One day in the middle of the 18th century, one of the greatest of all Englishmen, the writer Dr Samuel Johnson, was strolling in a churchyard with his friend James Boswell.As they walked, they were discussing a fashionable theory of the age, which held that there was no such thing as objective, material reality. Instead, there were only individual people’s subjective perceptions, which meant you could never be entirely certain whether something existed or not.The theory was obviously untrue, said Boswell, since we all know that other things exist. But, he added, it was ‘impossible to refute it’.
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