Examples
Bertrand Russell heard the sound of his knuckles rapping his writing table, felt the table's hardness and saw its apparent colour (which he knew 'really' to be the brown of wood) change significantly under shifting lighting conditions.
H. H. Price found that although he was able to doubt the presence of a tomato before him, he was unable to doubt the existence of his red, round and 'somewhat bulgy' sense-datum and his consciousness of this sense-datum.
When we twist a coin it 'appears' to us as elliptical. This elliptical 'appearance' cannot be identical with the coin (for the coin is perfectly round), and is therefore a sense datum, which somehow represents the round coin to us.
Consider a reflection which appears to us in a mirror. There is nothing corresponding to the reflection in the world external to the mind (for our reflection appears to us as the image of a human being apparently located inside a wall, or a wardrobe). The appearance is therefore a mental object, a sense datum.
Read more about this topic: Sense Data
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