• MetaphysicsNow
    311
    A post motivated by reading Dogmatism and Evolution by G and T Laguna:

    Berkeley's subjective idealism has, amongst perhaps many others, a problem in accounting for regularities in experience. In Principles of Human Knowledge, we have the following (section 30):

    The ideas of Sense are more strong, lively, and DISTINCT than those of the imagination; they have likewise a steadiness, order, and coherence, and are not excited at random, as those which are the effects of human wills often are, but in a regular train or series, the admirable connexion whereof sufficiently testifies the wisdom and benevolence of its Author. Now THE SET RULES OR ESTABLISHED METHODS WHEREIN THE MIND WE DEPEND ON EXCITES IN US THE IDEAS OF SENSE, ARE CALLED THE LAWS OF NATURE; and these we learn by experience, which teaches us that such and such ideas are attended with such and such other ideas, in the ordinary course of things.

    The problem hidden here is that the phrase "in the ordinary course of things" needs cashing out, because it is typically not the case that as individual subjects, our experiences conform to the general regularities of nature (e.g we do not always ourselves hear thunder after seeing lightning - other conditions have to be in place). Mill pointed this out (ch 11 Examination of Sir William Hamilton's philosophy).
    Now, of what nature is this fixed order among our sensations? It is a constancy of antecedence and sequence. But the constant antecedence and sequence do not generally exist between one actual sensation and another. Very few such sequences are presented to us by experience. In almost all the constant sequences which occur in Nature, the antecedence and consequence do not obtain between sensations, but between the groups we have been speaking about, of which a very small portion is actual sensation, the greater part being permanent possibilities of sensation, evidenced to us by a small and variable number of sensations actually present.

    So what are these permanent possibilities of sensation, and specifically, what grounds them? Usually a possibility is something we think of as grounded in an actuality of some kind or another, and of course if that actuality ultimately has to be an independently existing object or fact, subjective idealism is done for. One solution is to propose that the actualities on which these permanent possibilities are grounded are actual sensations/experiences, which would save subjective idealism but at the following cost: possibilities become mind-dependent, and thus (at least if the mind is not God's) they lose their required permanence, since modality is thereby bounded by our capacities for imagining possibilities (which could and has changed, and also runs counter to the intuition that there are possibilities we as human beings have yet to consider).

    So, as I see it, the issue for subjective idealism - and perhaps it affects all idealisms, although on that point I am not certain - boils down to the problem that it requires not only idealism to be true of the actual world, but also for all possible worlds. Is idealism for possible worlds coherent? After all, isn't it at least possible that idealism is false?
  • Wayfarer
    22.6k
    Berkeley's subjective idealism has, amongst perhaps many others, a problem in accounting for regularities in experience.MetaphysicsNow

    That's because he was a nominalist. It's the worst thing about him. Interesting fact: C S Peirce thought very highly of Berkeley, but thought his nominalism a mistake.

    As for the remainder - it's a thorny question. You do notice 'the benevolence of its Author'. Berkeley's world consisted entirely of spirits and ideas. Spirits are perceiving beings or conscious subjects, and 'ideas' are the objects of experience - what we take for objects. Berkeley doesn't deny that objects exist, but he denies that they're substances, in the philosophical sense, i.e. subjects in which predicates inhere. They have no substance in the sense of inherent existence (which is a rather Buddhist way of putting it); they only exist as perceptions, not as subjects per se.

    So in Berkeley's philosophy natural laws exist because they are the handiwork or expression of God:

    Whatever power I may have over my own thoughts, I find the ideas actually perceived by Sense have not a like dependence on my will. When in broad daylight I open my eyes, it is not in my power to choose whether I shall see or not, or to determine what particular objects shall present themselves to my view; and so likewise as to the hearing and other senses; the ideas imprinted on them are not creatures of my will. There is therefore some other Will or Spirit that produces them.

    (From Wiki entry on Berkeley).

    That 'will or spirit' being God - and that is what grounds them.

    Recall that Hume, Mill, and Berkeley were all committed empiricists - actually the fact that Berkeley is an empiricist, often seems to jar with his idealism, but recall that he believed that in the primacy of experience - that only experiences or perceptions could be said to be real.

    As for the 'permanent possibilities of sensation', I think you could argue that this is indeed an empiricist, or rather a nominalist, attempt to find something that will fulfil the role of universals (which of course nominalists don't accept.) So it seems to me, that it's a way of trying to contrive something that functions as a universal in terms of a 'permanent possibility of sensation'. But I will defer on that to see what others have to say about it.
  • jkg20
    405
    As @Wayfarer indicates, my understanding was that Berkeley has God doing all the hard work of keeping things moving along smoothly, Mill and the logical positivists after him were less inclined to theological solutions to the problem. I think the LPs, rather than supposing permanent possibilities were grounded in actualities, preferred to take a linguistic turn and assume that the regularities were to be accounted for by the truths of counterfactual conditionals (someone will correct me if I'm wrong about that). Of course, that leaves open the question of what makes the counterfactual conditionals true - so we are back to a grounding issue.
    Subjective idealism indeed might need to be augmented with some kind of realism about abstract entities, so that the regularities in concrete experience map relations between those abstracta. However, if you let realism in for abstracta, what becomes the motivation for not being realist about particulars as well? I've not looked into that question myself, but I do wonder whether it is an accident that Berkeley rejected Locke's notion of abstract general ideas.
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