Mad Man P: but that subjective experience is best characterised as being in contact with an objective reality.
If I put a ‘table’ in front of both of us among a crowd of 100++, yes there is an empirical table as observed.
However, within the philosophical perspective, show me the argument and justification there is a real objective ‘table’ out there.
Note Russell’s “perhaps there is no table at all”
Before we go farther it will be well to consider for a moment what it is that we have discovered so far.
It has appeared that, if we take any common object of the sort that is supposed to be known by the senses, what the senses immediately tell us is not the truth about the object as it is apart from us, but only the truth about certain sense-data which, so far as we can see, depend upon the relations between us and the object.Thus what we directly see and feel is merely ‘appearance’, which we believe to be a sign of some ‘reality’ behind. But if the reality is not what appears, have we any means of knowing whether there is any reality at all? And if so, have we any means of finding out what it is like?
Such questions are bewildering, and it is difficult to know that even the strangest hypotheses may not be true. Thus our familiar table, which has roused but the slightest thoughts in us hitherto, has become a problem full of surprising possibilities.
The one thing we know about it is that it is not what it seems.
Beyond this modest result, so far, we have the most complete liberty of conjecture.
Leibniz tells us it is a community of souls:
Berkeley tells us it is an idea in the mind of God;
sober science, scarcely less wonderful, tells us it is a vast collection of electric charges in violent motion.Among these surprising possibilities, doubt suggests that perhaps there is no table at all.
Problem of Philosophy - Chapter 1
I wonder you understand what Russell was arguing about?
Russell was doubting perhaps there is no objective table at all!
Can you counter Russell’s argument?