  Setting aside any anti-skeptical intent therefore, what needs assessment is the metaphysical significance of Moore's proof, as a proof of an ‘external world’. Clearly, everything here depends on what is to count as ‘external’, in particular whether Moore's demonstration of the existence of his hands proves the existence of things that are in no way at all dependent upon experience or thought. It is, I think, obvious that it does not; for that issue is one which depends on broader philosophical questions about idealism which cannot possibly be settled that way. Moore's own distinction between questions of truth and questions of analysis should be introduced here. Moore's ‘proof’ demonstrates the ‘empirical’ truth of a simple truism, that he has hands; but it leaves entirely open the question of the analysis of this truism. Yet it is at the level of analysis that the ‘transcendental’ question of whether things such as hands are altogether independent of experience and thought is to be answered.