Page:Schlick - Gesammelte Aufsätze (1926 - 1936), 1938.djvu/279

 in a different way, in a "philosophic" way, which he believes to be a consistent interpretation, but which actually is a metaphysical abuse.

Our discussion of the "problem" of other people's "consciousness" or "soul" has shown that the confusion is due not only to a careless use or lack of analysis of the terms "consciousness" or "self" but that a misunderstanding of "existence" has also something to do with it. For clearly our question could have been formulated by asking: "Does consciousness or 'a soul' or 'a mind' exist in other living being?" The same misunderstanding is the cause of the nonsensical problem concerning the "Existence of an External World". In order to get rid of such meaningless questions we need only remember, once for all, that, since every proposition expresses a fact by picturing its structure, this must also be true for propositions asserting the "existence" of something or other. The only meaning such a proposition can have is that it pictures a certain structure of our experience.

This was seen quite clearly even by Kant. He expressed it in his own way by saying that the "reality" was a "category", but from his explanation of his own thought we can infer that what he had in mind practically coincides with the interpretation we have to give to the term "existence".

According to this interpretation such questions as: "Does the inside of the sun exist?", "Did the earth exist before it was perceived by any human beings?" etc. have a perfectly good sense, and must, of course, be answered in the affirmative. There are certain ways of verifying these positive answers, certain scientific reasons for believing them to be true, and they assure us of the reality of mountains and oceans, stars, clouds, trees and fellow men by the same methods of observation or experience by which we learn the truth of every proposition. If by "external world" we mean their empirical reality, its existence as a problem, and if the philosopher means something else, if he is not satisfied with empirical reality, he must tell us what he does mean. He says he is concerned with "transcendent" reality. We do not understand this word and ask him for an explanation, which he may give by saying that "transcendent" refers to genuine metaphysical being, not to merely empirical reality. If we ask him what is meant by this distinction and how a proposition asserting transcendental existence of anything can be verified, he must answer that there is no way of ever testing the truth of such a proposition definitely. We must inform