The Attack on the Senses by Eddington's Two Tables

Eddington’s two tables paradox might be presented to your average philosophy 101 student as follows:

[the lecturer gestures to the table in front of him]. Before me sits two tables, you might think that there is only one table, but in reality there are two—the real table, made of atoms and molecules, and the fake table, which is created by your mind. You see this table as being brown, smooth, and wooden, but we know that in reality atoms and molecules are not brown, they are not smooth, they are not wooden—in fact, even the atoms may be broken down into still more fundamental particles, until we arrive at the fact that the table is actually just different vibrations of quantum energy. So you see, dear students, your senses cannot be trusted—they have deceived you.

This is one form of the fallacy of attacking the senses by their limitation—the claim is that because senses do not give you primaries, that because you have specific means of sensing and that those means are limited, that therefore the senses are invalid. That you perceive the table in some particular form does not invalidate sense perception—that you see it as brown, smooth, and wooden provides you with a great depth of information about its actual, real, attributes:

Those who condemn the senses on the grounds that sense qualities “are different from” the primaries that cause them (the “two tables” notion) are guilty of the same fallacy. They, too, demand that the primaries be given to man “pure,” i.e., in no sensory form. The view of perception that underlies this kind of demand is the “mirror theory.” The mirror theory holds that consciousness acts, or should act, as a luminous mirror (or diaphanous substance), reproducing external entities faithfully in its own inner world, untainted by any contribution from its organs of perception. This represents an attempt to rewrite the nature of consciousness. Consciousness is not a mirror or a transparent stuff or any kind of ethereal medium. It cannot be explicated by analogy to such physical objects; as we have seen, the concept is axiomatic and the faculty sui generis. Consciousness is not a faculty of reproduction, but of perception. Its function is not to create and then study an inner world that duplicates the outer world. Its function is directly to look outward, to perceive that which exists—and to do so by a certain means.

As to the claim that the racing particles, puffs, or whatever that make up tables do not “look like” the peaceful brown things on which we eat in daily life, this is the literal reverse of the truth. “Looks” means “appears to our visual sense.” The brown things are exactly what the puffs “look like.” There are not “two tables.” The brown things are a particular combination of the primary ingredients of reality; they are those ingredients as perceived by man.¹