BldE

Question 1

Berkley’s idealist main claims

Answer 1

ANTI-REALISM claim: All that exists are minds and their mind-dependent ideas. Ordinary objects are nothing more than collections of mind-dependent ideas.

IDEAS claim: We immediately perceive mind-dependent ideas.

THEISM: God exists as the cause of our ideas and of their coherence.

Question 2

OBJECTION (1): Objects (as collections of ideas) cannot exist within God’s mind because God cannot have sensations.

Answer 2

Berkeley says that God is a being who “can suffer nothing, nor be affected with any painful sensation, or indeed any sensation at all”

This surely means that God can’t have perceptual experiences. If so, it seems impossible for objects to exist in the mind of God.

Question 3

Response: God is capable of having non-sensory awareness of ideas/objects

Answer 3

Ideas could exist in God’s mind not as perceptions, but as part of God’s understanding.

So while God doesn’t have sensible ideas, he somehow still knows about these ideas in a non-sensory way and this is how he can sustain these ideas in existence whether we are aware of them or not.

One way of understanding this would be: We perceive ideas, God conceives of those same ideas (the difference between seeing a grape and thinking about that grape).

Question 4

Counter-response: This means that God and I cannot be aware of the same object (i.e. collection of ideas)

Answer 4

If my ideas are perceivable, and God’s ideas are unperceivable, then we cannot be aware of the same ideas

GOD’S ROLE: God can no longer ensure the continued existence of objects

GOD’S OMNISCIENCE: God cannot be omniscient, since there are ideas that God cannot know about.

Question 5

OBJECTION (2): The EW is better than God as
(1) the cause of our ideas and
(2) the explanation of unperceived objects

Answer 5

if God were the direct cause then God would be a deceiver, since we are naturally inclined to think there is an EW, and there is not then God has given us the wrong natural instinct. Additionally, they claim that realism can equally explain what happens to unperceived objects

Question 6

responses to OBJECTION (2): The EW is better than God as
(1) the cause of our ideas and
(2) the explanation of unperceived objects

Answer 6

(1) The EW is not a better hypothesis for a theist (like Locke) as God wouldn’t needlessly cause experiences via a world when he could do it directly.

(2) It makes more sense for the cause of mental ideas to be a mind (God) than a non-mind (the causation issue!)

3) God would explain coherence and involuntariness just as well as an external world

(4) If God were the cause, this would NOT make God a deceiver:

Question 7

Solipsism

Answer 7

The view that only my mind exists and so that there are no other minds and no mind-independent objects.

Question 8

ISSUE / OBJECTION: If idealism is true, then solipsism is true, and this is an unacceptable implication

Answer 8

If I have no reason to believe in the independent existence of those objects that I perceive to lie outside my body—indeed, no reason to believe even in the existence of my body—then I have no grounds on which to justify a belief in the existence of other minds, of which I have even less alleged experience

Question 9

Responses: Other minds is the best hypothesis as a causal explanation of people’s bodily behaviour.
(response to solipsism obj)

Answer 9

some argue that his work should be read as putting forwards a causal argument that minds are the cause of the movements in the bodies I observe and the words that I hear.

So it is reasonable to think that minds are the cause of
a) bodily actions/reactions we see
b)unforeseeable sentences we did not ourselves say

Question 10

Response to other minds as the best hypothesis as a causal explanation for people’s behaviour

Answer 10

a) It is still an inference to an uncheckable conclusion - we cannot ever check that Berkeley’s hypothesis is true

b) It does not tell us anything about what other people’s minds are like

Question 11

ISSUE / OBJECTION: Idealism cannot adequately account for illusions and hallucinations

Answer 11

The way in which we would ordinarily explain this discrepancy between how things look and how things really are is by saying that the hallucination/illusion is only in my mind. There is nothing corresponding to my experience in external, physical reality. This explanation, of course, is unavailable to Berkeley precisely because he rejects the suggestion that there is any external reality

Question 12

Response: Illusions involve a mistake of judgement not an error of perception. Things are as they look

Answer 12

It is right and proper that the oar/stick looks crooked in these conditions - that is how it should look. The mistake, he says, is to infer from this that it would also feel crooked. That would be a mistake of judgement the person makes, not an error in the person’s perceptual experience.

Question 13

Response 1 to hallucination objection: We can tell the difference

Answer 13

A) Hallucinations are less vivid than veridical experiences and are under our control

(B) Hallucinations don’t cohere with our other experiences, veridical experiences do.

Question 14

Response 2 to hallucination objection

Answer 14

Even if we can’t tell the difference they can be distinguished by what caused them (me vs God)

Question 15

Counter response to ‘Hallucinations are less vivid than veridical experiences and are under our control’

Answer 15

Hallucinations can be very vivid indeed – so vivid we mistake them for reality. And they are terrifying precisely because they are beyond our control.

Question 16

Counter response to ‘