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What is Real and What and How We Know
From "Things and Their Place in Theories"
Our talk of external things, our very notion of things, is just a
conceptual apparatus that helps us to foresee and control the
triggering of our sensory receptors in the light of previous triggering
of our sensory receptors. The triggering, first and last, is all we
have to go on. In saying this I too am talking of external
things, namely, people and their nerve endings. Thus what I am saying
applies in particular to what I am saying, and is not meant as
skeptical. There is nothing we can be more confident of than external
things — some of them, anyway — other people, sticks, stones. But there
remains the fact — a fact of science itself — that science is a
conceptual bridge of our own making, linking sensory stimulation to
sensory stimulation; there is no extrasensory perception.