sense datum

noun

1. 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.
2. Epistemology. datum ( def 3 ).

sense datum

noun

1. 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 inferred See also representationalism apriorism

Word History and Origins

Origin of sense datum¹

First recorded in 1920–25

Example Sentences

It’s not intrinsic to the sense data emanating from the world, so it’s not detectable in the world.

From 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.

From 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.

From 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.

From 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.

From Nautilus

In looking at a given thing and approaching it, one sense-datum will become several, and each of these will again divide.

From Project Gutenberg

By a sensation I mean the fact consisting in the subject's awareness of the sense-datum.

From Project Gutenberg

And the universal yellow is the predicate in such judgments as "this is yellow," where "this" is a particular sense-datum.

From Project Gutenberg

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.

From Project Gutenberg

The easiest relations to apprehend are those which hold between the different parts of a single complex sense-datum.

From Project Gutenberg