appearance, in philosophy, what seems to be (i.e., things as they are for human experience). The concept usually implies an opposition between the perception of a thing and its objective reality.
Numerous philosophical systems, in one way or another, have posited that the world as it appears is not the world of reality. The cosmologies that predominated in Asia Minor in the 6th century bce, for example, distinguished between sensible appearance and a reality accessible only to reason. Similarly, Plato identified appearance with opinion and reality with the truth. In the Advaita Vedanta school of Indian philosophy, particularly as expounded by Shankara, the finite phenomenal world is regarded as an illusory appearance (maya) of the one eternal unchanging reality (Brahman). In the modern West, Immanuel Kant created the term noumenon to signify unknowable reality, which he distinguished from phenomenon, the appearance of reality.
By contrast, for the empiricists, whose philosophical tradition extends back to the Sophists of ancient Greece, data apprehensible by the senses not only partake of the truth but constitute the sole measure by which the validity of any belief or concept may be judged.