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- Xenophanes:

- [EvG, 1991-Watzlawick, p.19] "Zur Zeit des Protagoras hatte X. längst festgestellt, dass, selbst wenn es einem Menschen gelänge, sich die Welt so vorzustellen, wie sie ist, dieser Mensch die Übereinstimmung doch nicht erkennen könnte.... Diese Feststellung wurde zum Hauptargument der Skeptiker und ist heute ebenso unwiederlegbar wie damals,...

- [EvG, 1984-Watzlawick, p.25] "said that no human being has ever seen certain truth, nor will there ever be one who knows about the gods and the things of the world, 'for if he succeeds to the full in saying what is completely true, he himself is nevertheless unaware of it; opinion is fixed by fate upon all things'

- Berkeley: "We can only compare ideas with ideas"

- [EvG, 1984-Watzlawick, p.26] "By taking for granted that knowledge must reflect reality, traditional epistemology has created for itself a dilemma that was as inevitable as it was unsolvable.

If knowledge is to be a description or image of the world as such, we need a criterion that might enable us to judge when our descriptions or images are "right" or "true". Thus, with the scenario in which man is born into a ready-made independent world as a "discoverer" with the task of exploring and "knowing" that reality in the truest possible fashion, the path of skepticism is there from the outset. The notion of "appearance" and "semblance" that, according to Xenophanes, is attached to all human knowledge, was elaborated and applied above all to perception by Phyrro's school and, later, by Sextus Empiricus; and the unanswerable question as to whether, or to what extent, any picture our senses "convey" might correspond to the "objective" reality is still today the crux of the entire theory of knowledge. Sextus used, among other things, an apple as an example. To our senses it appears smooth, scented, sweet, and yellow, but it is far from self-evident that the real apple possesses these properties, just as it is not at all obvious that it does not possess other properties as well, properties that are simply not perceived by our senses.

The question is unanswerable because, no matter what we do, we can check our perceptions only by means of other perceptions, but never with the apple as it might be before we perceive it. "

- [EvG, (1977) 1988, p.136-137]: "What I read and understood for the first time was: 'In order to discover whether the picture is true or false we must compare it with reality. (Wittgenstein, 1933/1922, p.43).' How could one possibly carry out that comparision ? With that question, ... I found myself in the company of Sextus Empiricus, of Montaigne, Berkeley, and Vico - the company of all the courageous sceptics who throughout the history of this civilization have maintained that it is impossible to compare our image of reality with reality outside. It is impossible, because in order to check whether our representation is a 'true' picture of reality we should have to have access not only to our representation but also that outside reality before we get to know it. And because the only way in which we are supposed to get at reality is precisely the way we would like to check and verify, there is no possible escape from the dilemma."