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Rather, most would accept the reality of an external, mind-independent world, quite simply because it appeals to us logically and naturally, through inductive reasoning, as by far the most probable hypothesis. orm an indisputable criterion for truth. Berkeley adopts an idealist standpoint, arguing that all properties only exist when perceived. The same can be said in terms of knowledge.

Knowledge is ‘justified true belief’, hence to prove knowledge of some sort we need justification. He therefore uses a mathematical model of building up a number of (what he considers to be) indubitable premises in an attempt to reach an equally indubitable conclusion. Rather, we should say something like: ‘I am having a ‘There is a table in front of me’ experience’, or ‘It seems to me that there is a table in front of me. In Meditation three, Descartes uses what has become known as the ‘Trademark Argument’. Whilst I can not be certain of my perceptions of the sensory world, I accept that they are correct, as it applies to our rationality, and seems to be the most probable hypothesis.

4) Therefore external bodies are ideas and impressions or collections of them, and cannot exist unperceived.

Yet Descartes escapes this scepticism in his second Meditation. Hence the foundationalist argument seems to be very weak, and we are left with the lingering questions: ‘How are our beliefs about our own experiences justified?’ and ‘How do beliefs about our own experience justify our beliefs about the external world?’ When we say things such as ‘There is a table in front of me’, it seems that we have trouble in justifying this. Next, he argues that even if our perceptions seem correct, there is nothing to say that we are not in a dream or suffering from a delusion of some sort. Perhaps we can also say that we can know truths of mathematics and logic, such as ‘there are 180º in a triangle’ and ‘the shortest distance between two points is a straight line’.