Phenomenon.

In philosophy, the term “phenomenon” refers to what is sensible: the observable data of experience and what human beings can grasp with the five senses. It is counterbalanced by “noumenon,” variously interpreted as “concept” or “law,” in epistemology in the tradition of German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Simply put, epistemology is the branch of philosophy that deals with knowledge: what is known, what can be known, and how people come to know what they know. Concepts, which have been described as the patterns underlying sensory data, are arrived at after making inferences from aggregations of data. The natural law of gravity would be an example of a noumenon, while a quarter falling to the ground after being dropped would be an example of a correlated phenomenon. Kant drew a distinction between the unknowable objects-in-themselves that make up the world and people’s perceptions of those objects. He argued that a person’s interactions with the world are inevitably mediated by the formation of mental concepts of the world. According to Kant, the gap between reality as such and the mental experience of it is unbridgeable, although humanity’s faculty of reason provides a grappling hook. The phenomenal world is at the center of many debates in epistemology.