ABSTRACT Looking at the terrain of those in the idealist world with an active mind, we un derstand that the word

idealism has got both ordinary language and philosophical meaning. On ordinary language, idealism has to do with one who accepts and live s by lofty moral, aesthetic, and religious standard whereas philosophical meanin g projects idealism as the view which asserts that reality consists of ideas, th ought, minds, or selves rather than material object and forces. It is this secon d sense that we are to take into cognizance as we engage in our discussion. Idea lists are willing to let the physical scientists tell us what matter is, provide d they do not attempt to reduce everything in the world to that category. The ce ntral principle of idealism is organic wholeness. The adherents see an inner uni ty, an unfolding series of levels from matter through vegetable forms through an imals to man, and spirit. The idealists tend to emphasize the coherence or consi stency theory of the test of truth- a judgement is believed to be true if it is in agreement with other judgements that accepted as true. Several of Moore's ess ays, including The Refutation of Idealism (1903), contributed to developments in m odern philosophical realism. An empiricist in his approach to knowledge, he did not identify experience with sense experience, and he avoided the scepticism tha t often accompanies empiricism. He came to the defense of the commonsense point of view which suggests that experience results in knowledge of an external world independent of the mind. Moore could therefore be regarded as an arch-rival of the adherents of idealism as he stands to refute their view, meanwhile, his own view is not also error immune hence, he deserve also some chunks of criticisms as well. 1. CRITIQUE OF G.E MOORES REFUTATION OF IDEALISM What we tag the analytic tradition in England climaxed with the rejection of the British and German Idealist tradition by George Edward Moore (1873-1958) and Be rtrand Russell (1872-1970) at Cambridge at the beginning of the Twentieth centur y. In their early philosophical development, both Moore and Russell went through idealist periods, heavily influenced by the dominant figure of F.H.Bradley, and to lesser extent by John Mc Taggart. Moore was the first to rebel, and was the catalyst for Russells own rejection of Idealism. What are they reacting to begs t he question, meanwhile, for us to know what they were reacting to we have to br iefly rehearse and in a very broad outline the development of idealist position up to the end of the 19th century. Space may not permit us to make elaborate e xposition rather we paint the background in broad strokes hence, I will only ske tch the main outlines of the position-just to indicate what the position is and by what main stages it was arrived at. Before we delve into analysis, let us briefly review Kants rejection of empiricis m. Immanuel Kant divided the modern period into two, the other being, of course, rationalism. The major rationalists of the modern period are Descartes, Spinoza , and Leibniz, and the major empiricists Locke, Berkley, and Hume. This taxonomy of the period is one that we owe to Kant himself, who thought of himself as in a certain way bringing the two traditions into harmony, showing the right place of both reason and experience in our knowledge of the world. The rationalists we re said to emphasize the importance of pure reason as a source of knowledge, and the empiricists to emphasize the importance of experience as a source of knowle dge. Now there is secondary emphasis in the empiricist thought that plays an imp ortant role in understanding the development of the idealist tradition, and one that plays a major in Kants thinking, which is that experience is not only a sour ce of knowledge, but is the source of knowledge of what ideas and concepts we ha ve, that is to say the origin of the conceptual framework which we bring to bear on the world around us when we think about it. This no doubt was confusion in e mpiricist thought. By and large, Kant employs this legitimate insight to try to respond to the skeptical problems which philosophers seems to have left with by a rigorous working out empiricist principles, both skepticism about the existenc e of a spatial world and skepticism about our knowledge of any facts which we ar e not presently in a position to observe that is scepticism about induction . A lso germane here is that the aspect Moore set out to refute is the claim of the idealists that esse is Percepi to be is to be perceived. We beg to stop here beari

ng in mind that the above is enough to carry us along in our discussion. At this crucial stage, it would be intellectually wise and practically useful if we briefly analyze Moores refutation of idealism. Moore s most famous criticisms of idealism are contained in his paper The Refutation of Idealism, (1903). The ba sic theme of this paper is the extension to sense-experience of the strong disti nction between the mind and its objects which we have encountered in connection with meaning. Moore concentrates here on the case of a sensation of blue and maint ains that this experience is a kind of diaphanous consciousness or awareness of bl ue, which is not a content of experience at all, but something real whose existenc e is not dependent on experience. His argument here is in part phenomenological: when we try to introspect the sensation of blue, all we can see is the blue but h e also argues that to suppose otherwise, that the blue is merely a content of the experience is to suppose that it is a quality of the experience, so that the exp erience is blue in much the way in which a blue bead is blue, which he takes to be absurd A critical look at the above analysis by Moore would unveil myriads of difficult ies. What is, nonetheless, odd about Moore s paper is that he makes no attempt t o address the famous argument from illusion. Moore concludes that blue is as much an object, and as little a mere content, of my experience, when I experience it, as the most exalted and independent real thing of which I am ever aware As he was s oon to realize, more needs to be said to handle cases in which something which i s not in fact blue looks blue. It turns out that Moores argumentative aims are ev en more circumscribed than he at first lets on for he did not argue on a key ass umption in his refutation- a sharp distinction between consciousness and its obj ects and argued explicitly against the idealists believe that esse is percipi. C ontinuing to develop his realistic convictions, Moore argued in "A Defense of Co mmon Sense" We can remark that Moore seems to have overlooked an option, that is that esse is percipi is analytic, although not because esse is to analyzed as X and percipi bu t because of deep connection between being and being perceived. Just as to be a number is to have a successor or to be extended is to be spatially located is ana lytic, but not because on analysis it is of the form to be X and to be perceived is to be perceived. Ina similar fashion, while there may be something wrong with saying there are tw o distinct things and there are not, it is not clear what argument Moore has adv anced against internal relations as such, which would be all that would be neede d to assert. I think the driving force of Moores objection to the idealists posit ion emerges only after this point, when he turns to identify a belief that the i dealists would not suppose that an experience and their object were inseparable. Lets closely examine this, Moore asserts, to say that blue is identical with th e sensation of blue must be contradictory, because there are only two analyses o f what the sensation of blue is. 1. It is a consciousness alone 2. It is the con sciousness plus blue. If the former, then it is not blue, and if the latter, sin ce part cannot be identical with the whole, it is blue. This of course, is a puz zling argument. Two things are going on here. First, Moore is taking the of in sen sation of blue to express a relation. If that is the case then there have been tw o things sensation, and the thing it is related to, its object which is apparent ly blue. Secondly, what is going on here is a consequent of the first, he treats blue as denoting an object. Moores treatment of of here as a signifying a two term relation is the key to understanding the genesis of sense data theory and the r ealism about the objects of judgemets which was characteristic of the early Moor e and Russell. Equally important, Moores argument in Refutation of idealism is a strange mixture o f clarity and confusion, insight and obtuseness. How? To illustrate, the grammat ical role of of in sensation of blue it does not express a relation. The term sensat ion is generic term for a type of mental state or event. The work of blue therefo re is to tell us what particular type of sensation it is. Put differently, intro ducing the terminology of determinable and determinates appears consequential he re. A determinable is a property that comes in a variety of particular sorts. Th e paradigm of determinable is being coloured. Anything that is coloured is one p

articular colour, but can be any of an indefinitely large number of colours. The particular definite colours a thing can be are determinate properties relative to the property of being coloured. In similar vein, being a sensation is a deter minable relative to being a sensation of x. every sensation is a particular kind of sensation; what we plug in for x tells what kind the particular sensation is. After reading with an active mind one can understand why the later Wittgenstein came to believe that all philosophical problems were the result of misunderstan ding of logical grammar of language. To sum up, the error Moore fell into is in way the same error that he accuses the idealist of falling into, that is, mistak ing the grammatical role of of in sensation of blue . Further again, Moore s arguments are generally inconclusive. And they do illustr ate the importance for him of careful examination of the meanings of words, in b oth their ordinary and philosophical contexts though as a means of achieving c larification rather than to show that the relevant philosophical problems are in any way spurious. Nevertheless, for all their supposed simplicity his conclusio ns are not immune to criticism; and there are many assumptions and unanswered qu estions. This issue is particularly important: What is the basis or justificatio n for the distinction between the act of consciousness and its objects? In conclusion, this gross mistake of Moores is the fountainhead both of the reali st view of the objects of judgements, a view still represented in contemporary p hilosophy, and of that strange tradition of theorizing about sense data, in the refutation, Moore made attempt to introduce the issue of sense data- the relatio n between consciousness and other things. It is germane to point out the sense d ata in the sense we get from Moores discussion are mind independent entities- at least modally, that is, it is possible for whatever we are directly aware of in sense to exist independently of the minds. To wind up our discussion therefore, Moores claims in the last few pages of his article that the recognition that this type of awareness is the same as a kind of awareness we have of our awareness t hemselves shows why scepticism about things other than ourselves can succeed onl y at the cost of scepticism about our own minds. This is why Moore did feel the same need the idealists and Kant did to treat what we think and experience as co nstituted by the activity of our minds in order to secure the possibility of kno wledge of it. But it turns out that whatever we are related to in this way canno t, after all, be the objects of the common sense world, since it is impossible t o suffer an illusion when having a sensation of blue, or an experience as of a b rown cow. Thus, if we treat these objects as separate from ourselves, we cannot treat them as physical objects, like cows, since we can suffer a kind of error a bout physical objects we cannot suffer same about whatever are immediate objects of our awareness, and so these objects must be another kind of object-since the y are what we are immediately aware of in sensory experience, we can call them se nse data. By and large, Moore recognize quickly that the position at the end of The Refutation of Idealism was unsatisfactory, as made manifest in his 1905 work titl ed On the nature and reality of objects of perception although, that will not deny him a reputable title- giant among the 20th century thinkers. BIBLIOGRAPHY Klemke,. E. D. A Defense of Realism: Reflections on the Metaphysics of G. E. Mo ore (Humanity, 1999) {Order from Amazon.com} 10/6/2011. The Refutation of Idealism Mind 12 (1903) Reprinted in Philosophical Studies and in *G. E. Moore: Selected Writings23-44. Moore led the way; but I followed closely in his footsteps, My Philosophical Deve lopment .London: George Allen & Unwin 1959. P. A. Schilpp (ed.) The Philosophy of G. E. Moore Northwestern University Press, Evanston ILL: 1942. A. Ambrose and M. Lazerowitz (eds.) G. E. Moore: Essays in Retrospect Allen and Unwin, London: 1970. T. Baldwin G. E. Moore Routledge, London: 1990. Ludwig, Platomic Atomism> http://www.scribd.com/doc/40501998/Platonic-atomisim-a

nd-Moore-s-refutation-of-Idealism 10/6/2011. Ducasse, C.J. Moores The Refutation of Idealism. In The Philosophy of G.E. Moore, edi ted by Paul Arthur Schilpp, Menasha, Wisconsin: George Banta Publishing Company, 1942. Durrant,Michael. On Moores Refutation of Esse is Percipi. Philosophical Investigati on 23,no.1(January 2000).