ABSTRACT
It is hard to regard Moore’s preoccupation with sense-perception as fruitful. He invested a great deal of time and energy on this topic (as his publications, lecture notes, and notebooks show), but few people now attend to this aspect of his work. This is not simply because Moore’s views on this matter are now regarded as straightforwardly incorrect. Rather, as G.A.Paul observed in 1936 concerning one of Moore’s puzzles about sense-data,
Before proceeding it is worth quickly gathering together from previous chapters the points that have already emerged concerning this topic. In chapters 1 and 2 I discussed Moore’s emphatic anti-subjectivism, which leads him to insist that consciousness has no ‘content’, and that the sensible qualities apprehended in sense-experience are ‘objects’ of experience whose existence is independent of our experience of them. In NROP Moore still regards these as, typically, parts of material objects; but, I suggested in chapter 5, at the end of the paper this naive realist view of the matter is recognised as problematic in the light of Berkeley’s argument concerning the relativity of appearances. The problem is then discussed at length in SMPP, where the term ‘sense-datum’ is introduced to describe these objects of sense-experience. Moore here takes the argument from relativity to be unanswerable and adopts an indirect realist position, according to which the sense-data directly apprehended are never parts of material objects, but are instead caused by them. This rather poorly specified indirect realist position then sets the stage for his subsequent discussions of sense-perception.
