More than 50 years ago Wilfrid Sellars challenged philosophers to explain how to reconcile the universe as we ordinarily experience it with what issues from the sciences, especially physics. In 1963’s Science, Perception, and Reality, he wrote:
The philosopher is confronted not by one complex many-dimensional picture, the unity of which, such as it is, he must come to appreciate; but by two pictures of essentially the same order of complexity, each of which purports to be a complete picture of man-in-the-world, and which, after separate scrutiny, he must fuse into one vision. Let me refer to these two perspectives, respectively, as the manifest and the scientific images of man-in-the-world.
Sellars’ exhortation echoes the physicist A. S. Eddington who, in his 1927 Gifford Lectures (subsequently published as The Nature of the Physical World, 1928) had spoken of setting out to write his lectures by drawing up two chairs to two tables.
Two tables! Yes; there are duplicates of every object about me – two tables, two chairs, two pens.
One of them has been familiar to me from earliest years. It is a commonplace object of that environment which I call the world. How shall I describe it? It has extension; it is comparatively permanent; it is coloured; above all it is substantial.
Table No. 2 is my scientific table. It is a more recent acquaintance and I do not feel so familiar with it. It does not belong to the world previously mentioned – that world which spontaneously appears around me when I open my eyes, though how much of it is objective and how much subjective I do not here consider. It is part of a world which in more devious ways has forced itself on my attention. My scientific table is mostly emptiness. Sparsely scattered in that emptiness are numerous electric charges rushing about with great speed; but their combined bulk amounts to less than a billionth of the bulk of the table itself.
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