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Tallis in Wonderland

Seeing & Believing

Raymond Tallis looks for the missing link between them.

Like many of the readers of this column (I guess), my first philosophical thoughts were provoked by questions about the nature of reality and its relationship to the way things appear to us in taken-for-granted everyday life. In my early teens, I was occasionally assailed by the queasy feeling that the phenomenal world – the world just as it appears to us to be – might be a highly structured hallucination: that I was dreaming what I otherwise thought I was experiencing. Although these traditional ‘Cartesian’ experiences were only momentary, they triggered an abiding interest in the philosophy of perception. Reading an excellent paper recently by San Francisco philosopher Kent Bach, ‘Searle against the world: how can experiences find their objects?’ (available at

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