sense datum

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noun

Also called sensum. Psychology. the basic unit of an experience resulting from the stimulation of a sense organ; a stimulus or an object of perception or sensation.

Epistemology. datum (def. 3).

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Origin of sense datum

First recorded in 1920–25

Words nearby sense datum

sensationalism, sensationalize, sensationism, sense, Sense and Sensibility, sense datum, senseful, sensei, senseless, sense organ, sense perception

Dictionary.com Unabridged Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023

How to use sense datum in a sentence

It’s not intrinsic to the sense data emanating from the world, so it’s not detectable in the world.
This is how your brain makes your mind|Lisa Feldman Barrett|August 25, 2021|MIT Technology Review
Your brain uses what you’ve seen, done, and learned in the past to explain sense data in the present, plan your next action, and predict what’s coming next.
This is how your brain makes your mind|Lisa Feldman Barrett|August 25, 2021|MIT Technology Review
A second ingredient of your experience is sense data from events inside your body, like the blood rushing through your veins and arteries, your lungs expanding and contracting, and your stomach gurgling.
This is how your brain makes your mind|Lisa Feldman Barrett|August 25, 2021|MIT Technology Review
Your brain compares the sense data coming in now with things you’ve sensed before in a similar situation where you had a similar goal.
This is how your brain makes your mind|Lisa Feldman Barrett|August 25, 2021|MIT Technology Review

In every moment, your brain makes meaning of the whirlwind of activity inside your body, just as it does with sense data from the outside world.
That Is Not How Your Brain Works - Issue 98: Mind|Lisa Feldman Barrett|March 3, 2021|Nautilus
In looking at a given thing and approaching it, one sense-datum will become several, and each of these will again divide.
Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays|Bertrand Russell
By a sensation I mean the fact consisting in the subject's awareness of the sense-datum.
Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays|Bertrand Russell
And the universal yellow is the predicate in such judgments as "this is yellow," where "this" is a particular sense-datum.
Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays|Bertrand Russell
And if the cat consists only of sense-data, it cannot be hungry, since no hunger but my own can be a sense-datum to me.
The Problems of Philosophy|Bertrand Russell
The easiest relations to apprehend are those which hold between the different parts of a single complex sense-datum.
The Problems of Philosophy|Bertrand Russell

British Dictionary definitions for sense datum

sense datum

noun

philosophy a sensation detached both from any information it may convey and from its putative source in the external world, such as the bare awareness of a red visual field. Sense data are held by some philosophers to be the immediate objects of experience providing certain knowledge from which knowledge of material objects is inferredSee also representationalism (def. 1), apriorism

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012