Dear Phil,

All of your analyses of perception are still of phenomenological reality.  No
matter what the stimuli or the perceptual equipment, we can't get outside of
ourselves to see if anything beyond our experience either matches our
perceptions is the cause of them.  The belief in the external world is
universal, but if we go after it to prove it either through direct experience
or any kind of experimentation, we are still stuck with phenomena.  However,
we need the explanatory hypothesis, since without it we are left with
unanswerable questions about our everyday experience.

Sylvia