ABSTRACT
Under the spell of philosophical pictures, philosophers come to adopt paradoxical claims in the absence of warrant. Belief-bias effects have them maintain these claims in the continued absence of warrant. The clash of these claims with common sense, acknowledged facts, or among each other, gives rise to illusory problems. To solve them and resolve the apparent confl icts, thinkers construct unwarranted philosophical theories, in the grip of the same pictures that had them formulate their ‘problems’. This is, in the roughest of outlines, the account of nature and genesis of philosophical problems and theories which we have developed, so far, by reconstructing core claims and moves which led to the lastingly infl uential division of the world into a colourful realm of inner perception called ‘the mind’ and an austere external realm of physical objects devoid of colour and sound, taste and smell, heat and cold. We now turn to an equally infl uential doctrine about sense-perception which purports to explain how the chasm between these two realms can be bridged.
