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Representative Realism, Phenomenalism, and "Physical-Talk"

It has been over a month since my last post, and for this I apologize. I doubt if I will be posting any more frequently in the near future as I am getting married on August 2 and moving from Philadelphia to Los Angeles immediately after the honeymoon. I'm sure the Internet will get by just fine without me.

Right now, however, I do have a bit of time, and I want to discuss an argument for phenomenalism about the physical world. When I wrote a while back about the idealist strategy, I said that the second step was to "argue that our physical statements - both ordinary statements about physical objects and statements about the discipline of physics - are best construed as talking about perception." What I want to do here is to unpack this statement. First, let's examine what the argument is supposed to do, and then we'll look at the argument as it appears in a brief section of Berkeley's Three Dialogues.

This piece of the argument is a reductio against representative realism. The first step of the idealist strategy is supposed to eliminate direct realism (the view that the very same things we experience in sense perception exist mind-independently and are known by us directly). I will assume this has already been accomplished. This leaves representative realism, the view that our perception are representations of mind-independent reality.

There are effectively two flavors of representative realism, both of which are, I think, fairly popular among philosophers today. The first is causal representation, which claims that our mental states come to represent things in the world in virtue of having been caused by them. This view has been supported by Fred Dretske. It has some problems which many philosophers have tried to shore up by a variety of strategies. The most important problem for it is the possibility of misrepresentation - e.g., how can we mistake a cow for a horse (from a distance, in the dark) if horse-thoughts represent horses precisely because they are caused by horses (but this one was caused by a cow)? I will not dwell on this objection, but there is a vast literature on it.

The second flavor is primitive or mysterian representation. This view takes representation as a primitive -i.e. one of the fundamental concepts of the theory, which does not admit of further analysis. The main objections to this view have to do with (1) whether you can adequately define the formal properties of representation in a coherent fashion, and (2) whether representation makes a good primitive. The latter is probably the most important, but the question of what makes something a good or bad primitive is extremely complex.

For the idealist's purposes, what matters is that when I perceive a table, there are two things: the 'real' table, and my perception or representation of the table. These are not the same thing. This much is conceded by the representative realist. It is customary to refer to the mental tokening which represents the table as a 'table', after the way we discuss words in philosophy of language, but this is going to get really confusing in this particular argument, so from here on out I will use table_i to refer to mind-independent table objects, table_m to refer to mind-dependent table-representations, and 'table' to refer to the English word spelled t-a-b-l-e. (I'm not sure how much less confusing that will be, but I'm hoping it won't be too difficult to follow.)

Suppose the phenomenalist grants, for the sake of argument, that there is such a thing as a table_i and that, under ordinary circumstances, there is a one-to-one correlation between tables_i and tables_m. Now listen to Berkeley:

Ask the gardener, why he thinks yonder cherry-tree exists in the garden, and he shall tell you, because he sees and feels it; in a word, because he perceives it by his senses. Ask him, why he thinks an orange-tree not to be there, and he shall tell you, because he does not perceive it. What he perceives by sense, that he terms a real being, and saith it is, or exists; but that which is not perceivable, the same, he saith, hath no being. (Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous, 234)

The disagreement between the Hylas and Philonous at this point is that Hylas supposes that 'cherry-tree' refers to the cherry-tree_i, whereas Philonous believes it refers to the cherry-tree_m. The argument, in other words, is that representative realism provides a poor analysis of "physical-talk". By "physical-talk" I mean the ordinary statements of non-philosophers about physical things, whether in the context of physics or everyday life.

The realist needs to argue that 'table' refers to the table_i. Now, Berkeley's principal target is Locke, and this argument immediately overcomes Locke. Consider:

Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas; how comes it to be furnished? ... To this I answer, in one word, from experience ... Our observation employed either about external, sensible objects; or about the internal operations of our minds, perceived and reflected on by ourselves, is that, which supplies our understandings with all the materials of thinking. (Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 2.1.2, emphasis original)

Locke isn't a representative realist. Rather, he holds a hybrid view according to which some properties ('primary qualities') are perceived directly and others ('secondary qualities') mediated by a representation. If direct realism falls (and we are assuming that it has already fallen), then no object can be both external and sensible, so Locke cannot claim that our "physical-talk" refers to external objects.

More recently the cause has been taken up by Kripke:

When I refer to heat, I refer not to an internal sensation that someone may have, but to an external phenomenon which we perceive through the sense of feeling; it produces a characteristic sensation which we call the sensation of heat. Heat is the motion of molecules. (Naming and Necessity, 129)

Now, recall that under Kripke's theory of reference, an object or natural kind is named by an initial 'baptism' in which someone points to it (literally or figuratively) and gives it a name. The name is subsequently passed on by the speaker community from one person to another. So, under Kripke's theory, how would 'heat' acquire the referent heat_i? Nobody can point to heat_i, because nobody perceives heat_i ("molecular motion"), we all perceive heat_m ("the sensation of heat"). Kripke says: "In the case of a natural phenomenon perceptible to the senses, the way the reference is picked out is simple: 'Heat = that which is sensed by sensation S'." (ibid. 136) This, however, is simply a statement, not an argument. To say "that which is sensed by sensation S" is the same as to say "that which is represented by sensation S".

The phenomenalist wants to argue that this is not a good analysis of 'heat'. Heat_i isn't a sensation. It can't be felt. If you ask the gardener to define 'cherry tree', he will describe a cherry tree_m: something that is seen, felt, smelled, etc. If you ask an ordinary person to define 'table', she will describe something that looks and feels (and therefore is) flat, that you can set objects on, etc. No one who has not been reading Aristotle, Locke, and friends will say anything about a "material substratum." No one will say "the object that causes my table perceptions." The table doesn't cause something to feel flat, the table itself feels flat.

Physicalists tend to be very adamant about believing only in the objects of their senses, but then begin describing things that can't be sensed at all, and claiming that those are the objects of their senses. If the phenomenalist can make this case that physical-talk is best understood as referring to objects_m, then matter will be superfluous to metaphysical explanations of the world we experience. Furthermore, if Kripke's "pass-through" reference fails, then his theory will make it impossible to refer to objects_i, for the same reason it is impossible for Putnam's brains in vats to wonder whether they are brains in vats.

Language and the Metaphysics of the Material World

Let me begin with a reminder: be sure to get your posts in for the 67th Philosophers' Carnival by tomorrow (Saturday) midnight (Eastern time), and remember that the theme is idealism. I've received many good posts already (probably more than I'll be able to include), but only a handful are idealism-themed. Having said that, let me begin my own idealism-themed post.

In my paper "The Semantics of Sense Perception in Berkeley" (which I never tire of linking to, because it is much better thought out, developed, and argued than the mostly half-baked stuff I post on this blog), I spend a considerable space of time discussing the question of where to locate the semantic content in Berkeley's "universal language of the Author of Nature." The problem which I try to address there is that virtually all of the things that look based on the broad outlines of Berkeley's theory as if they might be semantic relations are explicitly asserted to be syntactic* relations if one closely examines the particular texts where Berkeley discusses the structure of the language. In this post, I want to discuss the structure of the language (its "grammar" in the broadest possible sense) and the possible correspondence between problems in linguistics and problems in the metaphysics of the material world (and philosophy of science). This isn't necessarily a tight interpretation of Berkeley's text; rather, it is my reflection on how Berkeley's theory would work if true. I do think it is clear that the analogy (if it is merely an analogy and not, as Berkeley claims, an identity) between language and the phenomenal world is close enough for linguistic insights to be usefully applied to metaphysical problems (which would be a great thing, since linguistics is making a lot more progress than metaphysics). I've been thinking about writing this idea up in a paper, so I would very much like to get comments or criticisms on it. I will proceed by building language from the ground up, and in the process building up a picture of the structure of the phenomenal world.

Phonology = Theory of Properties

In linguistics, phonology is the study of the structure of the sounds of a language and the accompanying rules (e.g. the way sounds change when placed near other sounds). An individual sound is called a phone and groups of sounds which are not distinguished from one another within a given language are called phonemes. The analog to phonology in the material world is the theory of properties. In the language of sense perception, a particular sensible property (e.g. a particular shade of red) corresponds to a phone, and these group into phonemes which are ordinarily indistinguishable to us (but may be distinguishable if place side by side or examined with scientific instruments).

Morphology = Mereology

Morphology is the study of the internal structure of words. According to the most widely accepted (though there is still considerable controversy) theories of morphology, phonemes compose morphemes, which are the smallest meaningful bits of language. Morphemes are built into words, which are a little bit difficult to define, but are usually defined in terms of having their own accent. Finally, words compose lexemes which can be considered intuitively as dictionary entries. The analog to morphology in the metaphysics of the material world is mereology - the theory of parts and wholes. Properties are built up into specific object-appearances, which are built into objects. Note that we can now distinguish an object from an appearance of that object without sacrificing our phenomenalism. An object-appearance is like a word. Widely varying object-appearances can in certain circumstances be members of the same object, just as "am", "are", and "is" are all words belonging to the same lexeme, which we call "to be" (since in English we conventionally name verb lexemes by their infinitives). However, most cases do not vary so widely - consider "run", "run", "runs" for the same forms of the lexeme "to run". Similarly, under the most common circumstances appearances which are appearances of the same object will look similar and will vary according to well-specified rules (as you turn the object around or get nearer or farther from it, for instance), but there are some exceptions where the rules seem to break (for instance, the case Berkeley considers at length of a straight stick appearing bent when it is partially submerged in water).

Physics = Syntax

Finally, and perhaps most importantly (certainly this point is most important to Berkeley and many interpreters have seen this as the whole of the theory of sense perception as language), we come to syntax. Syntax governs the ways that words combine to form larger units - clauses, sentences, and paragraphs - and how these words are related to one another. The material world's analog to syntax is physics, which describes the rules by which individual objects combine to form a single coherent phenomenon deserving of the name "world."

I have not argued that this approach actually works, but I think that it is clear that there is at least some degree of analogy here. I hope to do future research into just how far the analogy can be carried, and whether it can perhaps be carried even to the point of identity, as Berkeley attempts to do.

*Berkeley's term is "grammatical;" see endnote 20 of the online version of my paper, which was deleted from the Religious Studies version due to space constraints.

Berkeley: Phenomenalist or Platonist?

Commentators have long recognized the existence of two distinct strains of thought in Berkeley's discussions of how our perceptions give rise to something that is properly called a world. According to the phenomenalist strain, the world is quite simply composed of perception and it becomes a world, rather than simply an unrelated collection of perceptions, by means of the orderliness with which God causes perceptions. According to the Platonist strain, the world (and each object in it) has an archetype in the divine mind and our perceptions are perceptions of the world because what we perceive is an "ectype" of that archetype. John Foster has argued that Berkeley is a reductive phenomenalist in the Treatise on the Principles of Human Knowledge, which he published in 1710, but that by the publication of the Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous in 1713 Berkeley has become a Platonist (The Case for Idealism, pp. 28-32). However, Berkeley cannot adopt the Platonist view so strictly as Foster tries to make him: to do so would undermine his refutation of skepticism. Berkeley needs to affirm that there is a sense in which our perceptions are the world so that we cannot be mistaken about it. Berkeley explicitly affirms this in Principles 87: "Colour, figure, motion, extension and the like, considered only as so many sensations in the mind, are perfectly known, there being nothing in them which is not perceived. But if they are looked on as notes or images, referred to things or archetypes existing without the mind, then are we involved all in scepticism." Furthermore, despite this statement, the language of archetypes as it is used in the Dialogues is also used in the Principles: "whoever shall reflect, and take care to understand what he says, will, if I mistake not, acknowledge that all sensible qualities are alike sensations, and alike real; that where the extension is, there is the colour too, to wit, in his mind, and that their archetypes can exist only in some other mind..." (99). Foster does point to Principles 48 as showing that the idea of archetypes in the divine mind is regarded as a possibility in the Principles, but he claims that "in the Principles, the role of God as a perceiver of physical objects is left as a mere possibility and on to which Berkeley seems to attach little importance ... But in his later work, the Three Dialogues, the preceptive role of God takes on a new significance." (p. 28) Be that as it may, the presence of the doctrine in the Principles would seem to be indicative that Berkeley does not regard the two models as mutually exclusive in the way that Foster does. Finally, in Dialogues 175ff. Berkeley argues again for his doctrine that the esse of physical things is percipi. So Foster's view must be rejected and we must find a way to reconcile the two views.

I have just finished reading "Berkeley's Christian Neoplatonism, Archetypes, and Divine Ideas" by Stephen H. Daniel (Journal of the History of Philosophy 39:2 (April 2001): 239-258). This paper is in part an attempt to reconcile these two seemingly opposing views.[1] Readers of this blog can probably predict what I am going to say the solution is. What is the solution to every problem in Berkeley's philosophy? Sense perception as language. Daniel gets to this by rather a roundabout path, investigating Gregory's and Berkeley's accounts of the Trinity and of human minds, but here is his ultimate conclusion:

To the extent that our ideas seem significant or intelligible to ourselves alone, they are ectypes: their existence consists simply in being perceived by a particular mind. An archetype is the meaning of that idea and all others like it as determined by their place in the sequence of ideas that inscribes history. A divine idea is God's active comprehension of a thing in an eternal communicative relation to all other things ... and, as such, identifies the mind of God as a matrix of discursive exchange. By learning the connections of ideas in history - that is, by "endeavoring to understand those signs instituted by the Author of Nature" (P[rinciples] 66) - we learn about ourselves and "the nature of things" (D[ialogues] 245). For all practical purposes, this amounts to nothing other than the contemplation of archetypes. Through such contemplation, we recognize oursleves not as substances distinct from God but as participants in the divine discourse. (p. 258)

I want to state the same thing a little differently: the world is a language. Words in a language have meaning independent of what each individual speaker hears or says or thinks, but not independent of what all individual speakers hear or say or think. The structure of a language - both in terms of syntax and in terms of morphology and lexicography - arises from the words and thoughts of individual speakers and is not anything over and above them in terms of existence. Nevertheless, we speak of a grammar and a lexicon for a language as some sort of abstract entities - like perfect "archetypes" of the language!

In the case of the divine language, God is privileged as a speaker. The rest of us "understand" and "speak" the language in more or less the way a domesticated dog "understands" and "speaks" English when it responds to what the humans around it say by, for instance, jumping up excitedly at the word "walk." Or perhaps a more apt comparison would be to a gorilla who can hear English and answer in American sign language. Whatever the case, it is clear that God is the author of the language, and thus creates the grammar and lexicon. As such, it is true both that the world simply is our perception of it and that it is the ectype of an archetype in the divine mind. As Daniel argues, this archetype is not found in God's passive perception - since God is not passive - but in his active will, his will to bring about the world. In this way, Berkeley is both a phenomenalist and a Platonist.



[1] Along the way the paper also argues that Berkeley holds a theory of mind modeled on Gregory of Nyssa's trinitarian theology and which eliminates the need for an immaterial substratum of mind distinct from volition and perception. Daniel finds support for this at Principles 98: "whoever shall go about to ... abstract the existence of a spirit from its cogitation, will, I believe, find it no easy task." I like this proposal since I am often not certain that I understand the meaning of the word "substance." However, I don't understand the proposal very well due to lack of familiarity with Gregory, and, in any case, I don't think it can be Berkeley's view, due to Dialogues 233-234.

Berkeley's Theory of Reference and the Critique of Matter

George Berkeley is well known for his critique of matter. By "matter" he means Locke's "material substratum." At the end of the Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous he actually does acknowledge that one might use the word "matter" simply to mean "the stuff of the physical world" (that's not a direct quote) and he doesn't object to this, so he actually isn't opposed to the way the word was used in your physics or chemistry classes, but only to the way it was used in early modern metaphysics.

The critique of matter is tied up in the critique of abstract ideas, and so Berkeley devotes the Introduction to the Treatise on the Principles of Human Knowledge to criticizing abstraction. The alleged faculty of abstraction is one by which we, by considering concrete ideas, are supposed to be able to frame clear and distinct ideas which are nevertheless underspecified. In a well-known passage, quoted several times by Berkeley, Locke writes: "does it not require some pains and skill to form the general idea of a triangle ... for it must be neither oblique, nor rectangle, nor neither equilateral, equicrural, nor scalenon; but all and none of these at once" (Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 4.7.9). This, Berkeley thinks, is nonsense. This alleged "idea" is full of contradictions, and we can form no such thing. Matter, or material substratum, he supposes, is just such a false "idea," as his spokesman, Philonous, points out in the Three Dialogues:

HYLAS. ... when I look on sensible things in another view, considering them as so many modes and qualities, I find it necessary to suppose a material substratum, without which they cannot be conceived to exist.
PHILONOUS. Material substratum call you it? Pray, by which of your senses came you acquainted with that being?
HYLAS. It is not itself sensible; its modes and qualities only being perceived by the senses.
PHILONOUS. I presume then, it was by reflexion and reason you obtained the idea of it.
HYLAS. I do not pretend to any proper positive idea of it. However I conclude it exists, because qualities cannot be conceived to exist without a support.
PHILONOUS. It seems then you have only a relative notion of it, or that you conceive it not otherwise than by conceiving the relation it bears to sensible qualities.
HYLAS. Right.
PHILONOUS. Be pleased therefore to let me know wherein that relation consists.
... [Hylas tries and fails to explain] ...
PHILONOUS. Pray, let me know any sense, literal or not literal, that you understand it in. - How long must I wait for an answer, Hylas?
HYLAS. I declare I know not what to say, I once thought I understood well enough what was meant by matter's supporting accidents. But now the more I think on it, the less can I comprehend it; in short, I find that I know nothing of it.
PHILONOUS. It seems then you have no idea at all, neither relative nor positive of matter; you know neither what it is in itself, nor what relation it bears to accidents.
HYLAS. I acknowledge it.
PHILONOUS. And yet you asserted, that you could not conceive how qualities or accidents should really exist, without conceiving at the same time a material support of them.
HYLAS. I did.
PHILONOUS. That is to say, when you conceive the real existence of qualities, you do withal conceive something which you cannot conceive. (pp. 197-199)

The substratum is supposed to be an idea of "material stuff" abstracted away from any particular qualities a particular object might have. Berkeley, however, does not believe that he or anyone else can frame such an idea. We are just playing with language here.

But wait! Elsewhere, Berkeley develops a sophisticated theory of reference that is supposed to give significance to all sorts of words that don't correspond to ideas! Here are selections from Alciphron 7.2, 4-7 (Berkeley's spokesman is Euphranor):

ALCIPHRON. ... Words are signs: they do or should stand for ideas; which so far as they suggest they are significant. But words that suggest no ideas are insignificant. He who annexeth a clear idea to every word he makes use of speaks sense; but where such ideas are wanting, the speaker utters nonsense. In order therefore to know whether any man's speech be senseless and insignificant, we have nothing to do but lay aside the words, and consider the ideas suggested by them.
...
Grace is the main point in the Christian dispensation; nothing is oftener mentioned or more considered throughout the New Testament; wherein it is represented as somewhat of a very particular kind, distinct from anything revealed to the Jews, or known by the light of nature ... Hence Christianity is styled the covenant or dispensation of grace ... What is the clear and distinct idea marked by the word grace? I presume a man may know the bare meaning of this term, without going into the depth of all those learned inquiries. This surely is an easy matter, provided there is an idea annexed to such term. And if there is not, it can be neither the subject of a rational dispute, nor the object of real faith ... Grace taken in the vulgar sense, either for beauty or favour, I can easily understand. But when it denotes an active, vital, ruling principle, influencing and operating on the mind of man, distinct from every natural power of motive, I profess myself altogether unable to understand it, or frame any distinct idea of it; and therefore I cannot assent to any proposition concerning it, nor consequently have any faith about it: and it is a self-evident truth, that God obligeth no man to impossibilities...

EUPHRANOR. ... Words, it is agreed, are signs: it may not therefore be amiss to examine the use of other signs, in order to know that of words. Counters, for instance, at a card-table are used, not for their own sake, but only as signs substituted for money, as words are for ideas. Say now, Alciphron, is it necessary every time these counters are used throughout the progress of a game, to frame an idea of the distinct sum or value that each represents?
ALCIPHRON. By no means: it is sufficient the players at first agree on their respective values, and at last substitute those values in their stead.
EUPHRANOR. And in casting up a sum, where the figures stand for pounds, shillings, and pence, do you think it necessary, throughout the whole progress of the operation, in each step to form ideas of pounds, shillings, and pence?
ALCIPHRON. I do not; it will suffice if in the conclusion those figures direct our actions with respect to things.
EUPHRANOR. From hence it seems to follow, that words may not be insignificant, although they should not, every time they are used, excite the ideas they signify in our minds; it being sufficient that we have it in our power to substitute things or ideas for their signs when there is occasion. It seems also to follow, that there may be another use of words besides that of marking and suggesting distinct ideas, to wit, the influencing our conduct and actions; which may be done either by forming rules for us to act by, or by raising certain passions, dispositions, and emotions in our minds. A discourse, therefore, that directs how to act or excites to the doing or forbearance of an action may, it seems, be useful and significant, although the words whereof it is composed should not bring each a distinct idea into our minds.
ALCIPHRON. It seems so.
EUPHRANOR. Pray tell me, Alciphron, is not an idea altogether inactive?
ALCIPHRON. It is.
EUPHRANOR. An agent therefore, an active mind, or spirit cannot be an idea, or like an idea. Whence it should seem to follow that those words which denote an active principle, soul, or spirit do not, in a strict and proper sense, stand for ideas. And yet they are not insignificant neither; since I understand what is signified by the term I, or myself, or know what it means, although it be no idea, nor like an idea, but that which thinks, and wills, and apprehends ideas, and operates about them. Certainly it must be allowed that we have some notion, that we understand or know what is meant by, the terms myself, will, memory, love, hate, and so forth; although to speak exactly, these words do not suggest so many distinct ideas.
ALCIPHRON. What would you infer from this?
EUPHRANOR. What hath been inferred already - that words may be significant, although they do not stand for ideas. The contrary whereof having been presumed seems to produce the doctrine of abstract ideas.
...
EUPHRANOR: ... But, to come to your own instance, let us examine what idea we can frame of force abstracted from body, motion, and outward sensible effects. For myself I do not find that I have or can have any such idea.
ALCIPHRON. Surely everyone knows what is meant by force.
EUPHRANOR. And yet I question whether everyone can form a distinct idea of force. Let me entreat you, Alciphron, be not amused by terms: lay aside the word force, and exclude very other thing from your thoughts, and then see what precise idea you have of force.
ALCIPHRON. Force is that in bodies which produces motion and other sensible effects.
EUPHRANOR. Is it then something distinct from those effects.
ALCIPHRON. It is.
EUPHRANOR. Be pleased now to exclude the consideration of its subject and effects, and contemplate force itself in its own precise idea.
ALCIPHRON. I profess I find it no such easy matter.
EUPHRANOR. Take your own advice, and shut your eyes to assist your meditation. Upon this, Alciphron, having closed his eyes and mused a few minutes, declared he could make nothing of it.
...
EUPHRANOR. But, notwithstanding all this, it is certain there are many speculations, reasoning, and disputes, refined subtleties and nice distinctions about this same force ... Upon the whole, therefore, may we not pronounce that - excluding body, time, space, motion, and all its sensible measures and effects - we shall find it as difficult to form an idea of force as of grace?
ALCIPHRON. I do not know what to think of it.

EUPHRANOR. And yet, I presume, you allow there are very evident propositions and theorems relating to force, which contain useful truths ... And if, by considering this doctrine of force, men arrive at the knowledge of many inventions in mechanics, and are taught to frame engines, by means of which things difficult and otherwise impossible may be performed ; and if the same doctrine which is so beneficial here below serveth also as a key to the celestial motions; shall we deny that it is of use, either in practice or speculation, because we have no distinct idea of force? Or that which we admit with regard to force, upon what pretence can we deny concerning grace?

Berkeley believes that the view of Alciphron, which is called "semantic atomism" is misconceived. When we hear words, we don't form ideas distinct from the words at every turn. Instead, as in solving a math problem, we manipulate words according to rules and don't necessarily stop to think about what it means until we get to the end. This parallel is made more explicit in sect. 14:

the algebraic mark, which denotes the root of a negative square, hath its use in logistic operations, although it be impossible to form an idea of any such quantity. And what is true of algebraic signs is also true of words or language, modern algebra being in fact a more short, apposite, and artificial sort of language, and it being possible to express by words at length, though less conveniently, all the steps of an algebraical process.

Some symbols may not correspond to anything at all, but gain meaning by being part of the system. The purpose of the system, as Berkeley remarks repeatedly in Alciphron 7, and also in the Introduction to the Principles, is not always the communication of propositional content, but can also involve inspiring emotion or action. For more on Berkeley's theory of reference, see Anthony Flew, "Was Berkeley a precursor of Wittgenstein?" in W. B. Todd, ed. Hume and the Enlightenment: Essays Presented to Ernest Campbell Mossner (reprinted in David Berman, ed. Alciphron in focus), and my "The Semantics of Sense Perception in Berkeley", under the heading "Berkeley's theory of reference."

So how does the critique of matter proceed? You may have noticed in the passage from the Three Dialogues that Philonous is careful to distinguish between a "positive idea" and a "relative notion." Positive ideas are the "distinct ideas" of the Alciphron. These are limited to what we can perceive or imagine. Relative notions are concepts like the imaginary number i. We don't have a "distinct idea" of i, but we have a theorem: i²=-1. This establishes a relation (hence "relative") between i and a real number, and thus allows us to apply the rules of algebra to get back to real numbers, which we understand. Berkeley believes that we can do this with words like "grace" and "force," but Hylas fails to do even this with "matter." A relative notion of matter actually might be something like "that which has mass and takes of space," which is what we learned in physics and chemistry classes, but this, according to Berkeley, is meaningful only because it actually relates to our perceptions. Therefore, such a definition does no good to someone arguing for a materialist metaphysics.

The Idealist Strategy

There is a particular strategy of argument generally employed by idealists in their arguments against materialism/physicalism/scientific realism and/or substance dualism. The strategy originates primarily with Berkeley. Some of the Parmenides fragments sound similar, but, absent context, it is not possible to determine exactly what he intended. Hume and Kant developed their metaphysical systems largely in response to it, and it is similar to the arguments of the so-called "modern Idealists" which Moore set out to refute. Finally, the strategy is, in recent literature, explicitly adopted in John Foster's The Case for Idealism, which I am currently reading. The strategy goes like this (note that I am not giving an argument, but an outline of an argumentative strategy):

1. Drive a wedge between perception and the underlying reality. This wedge must be sufficiently deep that it is no longer plausible to suppose that our assertions about the physical world could possible be describing both perception and underlying reality at once.


2. Argue that our physical statements - both ordinary statements about physical objects and statements about the discipline of physics - are best construed as talking about perception. Note that, given that this claim is part of the idealist's agenda, Moore's "two hands" argument - not to mention Samuel Johnson stomping on a stone or kicking his desk or whatever he did - is not an argument against idealism at all.


3. Argue (if this has not been established in step 1) that the underlying reality, while (presumably) responsible for the physical world and the orderliness of our perceptions, does not bear any resemblance to the physical world, or represent the physical world, or correspond to the physical world.

There have been a variety of takes on this strategy, but the strategy itself remains fairly constant, and is certainly held in common between Berkeley and Foster.

Though I find a lot of Foster's arguments problematic, his part 2, "the topic-neutrality thesis," is, I think, an excellent example of steps 1 and 2.

Quote of the Day: Schopenhauer on The History of Idealism

Now as, notwithstanding the transitory, isolated nature of our representations with respect to their immediate presence in our consciousness, the Subject nevertheless retains the representation of an all-comprehensive complex of reality, as described above, by means of the function of the Understanding; representations have, on the strength of this antithesis, been viewed, as something quite different when belonging to that complex than when considered with reference to their immediate presence in our consciousness ... This view of matter, which is the ordinary one, is known under the name Realism. On the appearance of modern philosophy, Idealism opposed itself to this Realism and has since been steadily gaining ground. Malebranche [Kenny's note: Malebranche was a Platonist, not an Idealist] and Berkeley were its earliest representatives, and Kant enhanced it to the power of Transcendental Idealism, by which the co-existence of the Empirical Reality of things with their Transcendental Ideality becomes conceivable ... But Realism quite overlooks the fact, that the so-called existence of these real things is absolutely nothing but their being represented (ein Vorgestellt-werden) ... The realist forgets that the Object ceases to be Object apart from its reference to the Subject, and that if we take away that reference, or think it away, we at once do away with all objective existence. Leibnitz [sic], while he clearly felt the Subject to be the necessary condition for the Object, was nevertheless unable to get rid of the thought that objects exist by themselves and independently of all reference whatsoever to the Subject, i.e. independently of being represented. He therefore assumed in the first place a world of objects exactly like the world of representations and running parallel with it, having no direct, but only an outward connection with it by means of a harmonia proestabilitia; - obviously the most superfluous thing possible ... When, however, he wanted to determine more closely the essence of these things existing objectively in themselves, he found himself obliged to declare the Objects in themselves to be Subjects (monades), and by doing so he furnished the most striking proof of the inability of our consciousness, in as far as it is merely cognitive, to find within the limits of the intellect - i.e. of the apparatus by means of which we represent the world - anything beyond Subject and Object; the representer and the represented.

    - Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, tr. Karl Hillebrand, sect. 19

Transubstantiation vs. Real Presence

The God Fearin' Fiddler has a post up on the historical significance of transubstantiation which has led to some interesting discussions. The principle problem with this post and the discussion that follows it, however, is that no one seems to understand the difference between transubstantiation and the Real Presence. Unfortunately, I'm not an expert on this either, but I do think I know enough to clear up some historical and metaphysical confusion. I am going to use two principal sources - session 13 of the Council of Trent, and the relevant article from the Catholic Encyclopedia - to explain the historical development and specific content of the doctrine of transubstantiation, and then attempt to show two things: (1) no such doctrine is affirmed by Ambrose in the passage the Fiddler likes to quote in this connection, and (2) it would be very difficult for Christians with strong Platonist leanings, such as Clement of Alexandria, Augustine, and most early Christian theologians, to even make sense of this doctrine, which renders it highly unlikely that they implicitly accepted it, or that they would have accepted it had it been explained to them.

Let us begin with an outline of the history. From the beginning, Christians used the words Christ himself used in describing the Eucharist. Christ himself said "this is my body" and "this is my blood." This is in essentially all of the records of the words of institution, including 1 Corinthians 11:23-29, the passage most churches read before serving the Eucharist. Christ also speaks this way in John 6, which is one of the most important texts on the theology of the Eucharist.

Now, all Christians, including even Zwingli, have used and still use this language in describing the Eucharist, so it is important to note that if Zwinglian or similar interpretations will work for the text of the New Testament, they will also work for most writers who merely adopt the New Testament's language and don't attempt to describe it in any more detail. Zwingli specifically argued for a symbolic interpretation by pointing out all the places in Scripture where "is" is used to mean "signifies." There appears to be a more or less uncontestable example of this even in the words of institution themselves, as they are recorded in Luke. Jesus says "this cup is the new covenant" (Luke 22:20, emphasis added), but the cup clearly isn't actually the new covenant (how could it be?). Rather, it is the sign and seal of the new covenant. I don't think that either Catholic and Orthodox believers, who like to interpret the words of institution literally, or fundamentalists, who like to interpret everything but the words of institution literally, would want to say that the cup literally is the new covenant.

I am not an expert on patristics (though I am working on it), but I suspect that most of the fathers, especially the earlier ones, simply used the same language as Christ and didn't provide or attempt to provide much further analysis. The question at issue here doesn't hinge on whether we affirm these words to be true. All Christians agree on that. We all agree that these words express some important truth; we don't agree about what truth they express. (Actually, there is some agreement, but there is a lot of disagreement about the details.)

That said, a case can probably be made that many of the fathers explicitly affirmed the doctrine of the Real Presence (certainly at least a few of them did), and that no writings survive from an otherwise orthodox writer in the early period of Christianity who denies this doctrine. The doctrine of the Real Presence is simply the claim that these words are to be interpreted literally: the bread is the body of Christ and the wine is the blood of Christ. In the Eastern Orthodox Church, any attempt at further analysis meets with suspicion. However, as we shall see, the Roman Catholic Church has not only given a metaphysical theory of this doctrine, but has elevated that theory to the status of dogma (that is, all members of the Church are in principle required to assent to it).

According to the Catholic Encyclopedia article, transubstantiation properly so-called (at least the details of the theory) is a uniquely Western doctrine. The word was first used by Hildebert of Tours around 1079. Note that this is contemporary with Anselm, the first of the Scholastics, but before the wide availability of the words of the Arab Muslim philosopher Ibn Rushd (aka Averroes) and through him the works of Aristotle in the West. This will become significant later.

Of course, the history of the word is not a history of the doctrine. I have already outlined the doctrine of the Real Presence (it really is that simple). The Catholic Encyclopedia states that "the Catholic doctrine of Transubstantiation sets up a mighty bulwark around the dogma of the Real Presence and constitutes in itself a distinct doctrinal article, which is not involved in that of the Real Presence, though the doctrine of the Real Presence is necessarily contained in that of Transubstantiation." So when did this distinct doctrine develop? Before or after the use of the word? Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find an answer to that question, and I don't know enough about Anselm and friends to know whether the philosophical commitments of the 11th and 12th century Western Christian philosophers and theologians left room for full transubstantiation. However, the Catholic Encyclopedia informs us that the word first entered Catholic dogmatic definitions at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, but the text of that council says only "[Christ's] body and blood are truly contained in the sacrament of the altar under the forms of bread and wine; the bread being changed [Lat. transsubstantiatio] by divine power into the body, and the wine into the blood, so that to realize the mystery of unity we may receive of Him what He has received of us." Here we do have the word "form" (presumably Latin "forma") which is often a synonym of "species", a Scholastic/Aritotelian technical term used in later discussions of the doctrine. Nevertheless, since outside the technical jargon of scholasticism, "forma" just means "shape" and "species" just means "appearance," in order to show that the Fourth Lateran Council actually affirms transubstantiation as we know it today, rather than just using the word, it would have to be shown that the word already had the present day meaning. On the other hand, the word itself would seem to have some Aristotelian baggage (I promise I'm about to explain all of this - I apologize if anyone has to read this long post twice due to my poor organization): the bread and wine are not trans-formed - they retain their original form. Rather they are trans-substanced. The form remains the same, but the substance changes. This is the essence (that's another loaded term in Aristotle/Aquinas talk) of the doctrine. So it is probably affirmed by the Fourth Lateran Council.

At any rate, it is quite clear in the Council of Trent in 1563. Here are some excerpts from the thirteenth session (translated by Philip Schaff):

Chapter I ... after the consecration of the bread and wine, our Lord Jesus Christ ... is truly, really, and substantially contained under the species of those sensible things ...

Chapter IV On Transubstantiation. And because that Christ, our Redeemer, declared that which he offered under the species of bread to be truly his own body, therefore has it ever been a firm belief in the Church of God, and this holy Synod doth now declare it anew, that by the consecration of the bread and of the wine, a conversion is made of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord, and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of his blood; which conversion is, by the holy Catholic Church, suitably and properly called transubstantiation.

The Canons anathematize anyone who disagrees with this (Canon II even anathematizes anyone who doesn't want to call it transubstantiation!), but don't really add anything.

Here is the metaphysical background: Aristotle was a proponent of what is called a "hylomorphic" metaphysics. That is, he affirmed that material objects were made up of "matter" (Gr. hylas) and "form" (Gr. morphos). There is a lot more complexity than this, but this is the basic idea. This is related to his distinction between "substance" or "essence" (Gr. ousia) and "accident" (I don't know the Greek word for this). The matter of an object is the stuff it's made out of, and it's form is its shape or organization. For the Scholastics, the Latin "species" seems to have been related to Aristotle's "form" but been more closely related to our cognition (the Catholic Encyclopedia article on this didn't make that much sense to me). Objects also have an essence, which is that in virtue of which it is the thing it is, and various accidents, or properties that could change without the object being destroyed. Often, the essence of an object is thought to be a collection of essential properties; thus I might be essentially human.

For the Scholastic/Aristotelian, the doctrine of transubstantiation is kind of weird, but no weirder than the Incarnation of the Trinity, and, more importantly, it is coherent. It is to be explained as follows: the substances or essences of the bread and wine are fully replaced by the substances or essences of the body and blood of Christ (I'm not sure if the matter is also replaced), but there is no change to the accidents, or to the form/species. Thus it still appears to be bread and wine, but it actually is the body and blood of Christ, since essence is what determines identity. Technically, the bread and wine are not changed into the body and blood, but replaced with the body and blood, since you can't change the essence of a thing and still have that same thing. Let me note that, while I'm not an expert on Aristotle, I suspect he would find it preposterous to claim that the essence of a material object could be replaced with another essence (and thus the material object be replaced with a different object) before our eyes without any perceptible difference in the matter before us.

Now we are going to examine Ambrose, and then the philosophical commitments of Augustine and his fellow Christian Platonists.

The Fiddler quotes Ambrose as saying:

Perhaps you will say, "I see something else, how is it that you assert that I receive the Body of Christ?" And this is the point which remains for us to prove. And what evidence shall we make use of? Let us prove that this is not what nature made, but what the blessing consecrated, and the power of blessing is greater than that of nature, because by blessing nature itself is changed.

... [Ambrose discusses miracles performed by the prophets] ...

We observe, then, that grace has more power than nature, and yet so far we have only spoken of the grace of a prophet's blessing. But if the blessing of man had such power as to change nature, what are we to say of that divine consecration where the very words of the Lord and Saviour operate? For that sacrament which you receive is made what it is by the word of Christ. But if the word of Elijah had such power as to bring down fire from heaven, shall not the word of Christ have power to change the nature of the elements? You read concerning the making of the whole world: "He spoke and they were made, He commanded and they were created." Shall not the word of Christ, which was able to make out of nothing that which was not, be able to change things which already are into what they were not? For it is not less to give a new nature to things than to change them.

But why make use of arguments? Let us use the examples He gives, and by the example of the Incarnation prove the truth of the mystery. Did the course of nature proceed as usual when the Lord Jesus was born of Mary? If we look to the usual course, a woman ordinarily conceives after connection with a man. And this body which we make is that which was born of the Virgin. Why do you seek the order of nature in the Body of Christ, seeing that the Lord Jesus Himself was born of a Virgin, not according to nature? It is the true Flesh of Christ which crucified and buried, this is then truly the Sacrament of His Body.

The Lord Jesus Himself proclaims: "This is My Body." Before the blessing of the heavenly words another nature is spoken of, after the consecration the Body is signified. He Himself speaks of His Blood. Before the consecration it has another name,after it is called Blood. And you say, Amen, that is, It is true. Let the heart within confess what the mouth utters, let the soul feel what the voice speaks.

In order to show that Amborse accepts transubstantiation, we have to show that he explains the words "this is my body" by the claim that the form and accidents of the bread remain, but its essence has been replaced by the essence of the body of Christ. Do you see that in the above quotation? I don't see any such thing. Ambrose certainly affirms the Real Presence: he says that if God can become human flesh, certainly he can become bread. He says that we shouldn't be surprised if Christ's body doesn't follow the ordinary course of nature, since God often performs miracles in Scripture, and since even Christ's human birth did not follow the ordinary course of nature. But I see nothing here about form and matter, or about substance and accident, or about species. And I'm not just looking for the words, I'm looking for the content. All Ambrose says is "this may look like bread, but it's actually the body of Christ, and God certainly has the power to make what looks, feels, and tastes like bread into the body of Christ." That is the doctrine of the Real Presence.

The last thing I want to cover is the issue of the Platonist leanings of many of the early fathers, notably the Alexandrians and Augustine. I shouldn't have to take pains to show this, because the Catholic Encyclopedia says, "even Augustine was deprived of a clear conception of Transubstantiation, so long as he was held in the bonds of Platonism." Nevertheless, I will at least try to explain it.

Platonism holds that material objects are what they are in virtue of their "participation" (more literally: "having a share") in a transcendant, changeless, immaterial "form" (not morphos, but eidos or idea, which Aristotle also uses, but in a somewhat different meaning than morphos, I think). You and I are both human because we participate in the form of Human, or, as Plato often says Humanity Itself. The bread is bread because of its relationship to Bread Itself. Things are, of course, generally participants in multiple forms, and everything is a participant in Goodness Itself to a greater or lesser degree because Plato holds to a privation theory of evil (which is where Augustine got it), so anything that had no goodness at all would not exist. Christian Platonists generally want to avoid the idea that the forms are co-eternal with and independent of God, so they say that they exist in God's understanding.

A Platonist does not have a concept of an essence as an Aristotelian does. Furthermore, Plato himself, and I believe most Platonists following him, generally cashes out "participation" in terms of "being patterned after." It is very difficult to see how the bread could change from being patterned after bread to being patterned after the body of Christ without any perceptible change. In what would the patterning consist? How does this object resemble a human body, and how Christ's body in particular? Now, there must be some way of getting this to work, because Father Nicolas Malebranche was a very intelligent Platonist Catholic priest in the 17th/18th century, after the Council of Trent, and he must have come up with something, but I don't know what he said.

At any rate, it is highly unlikely that any Christian Platonist held to anything like transubstantiation prior to Malebranche, and a great many of the early fathers, including, as I have said, the Alexandrian school and Augustine, were Platonists.

The situation is even worse for idealists such as myself (or 18th century Anglican Bishop George Berkeley). We don't believe that there is any such thing as the essence or substance or matter of the bread. All that exists, according to idealism, is what the Scholastics would call the "species." Transubstantiation is thus puzzling for the Aristotelian, more puzzling for the Platonist, and completely incoherent for the idealist. I should also note that most contemporary philosophers don't believe in any of these three theories, but transubstantiation is probably also incoherent for them, since material objects don't have undetectible essences (though they may have essential properties).

Now, a Christian idealist does have to come up with some explanation for the bodily resurrection and be able to say that the body that is raised is in some sense the same body although it is radically transformed in terms of its phenomenal properties. Whatever solution one comes up with for this problem could probably also be used to make sense of the doctrine of the Real Presence. However, this view cannot possibly look anything like transubstantiation, for the reasons discussed above.

Berkeley, Computers, and Time

I read a very interesting paper by James Van Cleve today, regarding a pair of arguments originally made by Jorge Luis Borges to the effect that either Berkeley's idealism or Leibniz's principle of the identity of indiscernables could be used to prove the unreality of time. The paper is "Time, Idealism, and the Identity of Indiscernables," Philosophical Perspectives 16 (2002): 379-393. Van Cleve identifies three "axioms of time order" which Borges' arguments are designed to undermine:

1. Given any two events e and f, either e precedes f or f precedes e or e and f are simultaneous.


2. If e precedes f, then f does not precede e. (As a corollary, no event precedes itself.)


3. If e precedes f and f precedes g, then e precedes g. (p. 379, emphasis original)

Van Cleve's paper is focused on showing that Borges' arguments, while valid, rely on an interpretation of Leibniz that is actually implausible (that is, a defensible interpretation according to which Leibniz asserts something that is not plausibly true), and an interpretation of Berkeley that is both exegetically and actually implausible. However, he also finds time to report a challenge to axiom 2:

... it must be noted that there are thinkers who do not take the irreflexivity of temporal precedence [i.e. the principle that no event precedes itself] as sacrosanct. Henri Bois objected to Neitzsche's doctrine of eternal return that it was not what it purported to be - that the supposedly infinitely repeating linear sequence of ABCDEA'B'C'D'E', etc. would really be a loop, given the identity of A and A', B and B' ... Bois apparently takes seriously the possibility of an event's preceding itself ... In other words the failure of our irreflexivity axiom is not taken to be a breakdown of time, but is taken instead to be precisely what is involved in looping time. In a similar vein, Goedel [sic] and others have pointed out there are solutions to the field equations of general relativity that involve closed timelike curves, in which an event is preceded by itself ...

At any rate, there is arguably nothing iimpossible about an event's preceding itself if it happens as part of a loop in time. Matters are otherwise if it happens as part of a linear series such as ABCDAXYZ, in which the second occurence of A is identified with the first. Here numerically identical events would have different sequels, in volation of the Indiscernibility of Identicals. (pp. 388-389)

Reformulating axiom 2 will be challenging if time is continuous. If time were discrete, we could say "if an event A has two immediate predecessors B and C, then B and C are simultaneous, and if A has two immediate successors, D and E, then D and E are simultaneous." However, for continuous time, we cannot define a rigorous notion of immediacy in this context, and relativity only makes things worse.

Nevertheless, Van Cleve does seem to succeed in saving Berkeleian idealism from Borges' charge that it leads to the unreality of time. Another problem remains, however, for the idealism, and that is to get a shared timeline for all minds. Van Cleve rightly notes (p. 382) that God's perceptons can save us a lot of trouble, but it still seems that Berkeley needs to explain how my mental events can exist in the same timeline as yours and how we can know the ordering for those events for which we seem to think we know the ordering.

An observation I want to make here, which I think will lead to a solution, is that an idealist world is an information system, like a computer network. Berkeley's world, in particular, is one in which all information is routed through a central server (namely, God). Other "network architectures" are imaginable, but it is the "central server" architecture that guarantees the coherence of the universe.

Now, Berkeley's world resembles a computer network (or a single multi-processor computer) in one respect that is particularly relevant here: in each computer processor, there is a series of discrete events, called clock cycles. A crystal emits an electrical signal in a sine wave, and one computation takes place in each period of the sine wave. When you have a network of computers, it is often necessary to have them all keep consistent time with one another but, as it turns out, this is quite difficult. Network packets don't always take the same amount of time to arrive and the clocks have to be continually resynchronized, since tiny variations in temperature will change the period of the wave. This means that the problem can't be solved in such a way as to create an ordering of events according to the ticking of some 'absolute' clock, but there are, nevertheless, several algorithms to order all the clock cycles of all the computers such that they satisfy the previously mentioned time order axioms. I'll briefly describe the general approach shared by the major solutions from my notes on Matt Blaze's 2005 operating systems class.

We define a few rules, using the predicate Pxy for "x precedes y", and standard logical notation, with a bit of English mixed in:

1. ∀x∀y[(x and y are events in the same process)&(x is executed before y)->Pxy]


2. ∀x∀y[(x is a sending event)&(y is the corresponding receiving event)->Pxy]


3. ∀x∀y∀z[(Pxy&Pyz)->Pxz]


4. ∀x∀y[(~Pxy&~Pyx)->x and y are concurrent]

This means that some events are simultaneous for one observer and not for another (in particular, if you have network packets n1 and n2 where n1 precedes n2 and no other packets are between n1 and n2, computer c1 will regard all events on computer c2 in between n1 and n2 as simultaneous, but computer c2 will see its own events as having an internal ordering), but we already had that from relativity. Now, this doesn't define an absolute time (which, again, relativity says we can't do anyway), but what's interesting from a Berkeleian perspective is that it does seem (to me) to capture how it is that we have a shared timeline: that is, certain sense events are shared between people, and by applying rules like these we get a shared timeline. Of course, we don't each have exactly the same ordering of events, but there is enough commonality for coherence between one observer's perceptions and another's.

What's going to complicate things even further is that under relativity (as Lauren has just been explaining to me) in certain specific circumstances (namely, circumstances where the spatial separation between event a and event b is such that llight from a cannot reach b or vice versa), some observers may disagree on the order of a and b. In the computer case, that doesn't generally happen. That is, if Sxy is "x and y are simultaneous", we may have one computer saying Sab and another saying Pab, but we will never have one computer saying Pab and another saying Pba. It seems to me that someone should say something interesting about this message passing thing in connection with this relativity and light cone stuff, but since I don't know what this interesting observation is, that someone must not be me.

The long and short of it is, it seems that an idealist/phenomenalist can get a timeline out of this that is as intersubjective as anyone can hope for, post-relativity.

"The Semantics of Sense Perception in Berkeley"

My paper "The Semantics of Sense Perception in Berkeley" is now available on my writings page. An earlier version of this paper served as my undergraduate honors thesis, and a somewhat reduced version of it has been accepted for publication by Religious Studies. I haven't heard anything about what issue it will appear in.

This paper discusses Berkeley's theory that our sense perceptions (especially visual perceptions) form a language by which God communicates with us, and asks how we are to interpret this language. In particular, it argues, against Walter Creery and Kenneth Winkler, that Berkeley's language must have what Winkler calls "vertical signification" - that is, ideas must be able to signify non-ideas - or Berkeley will be stuck in solipsism. (Winkler denies "vertical signification" on p. 21 of Berkeley: An Interpretation; Creery denies that the Berkeley's language has any "referential function" at all on p. 219 of "Berkeley's Argument for a Divine Visual Language," International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 3 (1972). See my paper, endnote 8.) The paper goes on to discuss a number of ways in which the difficulties in the semantics of this language mirror difficulties in the semantics of human language, and briefly discusses the interpretation of a few specific perceptions.

I have also reorganized my writings page to give a feel for which papers I regard as finished and/or good and which I am currently still working on, rather than just organizing them chronologically or lumping them all together. Go check it out.

"The Ontological Status of Dreams in Berkeleian Metaphysics"

The Dualist 13 (2006) is finally available online, including my paper "The Ontological Status of Dreams in Berkeleian Metaphysics". Unfortunately, the main index site is still badly broken. Hopefully it will soon be fixed. In the meantime, the direct link to my paper works.

There are some typesetting errors in the PDF (most importantly: footnote numbering is messed up, and some logical symbols are boxed out), and I haven't seen the print version to know if it contains these errors as well. I was never shown any proofs and I also found some spelling errors, and at least one place where a sentence is missing a word. Such is life. But the content is, I hope more interesting than the form, so that's what I will focus on and ask readers to focus on.

I wrote this paper over two and a half years ago, and it's now been just over a year since the paper was accepted, so there are definitely things I would do different if I were writing it today. Most of this is simply the sloppiness, unclarity, and general lack of polish that one expects from a Sophomore philosophy student. However, having just re-read the paper, I think that there is only one place in which these flaws touch the core of the argument, and that is in defining just what the argument is supposed to show. I will try to correct this flaw here, by outlining the general flow of argument as it appears in the published paper and explaining how it ought to differ.

The paper deals with the problem of dreams, given a Berkeleian idealist framework. In particular, it is focused on the question of whether "esse is percipi" places dreams on par with waking life, ontologically. Since, for the Berkeleian, perception defines reality, and dream perceptions are bona fide perceptions, it seems that the answer is yes. However, Berkeley claims (Dialogues 235) that "by whatever method you distinguish things from chimeras on your own scheme, the same, it is evident, will hold also upon mine" (emphasis original). The paper argues that this is in fact true: that is, that a particular solution to the epistemological problem of dreams, drawn from Leibniz's "On the Method of Distinguishing Real From Imaginary Phenomena," succeeds in solving Berkeley's ontological problem of dreams.

The descriptions of the nature of this "ontological problem" and its solution are the critical flaw of the paper. On p. 34, I say that the paper will argue that it is possible for a Berkeleian to draw "an ontological distinction" between dreams and waking life (this is the sentence with the missing word - my draft says "between dream worlds and the actual world"). I go on to talk about an ontology with four "levels" and use the word "real" in scare quotes a lot. Later, in sect. 5, I talk about some things being more or less real than others. I'm no longer entirely sure what the things I actually said mean, but, having studied a bit of W.V.O. Quine and David Lewis in the last year, I think I am prepared to say more accurately what it was that I was trying to say before:

In the famous Quinean formula, "to be is to be the value of a variable." That is, the things that are in the domain of quantification for the universal quantifier are the items of our ontology. However, context often causes the domain of quantification to vary, and, although existence is, as a matter of the way the world is, almost certainly an absolute, black and white sort of thing, "relative existence" enters the picture via language and discursive context.

Given this picture of being, I claim that Berkeley's position (that is, the position I believe to be entailed by his system, although he doesn't discuss the issue) with regard to dream worlds is almost exactly analogous to Lewis's position with regard to non-actual possible worlds: Lewis says that while, strictly speaking, all possible worlds exist, most of the time we restrict our quantifiers to the actual world, and the modal realist has as much reason as anyone for doing this.

I divide Berkeley's world into four "ontological levels:" "The level M of minds, the level RP of 'real' perceptions, the level DP of dreamed or hallucinated perceptions, and the level T of thoughts and volitions" (p. 51). These "ontological levels" are in fact domains of quantification, with every level including the level before it, in addition to the entities it specifies (that is, for instance, DP includes M and RP, but not T - it includes minds and all their perceptions). Strictly speaking, the Berkeleian is going to have to either say that ideas are modes of minds and so M is all that, in metaphysical rigor, exists, or that ideas are bona fide entities and so all of it exists. However, what the paper seeks to show, is that the use of these distinct domains of quantification is well justified by Berkeley's system and, especially, there are good reasons which the Berkeleian can admit - reasons having nothing to do with mind-independent entities - for frequently quantifying over only RP, and saying that those things are "real."

With these thoughts in mind, I present for your consideration, "The Ontological Status of Dreams in Berkeleian Metaphysics". You are encouraged to post your comments and criticisms here.

Armstrong on Berkeley

I was looking on half.com recently to see if I could find an affordable volume containing Berkeley's Siris last week when I came upon this 1965 collection, Berkeley's Philosophical Writings (ISBN 0020641702 according to half.com; it's apparently too old to have an ISBN printed in it) edited and with introduction by none other than D. M. Armstrong. I was unable to find any further information on the book, but, at half.com prices, decided it was worth buying just to get Armstrong's introduction (and on the off-chance that it contained Siris). Since there was no information on this book available online, and there are more copies still available, I thought I should provide some information myself.

First, it contains the following works:

• A Treatise on the Principles of Human Knowledge


• Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous


• Correspondance with Samuel Johnson


• De Motu


• An Essay Toward a New Theory of Vision


• Philosophical Commentaries

It is of note that this is almost the same collection of works as the 1975 Everyman edition edited by A. J. Ayers under the title Philosophical Works Including the Works on Vision, which was in print at least as recently as 1998 (that's the year my copy was printed). The Ayers edition has a more complete chonology of "Berkeley's Life and Times," as they put it (though the Armstrong edition does have a brief timeline) and contains "The Theory of Vision Vindicated and Explained" in addition to the works already listed.

Armstrong's introduction shows great respect for Berkeley as a thinker, but is ultimately hostile. It occasionally seemed dismissive to me, but this was only because of the necessary brevity of an introduction (it is 27 pages in length). Armstrong takes Berkeley seriously and generally states his position strongly, but since he is trying to introduce all of the works in the volume in a mere 27 pages is unable to treat the arguments in great depth.

The introduction opens with the paragraph:

One good way to study philosophy is to study the systems of the great philosophers. In an English-speaking country, there is much to be said for beginning with Berkeley. His most important works are superlatively well written. They are simple and clear. They are quite brief. What they say may be wrong, but it is never dull. There is interesting argument for even the most incredible assertion.

This is a fitting opening for the introduction, as it gives us a good idea of Armstrong's attitude toward Berkeley: his views are "wrong" and his claims are "incredible," but he is always "interesting" and never "dull." In short, Armstrong seems to view Berkeley as worth reading because he is obviously wrong but nevertheless difficult to refute. (I, of course, take rather a different view of Berkeley, and might be inclined rather to take this view of Armstrong!)

Armstrong divides his introduction into four principle sections, dealing with esse is percipi ("to be is to be perceived"), the critique of abstraction, the theory of vision, and the philosophy of science. The first section is by far the longest. In each section we have a development of Berkeley's position and his reasoning for it, followed by a sketch of the general direction of a refutation (sometimes a Berkeleian counter-refutation is given, but the anti-Berkeleian nearly always has the last word, and in the few cases where Berkeley has the last word the Berkeleian result is presented as a paradox, rather than a way the world might be). I am tempted to remark on the inadequacy of the refutations, but this would be unfair as, due to length, they are no more than sketches of general directions and all of them have the potential to be developed into important objections.

There is, however, at least one place where Armstrong's objection totally misses the mark, and this is in the claim (p. 16) that "Berkeley never shows any awareness" of the fact that the argument against matter could be turned against Berkeley's argument for the existence of other minds. However, when Berkeley discusses our knowledge of other minds at Principles 145 and 148 he says that we are informed of other minds by certain "effects or concommitant signs" that serve to "mark them out." Berkeley's view is that God, speaking to us through our senses, informs us of the existence of other minds. In their paper "Descartes, Leibniz and Berkeley on Whether We Can Dream Marks on the Waking State" (Studia Leibnitia 24 (1992): 177-181) Russell Wahl and Johnathan Westphal point out that in the case of all three of the philosophers they mention dream/hallucination skepticism serves as part of a reductio against an opposing view, but from within the confines of the philosopher's own view we are supposed to be safe from skepticism. In this way, contradiction is avoided. (I deal with this issue from two different directions in my "The Ontological Status of Dreams in Berkeleian Metaphysics" The Dualist 13 (2006), which has apparently been published on paper, but is not yet online, and "The Semantics of Sense Perception in Berkeley," forthcoming in Religious Studies - the former paper argues that the consistency and meaningfulness of our perceptions can be used by Berkeley to draw a distinction between the dreaming/hallucinating and waking states, and the latter paper discusses the use of the language of sense perception to refer to other minds and so rescue us from solipsism.)

I imagine that others who have studied Berkeley will, like me, be puzzled at the ordering of the sections. Indeed, it might make sense to discuss these topics in precisely the reverse order, since the critique of abstraction and the theory of vision form the foundation for the ultimate critique of matter and the establishment of the doctrine that esse is percipi, and this is part of the above problem. Armstrong divorces these issues from each other almost entirely when they are in fact intimately related, and he discusses them in the wrong order. Had he developed the critique of abstraction and the account of a divine language of vision before he had developed the critique of matter, he might have made Berkeley's claims more compelling and not run into this faulty critique of Berkeley on other minds. Similarly, Armstrong does a disservice to serious students by placing the New Theory of Vision at the end of the volume, when it should be at the beginning where Ayer put it, seeing as it was published first and forms an important introductory work before the Principles of Human Knowledge.

Another deficiency of Armstrong's introduction is that, apart from a passing reference to The Theory of Vision Vindicated and Explained (p. 30), it shows no awareness of any of Berkeley's works not included in this particular edition. This may be intentional, as the edition seems to be intended primarily for students who have no prior exposure to Berkeley, but it is nevertheless a weakness of the presentation. Armstrong sometimes by omitting references to other works of Berkeley, especially the Alciphron, Armstrong sometimes fails to do justice to Berkeley's overall position.

Finally, Armstrong seems to downplay the importance of God in Berkeley's metaphysics, and shows little or no interest in Berkeley's theology. This is something that one simply cannot do while studying Berkeley seriously.

I nevertheless suspect that I will find this introduction very useful on the whole. The reason is that it provides concise, simple, and well-formulated summaries of the most important objections to Berkeley's central doctrines. Pages 8 and 9 even provide what is effectively a presentation of the central point of Moore's "Refutation of Idealism." This brief introduction is, I think, a very good account of the objections a Berkeleian will need to answer, very much as Armstrong's Universals provides very good outlines of the most important objections to each of a variety of theories of properties. Armstrong's introduction could also be useful in this respect to someone who had never read Berkeley before and I think that it is more focused and consequently easier to get through than Ayer's introduction (though I haven't read through Ayer recently). In short, I recommend this introduction (and I even more strongly recommend the works of Berkeley included in this edition), but I advise readers to approach Armstrong at least as critically as Armstrong approaches Berkeley.

Paper #2: For Real This Time

Before I left last week, I sent in to Religious Studies the final draft of my paper "The Semantics of Sense Perception in Berkeley," which they have accepted for publication. The paper discusses the meaning of the "universal language of the Author of Nature" Berkeley argues for in the Essay Toward a New Theory of Vision and elsewhere. Essentially, the question I try to begin to answer is "if sense perception is a language by which God speaks to us, then what is he saying?" (I say "begin" because I have not developed a detailed semantic theory, but only offered some considerations with regard to what kind of content the perceptual language must have and how its semantics resembles the semantics of human languages.) The paper had to be cut down from about 13,000 words to just under 10,000 to meet Religious Studies' length limit and these journals sometimes take rather a long time to publish, so I intend to get the long version nicely fromatted and PDF'd to post here sometime soon. I want to get a link up to my first paper first so they're in order, but The Dualist still hasn't come out. If they delay much longer I'll just post my own version.

Quote(s) of the Day: Selections From Berkeley's Letter to Sir John James

In the course of a bit of research on Berkeley's views on the epistemology of religion, I have just come across a little letter Berkeley wrote to one Sir John James, dated June 7, 1741. James was, apparently, an Anglican living in Boston who was considering converting to Roman Catholicism. While for some reason (perhaps because he was Irish) Berkeley is often mistakenly believed to have been a member of the Roman Catholic Church, he was, in fact, a member of the clergy of the Church of England, and wrote against Roman Catholicism on a number of occasions, this being one of them. His writings on the subject are, however, admirably balanced, respectful, and civil as compared with many of the polemics produced by his Protestant contemporaries. The letter to James, published in vol. 7, pp. 143-155 of The Works of George Berkeley, ed. Luce and Jessop, contains some wonderful reflections on individual knowledge and experience of God, the nature and authority of the Church, and the Christian life. Below are some passages that stuck out to me. I've copied quite a lot of text here (hurray for the public domain!) because that much of it was that God and Berkeley's theology is a very neglected topic. Most of the references in brackets are found in Luce's footnotes; a few that Luce missed were added by me.

You observe very justly that Christ's religion is spiritual, and the Christian life supernatural; and that there is no judge of spiritual things but the spirit of God. We have need, therefore, of aid and light from above. Accordingly we have the Spirit of God to guide us into all truth. [John 16:3] If we are sanctified and enlightened by the Holy Ghost & by Christ, this will make up for our defects without the Pope's assistance. And why our Church and her pious members may not hope for this help as well as others I see no reason. That Author of our faith tells us, He that will do the will of God, shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God. [John 7:17]

There is an indwelling of Chirst and the Holy Spirit, there is an inward light

...

There is an invisible Church whereof Christ is the head, the members of which are linked together by faith, hope, & charity. By faith in Christ, not in the Pope.

...

Men travelling in day-light see by one common light, though each with his own eyes. If one man shou'd say to the rest, Shut your eyes and follow me who see better than you all. This wou'd not be well taken. The sincere Christians of our communion are governed or led by the inward light of God's grace, by the outward light of his written word, by the ancient and Catholic traditions of Christ's church, by the ordinances of our National Church which we take to consist all and hang together. But then we see, as all must do with out own eyes, by a common llight but each with his own private eyes. And so must you too or you will not see at all. And not seeing at all how can you too chuse a Church? Why prefer that of Rom to that of England? Thus far, and in this sense every man's judgment is private as well as ours. Some indeed go farther and without regard to the holy Spirit or the word of God, or the writings of the primitive fathers, or the universal uninterrupt'd traditions of the Church, will pretend to canvass every mystery, every step of Providence, and reduce it to the private standard of their own fancy, for reason reaches not those things. Such as these I give up and disown as well as you do.

I grant it is meet the Law of Christ shou'd like other laws have magistrates to explain and apply it. But then as in the civil State a private man may know the law enough to avoid transgressing it, and also to see whether the magistrates deviate into tyrrany: Even so, in the other case a private Christian may know and ought to know the written law of God and not give himself up blindly tot he dictates of the Pope and his assessors.

...

Light and heat are both found in a religious mind duly disposed. Light in due order goes first. It is dangerous to begin with heat, that is with affections. To ballance earthly affections by spiritual affections is right. But our affections shou'd grow from inquiry and deliberation else there is danger of our being superstitious or Enthusiasts. An affection conceived towards a particular Church, upon reading some spiritual authors of that Communion which might have left a bias in the mind is I apprehend to be suspected. Most men act with a byas. God knows how far my education may have byassed me against the Church of Rome ... It is our duty to strive to divest our selves of all byas whatsoever.

Whatever unguarded expressions may be found in this or that Protestant Divine, it is certainly the Doctrine of our Church that no particular church or congregation of Believers is infallible. We hold all mankind to be peccable and errable, even the Pope himself with all that belong to him. We are like men in a cave in this present life seeing by a dim light through such chinks as the divine goodness hath open'd to us. We dare not talk in the high unerring positive style of the Romanists. We confess that we see through a glass darkly [1 Cor. 13:12]: and rejoice that we see enough to determine our practice and excite our hopes.

...There is indeed an invisible Church, whereof Christ is head, linked together by charity, animated with the same hope, sanctifyed by the same Spirit, heirs of the same promise. This is the universal church militant and triumphant: the militant dispersed in all parts of Christendom partaking of the same word and sacraments. There are also visible, political or national churches: none of which is universal ... The members of this universal church are not visible by outward makrs, but certainly known only to God whose Spirit will sanctifie and maintain it to the end of time.

The church is a calling ekklesia. Many are called by few are chosen. [Matt. 22:14] Therefore there is no reckoning the elect by the number of visible members. There must be the invisible grace, as well as the outward sign; the spiritual life and holy unction to make a real member of Christ's invisible church. The particular churches of Jersualem Antioch Alexandria Rome &c have all fallen into error. And yet in their most corrupt and erroneous state I believe they have included some true members of that body whereof Christ is head, of that building whereof He is the corner stone. [Eph. 2:20] Other foundation shall no man lay, but on this foundation there may be superstructures of hay stubble [1 Cor. 3:11-12] and much combustible trash without absolutely annihilating the church. This I take to have been evidently the case. Christ's religion is spiritual and supernatural, and there is an unseen cement of the faithful who draw grace from the same source, are enlightened by the same father of lights [James 1:17] and sanctified by the same Spirit. And this, although they may be members of different political or visible congregations, may be estranged or suspected or even excommunicate to each other. They may be loyal to Christ however divided among themselves.

...

But perhaps you will say there is need of an infallible visible guide for the soul's quiet. But, of what use is an infallible guide without an infallible sign to know him by? We have often seen Pope against Pope and Council against Council. What or whom shall we follow in these contests by the written word of God, the Apostolical traditions, and the internal light of the logos that irradiates every mind but is not equally observed by all?

...

As Plato thanked the gods that he was born an Athenian, so I think it a peculiar blessing to have been educated in the Church of England. My prayer nevertheless and trust in God is, not that I shall live and die in this church, but in the true church. For, after all, in respect of religion our attachment shou'd be only to the truth.

The Ontological Economy of Idealism

The following is an excerpt from a draft of my metaphysics term paper, which I thought might be of interest to readers. The paper presents an idealist theory of properties under which two things are said to have a property if those two things are or would be indistinguishable under some specified conditions. I call this account, fittingly enough, the "conditional indistinguishability" analysis of properties. After presenting the conditional indistinguishability account, I discuss the ontological economy of the idealist theory from which it arises, as compared especially to the currently dominant physicalist assumptions, but also to substance dualism:

The theory that has been given presupposes idealism. Accepting the postulates of idealism is the price paid for this simple account of properties which does not need to postulate additional entities beyond the perceptions themselves. Is it worth the price? Idealism takes minds as primitive and, at least as they are in themselves, unanalyzable. It might be thought that this is worse than just accepting properties as primitive and being done with it. However, I am not at all convinced that this is so. Minds are already our epistemic starting point, whether we like it or not: we know only what we know, we think only what we think, and we believe only what we believe, so we first and foremost know, think, and believe that there are minds (whatever minds may be) that know, think, and believe. Dualism is plagued with the mind-body problem, and physicalism suffers from what may be termed the mind problem: what is a mind? How could there be such a thing? Idealism places the starting point of our metaphysics at the starting point of our epistemology. Everything we can know is based on mind. The physicalist or dualist posits that there are other things behind these mind-dependent entities, and then somehow has to explain what these other things are, how we are able to think of them, how they affect our minds, and, for the physicalist, what our minds are in the first place. The problem of properties is just one of the philosophical problems that arises from these sorts of assumptions. From the perspective of the idealist, the plight of the metaphysician today is very much the same as it was in Berkeley's day: “we have first raised a dust, and then complain, we cannot see.”[1]

The idealist instead takes things as they come: we know that there are minds, and that these minds have certain faculties, and also that they receive certain ideas which we call perceptions. The physicalist tries to build these things out of some other objects that are taken to be fundamental, but these attempts have not been particularly successful. Furthermore, even if the physicalist succeeds in this attempt, some objects are still taken as primitive, and these objects tend to be at least as bizarre and complex as minds. The difference is that we know with great certainty that there are minds, whereas we don't know that there are possibilia or states of affairs or quantum strings in this way.

[1]A Treatise on the Principles of Human Knowledge, Introduction, 3.

"Common Sense," "Pre-Theoretical Intuitions," and Philosophy

I am presently reading Peter van Inwagen's Material Beings (I'm not sure if it's going to actually help with my very strange philosophy of religion term paper wherein I argue that idealism is compatible with a belief in the bodily resurrection of the dead, or if I'm just procrastinating). In section 10, after denying that there are, in metaphysical rigor, any artifacts (i.e. inanimate macrophysical objects, such as chairs), van Inwagen makes the following remark:

Does my position not fly in the face of common sense? I do not think so. This is not because I think that my position is in accord with "common sense," but rather because I do not think that there is any such thing as the body of doctrine the philosophers call common sense. There is common sense: Common sense tells us to taste our food before we salt it and to cut the cards. It does not tell us there are chairs. (p. 103)

Van Inwagen implies that common sense does dictate that when people say such things as "there are two very valuable chairs in the next room" they may, under the correct circumstances, say what is true, despite the fact that (according to his theory) there are (in metaphysical rigor) no chairs (p. 100). According to van Inwagen, the sentence "there are two very valuable chairs in the next room" is like the sentence "It was cooler in the garden after the sun had moved behind the elms" (p. 101). It is "common sense" that both sentences sometimes express truths, but the former is not inconsistent with van Inwagen's