2.1. Spatial presentation

Consider seeing a chair and then experiencing a negative after-image of the chair as well. For Moore, both the chair and the negative after-image are presented spatially. The negative after-image of the chair is not like a visually imagined chair, which is not presented as being in any direction relative to one’s own. It doesn’t seem to be in front of one, beside one, under one, etc. (although one might imagine it as being seen from a certain direction, such as by imagining seeing the back of the chair only). A negative after-image, however, appears directionally. Likewise – albeit less clearly than with after-images – a pain might be felt in some part of one’s body and is thereby spatially presented without having an identifiable spatio-temporal location; it is not a “thing to be met with in space” in Moore’s sense.Footnote ⁹

2.2. Spatial occupation

Things to be met with in space are not only capable of being presented spatially (as having spatial and directional properties) but are also capable of being perceived by others. Moore thought that although both the chair and the chair after-image are presented spatially, of the two only the chair can be met with in space because no one else could perceive the chair after-image that he perceives: “If both were (the chair and the after-image were perceivable), it would follow that somebody else might see the very same two images which I see,” which he thinks isn’t possible (Moore 1939 [Reference Moore2013]: 153). That is, while both things appear to have spatial properties – spatial properties are perceptually represented – only the chair can be perceived by others. This modal property of <being possibly perceived by others> is what differentiates spatio-temporal occupation from spatio-temporal presentation.Footnote ¹⁰

Moore thought that the spatial occupation sense of “external things” is co-extensive with “physical” and “material object”: “all things of the sort that philosophers have been used to calling ‘physical objects’, ‘material things’, or ‘bodies’ obviously come under this head,” he said (Moore 1939 [Reference Moore2013]: 130). However, he thought of the spatial occupation sense of externality as being broader than “physical object” because of minor objects like shadows, which have spatio-temporal location but aren’t thought of as being “physical.” As Moore put it: “The phrase ‘things which are to be met with in space’ can … be naturally understood as having a very wide meaning” (ibid).

With these distinctions in play, Moore argues that from the fact that a plant exists or that a soap-bubble exists, for example, it follows that there are things to be met with in space. He thus accepts the following entailment:

Crucially, he says that “you will not require also to give a separate proof that from the proposition that there are plants it does follow that there are things to be met with in space” (Moore 1939 [Reference Moore2013]: 138). Mutatis mutandis for other ordinary objects. So, the thought is that it is just part of what “plant” and other ordinary object terms mean that they are things to be met with in space (i.e., have spatio-temporal properties). So, Moore seems to have thought that Ordinary Objects Are Spatial is analytic. Crucially, for Moore, this doesn’t yet show that “plant” refers to something external in any other sense.

Moore’s argument for the entailment is unclear, however. At some points, he suggests that he is just stipulating it: “I am so using ‘things to be met with in space’ that, in the case of each of these kinds of ‘things’, from the proposition that there are ‘things’ of that kind it follows that there are things to be met with in space” (Moore 1939 [Reference Moore2013]: 137). This is a stipulative entailment. One is of course free to stipulate the opposite as well.

However, given the fact that he takes great pains to distinguish spatio-temporal presentation from spatio-temporal occupation, we think it best to understand it not as a mere stipulation but an argument from cases and conceptual analysis: once we appreciate the property differences between plants and plant after-images, for example, this furnishes us with a conception of spatio-temporal presentation (i.e., things presented in space) and spatio-temporal occupation (i.e., things to be met with in space) that can be applied to other cases. We know by experience that plant after-images aren’t the sort of things that are spatio-temporally located. Rather, they are merely spatio-temporarily presented.Footnote ¹¹

Interestingly, Moore denies that this kind of argument suffices for the semantic premise. While he says that, with regard to “things to be met with in space,” that no proof is necessary for Ordinary Objects Are Spatial – that the entailment is (apparently) obvious – that “with regard to the phrase ‘things external to our minds’, …. the case is different” (Moore 1939 [Reference Moore2013]: 138). Indeed, he says that it’s possible that a plant might be met in space but not be external to our minds and that “external to our minds” is not a mere synonym of “to be met with in space” (ibid).Footnote ¹²

2.3. Mind-independence

So, we need a better understanding of Moore’s distinction between things to be met with in space and a thing’s externality. To this end, Moore reintroduces an argument he gave in his earlier (Reference Moore1925) work, “A Defence of Common sense,” where he says that “physical facts” and “mental facts” are distinguished by their logical independence (Moore 1925 [Reference Moore2013]: 50). The thought here is that statements that feature (perceptual) mental-verbs like “I saw,” “I heard,” or “I imagined” are all such that they presuppose that someone had an experience. From “I saw my hands,” it follows that I had some experience at that time. In contrast, statements which lack mental-verbs like “I am 4’11” or “there’s a tree in the quad” lack such implications. We can capture Moore’s view about what “external to our minds” means as follows:

Moore’s argument for the semantic premise draws on this principle. His thought was that things to be met with in space are external to our minds in this sense that they all respect Mind-independence. He argues for this in two steps. First, he employs a self-contradiction test on ordinary object terms: that from accepting the proposition that there is a soap-bubble here – which is something to be met with in space – that one would not contradict themselves if they added: “it was here before I perceived it” or “it might stay here even if no one perceives it” (Moore 1939 [Reference Moore2013]: 144).Footnote ¹⁴ It would not be like asserting “there’s a bachelor here,” adding “there’s no unmarried man here,” which would be contradictory.

The second step in his argument is that the logical independence between “there’s a soap-bubble here” and the corresponding mental-statement “someone had an experience as of a soap-bubble” is what distinguishes something’s being a real soap-bubble from its being a merely hallucinated soap-bubble or similar:

So, on Moore’s view being an ordinary object partly consists in its obeying Mind-independence. As he puts it, a thing “would not be a soap-bubble unless its existence at any given time were logically independent of my perception of it at that time” (ibid). If the soap-bubble could exist only if it were perceived at some time, then this would compromise our distinction between something’s being a real soap-bubble and a merely hallucinated or imagined soap-bubble.

As we can see, then, Moore’s argument for the semantic premise draws on semantic intuitions about ordinary object terms: crucially, about their referents’ logical independence from psychological phenomena. We can summarize Moore’s argument for the semantic premise as follows:

Sub-Semantic Argument

• (P2a) We can conceptually distinguish between hands and mere hallucinations of hands only if the referent of “hand” obeys Mind-independence.

• (P2b) We can conceptually distinguish between hands and mere hallucinations of hands.

Therefore,

• (P2c) The referent of “hand” obeys Mind-independence.

Given relatively innocuous assumptions about reference, (P2c) implies the semantic premise, that if one has two hands, then there are external things. Mutatis mutandis for other ordinary object concepts.

Unsurprisingly, then, Moore’s argument for the semantic premise draws on semantic intuitions about ordinary object terms. As we noted in the introduction, Moore spent most of his lecture on the semantic premise, with his defense of the epistemological premise, (P1), coming down to two key points. First, that one doesn’t need to prove “I have hands” to know it, and, second, that it would be “absurd” to deny that he knows it (see Moore 1939 [Reference Moore2013]: 146). The extant literature on Mooreanism defends the premise in other ways: by appeal to dogmatism (Pryor Reference Pryor2004), safety theories (Sosa Reference Sosa1999); (Pritchard Reference Pritchard2005), evidentialism (Steup Reference Steup2011), or disjunctivism (Pritchard Reference Pritchard2012). Fortunately, the ecumenical view doesn’t require us to disagree with Moore or Mooreans here. As we see it, we can have justification to believe “here are two hands.”Footnote ¹⁵ And while some philosophers have taken issue with Moore’s conception of proof (De Reference De2020), as well as its rational persuasiveness, granting that it is a proof (Pryor Reference Pryor2004), our issue lies exclusively with the semantic premise. Metaphysical ecumenicalists seek to preserve the rationality and truth of our ordinary beliefs, “I have two hands,” “there are chairs,” and the like without metaphysical sectarianism.Footnote ¹⁶

As a final issue, one might ask whether Moore is really allied to a “materialist” view of ordinary objects, on which ordinary material objects are mind-independent. Materialism doesn’t say simply that ordinary objects have spatial location, but that such spatially located things are mind-independent. This caveat is important. Berkeley, after all, never denied that ordinary objects exist in space, but he did deny that they are mind-independent. He called that combination “materialism” about ordinary objects.Footnote ¹⁷ A more ecumenical view about ordinary objects would say that even if they are mind-independent – they aren’t logically entailed by our mental states – they might nevertheless lack material substance; they might be functional kinds, digital, or some hitherto unknown kind of stuff.Footnote ¹⁸

There are textual hints that Moore allies himself to materialism about ordinary objects. This doesn’t mean that he accepted metaphysical materialism, the thesis that all objects are physical or material, only the restricted view that ordinary objects – tables, chairs, plants, animals – are mind-independent bodies that exist in space. In his Replies, Moore tells us that it “seems quite obvious to me that we so use “I hear a rat,” that at least part of what we mean by this is that we are hearing a physical sound” (Moore Reference Moore and Schilpp1968, 645). Moore’s emphasis on the physicality of the object is important. It suggests that assuming rats are a kind of ordinary object – that his view here is meant to generalize – that he thinks it’s part of what an ordinary object term means that it is a physical thing. And given what he argued in “Proof of an External World,” physical things are necessarily mind-independent.

Moreover, in his reply to John Wisdom, Moore clarifies that “some philosophers have used ‘material thing’ in such a sense that from ‘There are no material things’ there does follow ‘There are no human hands’; and it was only this usage of ‘There are no material things’ that I meant to say the proposition then expressed by these words can be proved false in the way I gave [in Proof of an External World]” (Moore Reference Moore and Schilpp1968, 670). Hence, Moore seems to have in mind a materialism about ordinary objects (so understood) in mind in “Proof of an External World.”

Moore also addresses the point, apparently made by Wittgenstein, that no philosopher who denied the existence of matter or physical things ever meant to deny the existence of ordinary objects (like pants or hands). Moore’s response is telling. He says, “I think the statement is simply false”; that “they have meant to assert that no such proposition as that pants exist is true” (ibid). This is some further evidence that Moore accepts materialism about ordinary objects, as we understand it.

3.1. Usage

The first argument against the semantic premise turns on how the term “hands” is used by several authors. As we hope to show in more detail below, Moore’s argument for the semantic premise requires his sectarian understanding. A consequence of this is that Moore must say that any use of the word “hands” invoking a non-materialist metaphysics is false, or the usage must be understood in some non-literal fashion. Our argument is that this is at odds with how the term is often used. (Below we will suggest a weaker version of this conclusion that also undermines the semantic premise). By “non-materialist” we mean one which denies one or both of that ordinary objects are physical and mind-independent.

Consider that Berkeley appears to use the word “hands” at variance with Moore’s preferred understanding:

If Moore is correct that part of the meaning of the word “hands” is that they are material, then Berkeley has said something that is analytically false. It would be akin to Berkeley saying “I do not deny the existence of bachelors, I merely deny that they are unmarried.” If Moore is right, it is a wonder that Berkeley is not taken to task for being mistaken about the meaning of “hands” and other ordinary terms.

Consider also Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, when Scrooge asks: “I am in the presence of the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come?” The Spirit answered not, but pointed onward with its hand.”Footnote ²⁰ Again, if Moore is correct, it seems that Dickens has written a statement that is analytically false. Similar sorts of things might be said about how to refer to the prehensile appendages of the characters in the Matrix movies by the Wachowski sisters. (We will discuss this possibility in more detail below.)

A more recent example comes from an interview with Mark Zuckerberg who freely used “hands” and “his hands” to talk about his hands qua avatar in the metaverse.Footnote ²¹ Here, if we interpret Zuckerberg as employing a materialist sectarian understanding of “hands,” his sentence “I was waving my hands” is false. It forces the listener to reinterpret Zuckerberg so that what he meant was his avatar’s hand-like appendages. If, however, we interpret Zuckerberg as employing an ecumenical understanding of “hands,” he was speaking literally (and truly). The context provided the listener with knowledge – the knowledge of which kind of hands Zuckerberg was referring to – so that no reinterpretation of Zuckerberg is necessary. In turn, it’s not necessary to ascribe analytic error either, nor a metaphorical use of the term.Footnote ²² A similar point applies to the examples from Berkeley, Dickens, and the Wachowski sisters.Footnote ²³

3.2. The metaphysical Big Reveal

Our second argument considers how speakers might react if they discovered that materialism about ordinary objects, the idea that ordinary objects are material or physical – where this implies being spatial and mind-independent – is wrong. Consider:

We imagine that no one will be tempted by the lawyers’ argument. We analyze its failure in terms of the implausibility of the assumption that the Big Reveal shows that people never had hands. Rather, it seems a more plausible reaction is that people learned that their hands were made of immaterial stuff all along. In other words, the Big Reveal doesn’t reveal that people had false beliefs that they had hands, but that they had false beliefs about the composition of their hands.

Of course, this use of “hands” is incompatible with Moore’s proffered sectarian understanding of the term.

3.3. Neo’s hands

Our third argument is similar to the second, except that it asks what we might say when there are multiple (putative) candidates for the word “hands.” This line of thought is helped by the thought that the belief that macroscopic material objects are the typical cause of our sense experience is defeasible. Movies like The 13 ^th Floor and The Matrix are premised on this: viewers are led to see how the protagonists might come to the revelation that they live in a virtual world. Consider then the plight of Neo: the protagonist in the Matrix movies series. Neo was immersed in a virtual reality (“The Matrix”) for the first 35 or so years of his life, before being freed by those who would become his co-conspirators. In the movie, most humans are plugged into the Matrix for their whole lives, unaware that their bodies exist outside the Matrix in pods designed to support the biological functions of the body. Now think about Neo before he escaped from the Matrix. How many hands does he have while he is plugged into the Matrix? Here are three different answers:

1. (I) Neo has two hands – the two hands attached to his physical body in the pod. Yes, it is true that Neo has never seen or used these hands, but this just shows that one can have hands and not know much about them. The Matrix is entirely virtual, so there are no body parts in the Matrix, including hands. Body parts are essentially comprised of material stuff.

2. (II) Neo has four hands – the two hands he uses in the Matrix, and two hands attached to his physical body in the pod. Yes, Neo knows only of the two hands he has in the Matrix, but he’ll soon learn that he has two more hands.

3. (III) Neo has two hands – the two hands he uses in the Matrix. Yes, it is true that his brain is part of a material body in the pod, and the body in the pod has two hands. But Neo has never seen nor used these hands.

To understand three possible answers, it will help to introduce some distinctions:

• M: “Hands” refers to the prehensile part of the upper limb of humans and other species, and “hands” refers to material objects that obey Mind-independence. (Hereafter “mhands.”)

• V: “Hands” refers to the prehensile part of the upper limb of humans and other species, and “hands” refers to virtual objects. (Hereafter “vhands.”)

Both mhands are vhands are sectarian understandings of the term “hands” in the sense that the terms are semantically embellished by a particular metaphysics. This is in contrast with the aforementioned ecumenical understanding of “hands” that is not essentially linked to a particular metaphysics:

• E: “Hands” refers to the prehensile part of the upper limb of humans and other species, and “hands” refers to objects that may or may not be material, or virtual, or immaterial, etc. (Hereafter “ehands.”)

So, answering (I) appears to require “hands” is understood as mhands, answering (II) appears to require “hands” is understood as ehands, and answering (III) appears to require understanding “hands” as vhands. It is clear that the premises of Moore’s argument require that (I) is true, that is, that “hands” is understood as mhands; otherwise, his argument is invalid. (More on this below.)

Over the last several years we asked people which of the three answers they find most compelling. Among several hundred non-philosophers (this group includes philosophy students, family, and friends), (II) and (III) are roughly equal in popularity, with very little support for (I) in this group. Among the small group of philosophers (fewer than 20) asked, all three options had about equal support among our limited survey group. Here, semantic intuitions clearly vary.

Our informal data strongly suggests that “hands” is not used univocally. We conjecture that the same non-univocal results would be found if these scenarios were subject to empirically rigorous testing. Thus, we allow that if such testing was undertaken by psychologists, linguists, or x-phi philosophers, we would have much stronger evidence about how “the folk” and how philosophers understand the meaning of “hands.” Furthermore, we allow that this testing might reveal that our hypothesis about how subjects use the term “hands” might be disconfirmed. In other words, we are “mere” theoreticians: we leave it to experimentalists to subject this claim to more rigorous testing. This sort of division of labor is common in some areas of inquiry, for example, theoretical physicists make conjectures, and experimental physicists confirm or infirm the conjectures. Still, we think it is highly unlikely that such investigations will favor Moore’s view, and as we argue below, linguistic tests for presupposition and entailment strongly support our verdict.

As noted above, if Moore’s argument is valid, then it must be the case that (I) offers the correct answer, so it seems that Moore will have to admit that there is a high error rate in the use of “hands.” We’ll discuss the relevance of this point below.

3.4. The “Yes, but”-test

The final argument against Moore’s semantic premise leverages a standard way of testing for lexical entailment and presupposition employed by linguists: the “Yes, but”-test (henceforth YBT) (Reference Cummins, Kastos, Chelma, Homer and WintersteinCummins and Kastos 2012; Amaral & Cummins Reference Amaral, Cummins and Schwarz2015; Schwarz Reference Schwarz2016). Speakers consider a question–answer pair, with the answer both affirming and denying what the question expresses (or some related content to be tested). Here’s the basic idea:

The answer is clearly infelicitous. The basic idea is that the “yes” response commits the speaker to all of the entailments of the question – that is, “yes” commits the speaker to “Samanya went to university” – so following this up with “but she didn’t go to university” is contradictory.

YBT distinguishes entailments from other types of inferred meaning, such as implicatures and pragmatic presupposition. For example, consider:

In this case, there is scalar implicature. After all, compare A with A_A “Yes, but she didn’t drink some of the beers – she drank them all!”. Notice that A_A is semantically permitted while A_N “Yes, but she didn’t drink any of the beers” is not.

Now consider a priori analytical entailments, like that bachelor entails being an unmarried man. The YBT predicts the correct verdicts about these kinds of entailments too:

A is clearly infelicitous. The YBT correctly predicts that “Darren is unmarried” is an entailment of “Darren is a bachelor.”

Indeed, the YBT gives us the correct prediction about “non-core” meaning because of contextual shifts as well. Certain phrases prime people to coerce a certain interpretation of an answer-sentence the concept is embedded within so that there’s no inconsistency between the question- and answer-sentence. This can happen, for example, because of shared information about the referent’s context. To see how this works, consider a situation in which Darren is married, and the best man among “stereotypical lads” at a bachelor party:

• Bachelor Party:

  • Q: Is Darren a bachelor?

  • A: No, but he is for the weekend.

This is not infelicitous. Phrases like “… for the weekend” coerce semantic selection, so that the relevant term is interpreted with its non-standard (i.e., non-core) meaning. In Bachelor Party, the key phrase “… for the weekend” enables a consistent interpretation of the answer-sentence even though flat denial contradicts the fact that the subject is a bachelor. The phenomenon is a general one, not specific to “bachelor.” The phrase “for the weekend” also coerces an interpretation of other question-terms, like:

• Accountant:

  • Q_a: Are you an accountant?

  • A_a: No, but I am for the weekend.

• Nurse:

  • Q_D: Are you a nurse?

  • A_D: No, but I am for the weekend.

Imagine that Darren is preparing his taxes over the weekend, or that he is nursing a family member who has a cold over the weekend. In these cases, we have consistent answer-sentences; crucially, absent the phrases, we wouldn’t.

We now want to test Moore’s view about “hands” and other ordinary object terms like “keys” or “house” using the YBT. Consider the following example:

To the question: “Do you have keys?” The answer is clearly “yes.” Now let’s add the following twist:

Now consider:

• Q: Do you have keys?

• A: ?Yes, but I’m a brain in a vat in a simulation.

There is no clear infelicity here, not like with:

• A1: #Yes, but I don’t have keys.

• A2: #Yes, but I don’t have anything which unlocks anything.

After all, one might assert A above “Yes, but I’m a brain-in-a-vat” all the while trying to open a door, rending the negative conjunct that follows difficult to understand. Infelicitous answers also permitted by our initial question Q include:

• A3: Yes, but they are not wholly metal.

• A4: Yes, but they are wholly plastic.

These are unusual, but not infelicitous. This gives us a clue with respect to their lexical semantics. The thought here is that, semantically, being <keys> allows them to be compositionally many different sorts of things: metal, plastic, wood, or even glass. This is what we referred to above as physical ecumenicalism. If, for example, the person wanted to get another set of keys, the fact that the new set is steel rather than, say, brass wouldn’t affect their status as keys. As the YBT suggests, the BIV answer-sentence doesn’t appear to contradict the question-sentence; it’s not like the relationship between Q-A1 and Q-A2. Compare these sentence pairs with others, like:

• Digital:

  • Q5: Do you have hands?

  • A5: Yes, but everything is digital.

  • A5!: Yes, in fact they’re completely digital.

• Immaterial:

  • Q6: Do you have hands?

  • A6: Yes, but everything is immaterial.

  • A6!: Yes, in fact they’re completely immaterial.

Here, we submit that there’s no infelicity. They are unconventional, but not contradictory; again, not at all like the other pairs. Two comments: first, we think that <hands> displays metaphysical ecumenicalism: that the concept displays a certain degree of tolerance with respect to metaphysical compositional variation. Physical hands, mind-dependent hands, indeed, Panpsychist hands-as-part-of-God are all hands. Finding out that your hands are, say, God-parts, or mind-dependent, doesn’t affect their status as hands. Put generally, many of our ordinary object concepts will predictably display a certain degree of metaphysical ecumenicalism.

The YBT arguments suggest that the metaphysical ecumenical understanding of “hands” is not revisionary; it is part of what we already mean. Importantly, we acknowledge that this is a (partly) empirical claim about how speakers use “hands” and allied terms, and so potentially vulnerable to empirical refutation. Of course, this is true of all empirical claims. Naturally, we expect any further investigation to corroborate the verdicts of YBT here, and welcome studies that include a more diverse pool of speakers. Also of interest would be cross-linguistic studies in the same way that cross-linguistic studies of “knowledge” in Gettier cases have proved interesting (Machery et al. Reference Machery, Stich, Rose, Chatterjee, Karasawa, Struchiner, Sirker, Usui and Hashimoto2017). Of special interest is cross-linguistic studies that look at how “hand” might be translated into languages used by those who hold non-materialistic views, for example, some subsets of Hinduism maintain a form of idealism somewhat akin to Berkeley’s, on which ordinary objects (among other things) are immaterial, mind-dependent things (Raju 2008 Reference Raju2013).

The strongest conclusion that might be drawn from these four arguments against the semantic premise is that people generally mean by “hands” ehands. This would have the implication that Moore (at best) employs a stipulative definition of “hands.” A weaker conclusion is that “hands” is ambiguous: it means mhands in some contexts and ehands in others. What fixes the reference might depend on a variety of contextual factors, like practical interests (imagine Moore is within the Matrix, and more interested in his vhands than mhands), or salient presupposition triggers (e.g., after an accident in which Moore loses his hands and gets a prosthetic – which needs replacing – in the sentence “Did you lose your hands again?”, “again” is a trigger for the speakers that “hand” refers to prosthetic non-biological hands). An even weaker conclusion is that Moore is correct about the proper usage of “hands,” but people very frequently use the term incorrectly to convey a different meaning. Obviously, it is not uncommon for people to use terms incorrectly. When someone says, “I literally died laughing,” it’s clear that charitably understood they’re using “literally” to mean something more akin to “metaphorically.” An uncharitable understanding of such an obvious misuse of the term is to wish what one said is literally true.

As we hope to show in the following section, each of these three conclusions is sufficient to challenge the cogency of Moore’s argument.

5.1. More empirical studies

It might be objected that more rigorous empirical studies are needed about the meaning and language users’ uptake of “hand” before we reject Moore’s semantic premise with full confidence.

We agree. One of the upshots of this paper is that establishing the semantic premise of the argument is far more difficult than it first appears, as much of the literature takes it for granted, which we have at least shown is controversial and shouldn’t be treated as non-negotiable.

What’s more, we have intimated several lines of systematic empirical evidence that might bear on its truth:

1. (i) In the first argument against the semantic premise, we offered some preliminary “field evidence” when we discussed how Dickens and Zuckerberg appear to use the word “hands” in a way that conflicts with Moore’s semantic premise. We imagine that empirical “field linguistics” might look more systematically at evidence using linguistic databases to see how non-philosophers use the word “hands.”

2. (ii) The last three of the four arguments against the semantic premise may lend themselves to laboratory testing. The arguments might be operationalized in a way that could yield more systematic empirical evidence to test the plausibility of More’s semantic premise. Linguists or psychologists are probably the best qualified to carry out such studies. As noted above, conducting such investigations on a culturally and linguistically diverse sample might yield interesting results.

While we agree that more empirical evidence would be necessary to reject the semantic premise with full confidence, we still hold that the preponderance of evidence at present supports leaning toward the rejection of the semantic premise. Our credences should side against it.

Suppose those sympathetic to the “more empirical evidence” objection dig in here and say that more systematic evidence is required before we would be in a position to even lean toward the rejection of the semantic premise. At least for the sake of the dialectic, we can concede the point so long as the same high evidential standards are consistently maintained. In particular, absent the aforementioned systematic empirical studies, a consistent application of these high evidential standards requires not accepting Moore’s semantic premise. That is, these high evidential standards imply suspending judgment on Moore’s semantic premise without the relevant systematic empirical studies to move the evidential dials.

Of course, such a stance directly conflicts with Moore’s claim that we are in a position to know the premises of the argument. And so, the objection is not friendly to Moore’s proof: yes, it undermines our claim that the preponderance of evidence supports leaning against the truth of the semantic premise, but at the cost of undermining Moore’s proof anyway.

5.2. Stipulation

It might be thought that this entire discussion could be circumvented if Moore simply stipulated that what he means by “hands” is mhands. So stipulated, it doesn’t matter what folks think about the semantics of “hands.” In other words, the objection on Moore’s behalf is that he is attempting to make precise a polysemous term. Thus, in one fell swoop the objection does away with the problems suggested by (B), (C), and (D).

We have no objection to Moore (or Mooreans) stipulating in this way. And we allow that the canonical presentation of the argument is best stipulated to be the (A)-interpretation. The question is whether doing so will weaken the dialectical strength of his argument, since it calls attention to the fact that there are different ways of describing what we see when Moore waves when he is demonstrating the truth of P1. Moore’s stipulation allows him to say that he sees mhands, but Berkeley might object, appealing to his own stipulative definition, that Moore is waving ihands.

Similarly, those who favor the virtual world hypothesis using the stipulation tactic can say that they see vhands, and those who prefer to stay away from sectarianism say that they see ehands. The problem then is that opting for a stipulative definition opens the floodgates to many possible proofs of differing sectarian metaphysics and ecumenical metaphysics. Thus, this line of objection leads to what has been described in the literature as the “problem of too many proofs” (Walker Reference Walker2020).

5.3. Common sense epistemology

Common sense philosophers argue that common sense has a distinctive epistemic standing. For example, Lemos (Reference Lemos2004) thinks that if a philosophical theory is inconsistent with common sense, that’s some reason to reject the theory. (Kelly Reference Kelly2005) says something similar: “there are very substantial limits on how radical a change in our views philosophy might legitimately inspire” (Kelly Reference Kelly2005, 181). Soames (Reference Soames2003) argues that common sense is the proper starting point for philosophical inquiry; that common sense lacks “the sorts of claims that can be overturned by philosophical argument” (Soames Reference Soames2003, 5). So, one might worry that our criticisms are incompatible with common sense, and given that our argument is incompatible with common sense, our argument must be unsound.

This is not the place to delve into metaphilosophical issues like the epistemological status of common sense. One such issue that would have to be addressed is the status of sectarian appeals to metaphysics. In particular, an appeal to common sense will have to address the fact that other cultures appear to have very different sectarian views about metaphysics.

For example, it’s not common to all cultures to think of tables or even one’s body as external in Moore’s sense. Raju argues that “Idealism is the dominant philosophy of India,” and, indeed, is embedded within the religious traditions of East Asia (Raju (Reference Raju1953), 212). Other cultures have views that look closer to panpsychism, and so on (Povinelli Reference Povinelli1995). We do not need to settle any of this to note that if this line of objection is to go through, it must be the case that some very substantive notion of common sense is appealed to – one that makes appeal to the sectarian metaphysics of materialism about ordinary objects and external world realism as the correct views.

But let us suppose that the appeal to this sort of very substantive notion of common sense is correct, and so the conclusion of Moore’s argument must be correct. Still, we believe this is compatible with our main line of criticism. All that is required is that we reconstruct Moore’s argument as an enthymematic argument, where UP notes the unstated premise.

Enthymematic Version (EN)

• P1e. Here are two ehands.

• UP: Sectarian Common Sense Materialism (SCSM): things in our immediate environment that we normally see are material objects that obey Mind-Independence.

• P2’e. If here are two ehands, and SCSM is true, then there is an external world.

• Therefore

• C: There is an external world.

Notice that EN is consistent with Mooreans making an error about the meaning of “hands” and it permits the meaning of “hands” to take any number of different sectarian views about the metaphysics of composition. Mutatis mutandis for other, ordinary object terms that might be used in Moorean proofs. EN also explains the dissatisfaction with Moore’s argument in its canonical formulation: it is hard to see how the evidence for P1 – merely looking at Moore furiously waving his hands – could establish a metaphysically substantive and sectarian conclusion like C. The explanation implicit in EN is that SCSM is doing the heavy lifting in the argument. It explains why one might be more confident in the first epistemological premise (P1e) than in C. The reason is that, although the argument is valid, it is still possible that P1e is true while C is false. Thus, the common sense objection does not weaken our case.

Finally, we note that what philosophers typically mean by “is inconsistent with common sense” is when a theory entails that “there are tables” or “I have hands” and the like are false or unjustified (see, e.g., Merricks forthcoming). Revisionary metaphysics is characteristically metaphysics inconsistent with “common sense” in that sense. Fortunately, our view lacks those revisionary implications. The ecumenical view permits that “I have hands” can be true – crucially, part of the furniture of reality – and justifiably believed.Footnote ^{24 ,} Footnote ²⁵