noun

• The doctrine that human knowledge is confined to or founded on the realities or appearances presented to the senses.

  ‘Edwards' occasionalism, idealism, and mental phenomenalism provide a philosophical interpretation of God's absolute sovereignty: God is the only real cause and the only true substance.’

  More example sentences

  • ‘The movement of Ayer's own thought has been from phenomenalism to what he describes in his latest treatment of the topic as ‘a sophisticated form of realism’.’
  • ‘This book, together with a paper entitled The Relation of Sense-Data to Physics published in the same year, represents an excursus by Russell into something like phenomenalism.’
  • ‘Thus phenomenalism sought to reduce all statements to statements about immediately perceived sense-data.’
  • ‘Similarly, the emphasis on the translation of concepts into measures is symptomatic of the principle of phenomenalism that is also a feature of positivism.’