"Common sense says that chairs and tables exist independently of whether anyone happens to perceive them or not"
About this Quote
Broad’s line wears the plainest clothes in philosophy: chairs, tables, the whole clunky furniture of the world are still there when nobody’s looking. It’s a deliberately homely image, and that’s the point. By choosing domestic objects rather than atoms or galaxies, Broad recruits the reader’s everyday confidence as a rhetorical ally. “Common sense” isn’t just a premise here; it’s a pressure tactic. If you deny this, you’re not merely disagreeing with a theory, you’re flirting with a kind of intellectual perversity.
The intent is defensive and strategic. Broad is writing in the long shadow of British idealism and in active conversation with the early analytic project: take metaphysics seriously, but keep it tethered to what our practices presuppose. In the early 20th century, philosophers were still wrangling with Berkeleyan worries (to be is to be perceived), with sense-data theories that make perception look like a veil, and with the thought that “the world” might be a construction of mind. Broad’s move is to mark a default setting: realism as the position you must actively argue away from.
The subtext is a warning about philosophical overreach. He’s not claiming common sense is infallible; he’s claiming it has argumentative standing. Chairs and tables become the test case for whether a system is illuminating or merely ingenious. If your view can’t accommodate the stubborn continuity of ordinary objects, Broad implies, the problem may not be with the furniture. It may be with your theory’s appetite for paradox.
The intent is defensive and strategic. Broad is writing in the long shadow of British idealism and in active conversation with the early analytic project: take metaphysics seriously, but keep it tethered to what our practices presuppose. In the early 20th century, philosophers were still wrangling with Berkeleyan worries (to be is to be perceived), with sense-data theories that make perception look like a veil, and with the thought that “the world” might be a construction of mind. Broad’s move is to mark a default setting: realism as the position you must actively argue away from.
The subtext is a warning about philosophical overreach. He’s not claiming common sense is infallible; he’s claiming it has argumentative standing. Chairs and tables become the test case for whether a system is illuminating or merely ingenious. If your view can’t accommodate the stubborn continuity of ordinary objects, Broad implies, the problem may not be with the furniture. It may be with your theory’s appetite for paradox.
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| Topic | Truth |
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