Subjunctive Phenomenalism and Logical Construction Idealism
Within the last week, I have seen the same mistake in two different recent books on the philosophy of perception: According to phenomenalism, objects are (in John Stuart Mill's excellent phrase) "permanent possibilities of sensation"; they are, in a more recent idiom, "logical constructions" of sense data. (Alva Noë, Action in Perception, 79) Berkeley observed that the philosophical conception that the objects of direct awareness are sense-data (or, in Berkeley's terminology, "ideas") is perfectly compatible with the commonsense conception that the objects of direct awareness are ordinary things (e.g., tomatoes). We can accept both, Berkeley argued, if we recognize the...
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Topic(s):
Alva Noë
,
Anil Gupta
,
Bertrand Russell
,
C. I. Lewis
,
Contemporary Thinkers
,
Familiar Objects
,
George Berkeley
,
Historical Thinkers
,
Idealism/Phenomenalism
,
Kenneth P. Winkler
,
Metaphysics
,
Ontology
,
Philosophy
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No Such Thing as an Ontological Free Lunch
In D.M. Armstrong's book
Universals: an Opinionated Introduction, he discusses the pros and cons of a number of theories of the metaphysics of properties. Chapter three deals with "resemblance nominalism." According to resemblance nominalism, properties can be accounted for in terms of degrees of resemblance between the various objects having the property. So, for instance, on object is red if and only if it resembles some paradigmatic red objects. This theory is plagued by the "Resemblance Regress." Armstrong quotes Bertrand Russells' version as the "classical exposition" of the difficulty (p. 53): If we wish to avoid the universals...
Continue reading "No Such Thing as an Ontological Free Lunch"