World”, in The Journal of Philosophy, volume 51, number 2, page 61:
- Is not a vast "background" of experience what we all really mean by an external world, or God, according to the mood we are in?
- 2003, Ram Neta, “Contextualism and the Problem of the External World”, in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, volume 66, number 1, page 1:
- Skeptics . . . claim that our evidence can't support our beliefs about the external world.