Theme 1: Reflection

In my opinion Russells definition of sense-data were easy to relate to as it was presented very rationally and well. Most course participants seems to have come to the same conclusion about sense-data as I have, that it is the things that are immediately known in sensation such as color or sound, which feels good and reassuring. I enjoyed the very simple, but still highly explanatory, summarizing sentence written by Ragnar Schön: "To differentiate between the appearance of an object and the reality or "truth" of an object, Russell introduces sense-data and physical object where the former is the appearance of the latter."

Moving on, I had some trouble to define what was meant by a "statement of fact" and "proposition" in relation to other verbal expressions. This required some querying on the Internet that resulted in a lot of different review sites with many different interpretations, of varying quality, of the same question. I came to the conclusion that a statement of fact is a proposition that many agree on, that is generally accepted as a fact. Some student wrote that a proposition is a statement based on beliefs, but my interpretation of "proposition" was that a proposition is a statement that has to be based on components that we are acquainted with in order for us to understand it. We have to know its sense-data. This renders me unsure if I made the right conclusions about what a proposition actually is according to Russell. I leave this up to discussion. Reading through other students answers it was kind of nice, or mostly reassuring, to see that I was not the only one having trouble defining this.

It was very easy to see which students that had a knack for reading and evaluating complex philosophical texts like this one and which students that behaved more "engineer-like" by trying to interpret the true meaning of the text and get the answers absolutely right. I believe that I myself lie somewhere in the middle, not trying to over complicate things but at the same time focusing on answering the questions as straight on as possible. One thing that I feel is true is that no matter how much time you spend analyzing texts like Russells, you always feel you could have drawn better conclusions, related it to more philosophical works etc. As an engineering student I sometimes feel somewhat frustrated by this, but at the same time I believe that as an engineering student I have a lot to benefit from it.