Transcript Criticisms of Berkeley’s Idealism

4 Criticisms of Berkeley’s
Idealism ( and 1 defence)
AS Philosophy
Knowledge of the external world
stox mar12
1) Hallucinations
• How can idealism explain distinction between perceptual error and
veridical perception?
• So if everything is like a kind of a dream, there isn’t a difference
between how it really is, and being mistaken or between
hallucinations and actually seeing something
• This is also a problem for representative realists – who admits we
can’t distinguish hallucinations from veridical perception as we
can’t see the world as it really is. So we have to make the distinction
out of our own experience
• The idealist has a similar problem and does not have a ‘real world’
that can help answer the problem
• The idealist makes sense of perceptual error by considering the
regularity we have observed in past experience – we regard as real
or veridical those which fit in with what has happened in the past,
and reject those that don’t fit as an error. (e.g. pink floating
elephant)
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2) Continued existence of things
• An apple exists on my desk. I put it in the
drawer. I can’t see it so it doesn’t exist – how
do we explain the ‘gappiness’?
• I light a fire – it exists – I leave the room – it
doesn’t exist – yet when I return to the room
it exists again
• Try the blind spot experiment
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Back to the tree
• Tree in forest. Standing 1 day – fallen down the
next. How can we explain the falling down
process? If no-one observed it, it couldn’t
happen, so how did the tree get to the ground?
• Idealists inhabits a world where things appear
and disappear – things doesn't have hidden sides,
secret aspects of interiors
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3) Regularity of the universe
• We can expect the apple to be in the drawer
when I reopen it. I more or less know what it will
taste like.
• Both types of realists can explain this – matter
retains properties when we are not observing it,
so when we do come to perceive it we can expect
it to produce the same sensations in us.
• Idealism doesn’t have an explain for this – the
whole world of ideas we inhabit is miraculous
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Berkeley’s defence
• Berkeley rejects the regularity argument – he questions
WHY we would expect matter to behave in a regular
way – what evidence do we have? He states that in
relate to regularity, ideals and materialism are in the
same boat
• Berkeley responds to the challenge of explain
gappiness – states there is a permanent perceiver –
God – so as he perceives all animals and persons at all
times even when no humans are perceiving them,
Berkeley’s God ensures that physical objects retain the
kind of existence realists and common sense would
claim.
• He also explain the origin and regularity of our sense
data
stox mar12
Criticisms of Berkeley’s defence`
• Materialists refute this defence saying we have a) no
independent proof that God exists and b) that He operates
in this way
• Some materialists reject the use of God to shore up theory
as dishonest
• However, at least God has intelligence, and would so
behave in a regular and orderly way, the idea that some
mindless matter should do this is for Berkeley a bigger copout
• Berkeley isn’t using God to save his theory, rather he uses it
to demonstrate God’s existence. (Being a bishop) if matter
cannot exist then the only way to explain the orderly
appearance of sense experience is by positing the existence
of some intelligence producing them
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4) Confusion over the term ‘ideas’
• Pain and desire are entirely mental – in essence – acts
of the mind
• Colours and sounds are partly mental – objects of the
mind
• Russell & others state that idealists have not made the
distinction.
• Berkeley reject this criticism – only true mental act is
an act of will – perception is passive and not an act –
therefore there can be no confusion
• This criticism was deemed to have failed as it relies on
a criticism which can’t be properly articulated – and
even Russell later rejected it
stox mar12