Moore's Proof Of An External World Summary

“Proving Moore’s Proof of an External World”

In ‘Proof of an External World’, G.E. Moore raises his hands and claims thereby to prove the existence of an external world. He says that this proof satisfies three conditions that are necessary for a rigorous proof.

In this essay, I will argue for the plausibility of Moore’s response to Cartesian scepticism, through attempting to resolve the common objection made against Moore’s proof.

In his First Meditation, Rene Descartes argued that the senses can deceive, and so they cannot be believed. He based his argument upon the existence of dreams: claiming that as the dreaming state is internally indistinguishable from the waking state, and that both the dreaming state and the waking state are perceived through the senses, what one believes to be the waking state may in fact be nothing but a dream - there is no way of knowing for certain if one is at present awake or asleep. He concluded that one cannot confirm the truth of external reality.

Philosopher George Edward Moore, in his response to this

I contend that we would know our proof to be true. In our inverse situation, it would be impossible to prove that two hands exist - and by extension, that two things exist - when all the evidence to which we have access would inform us that two hands do not. Given the limits of our human faculties, we decidedly could not say that we do not know that two hands do not exist. Because we would be unable to identify through any of our human faculties the criteria by which we define ‘hands’, we must conclude that two hands do not exist. If we would use our human faculties to determine that two hands do not exist, we must be able to use our human faculties to determine that two hands do exist in Moore’s original example - and therefore conclude the existence of at least two external