Did Berkeley Goof?

Pneumenon

So, in the third dialogue between Hylas and Philonous, I see this:

Hyl: ...Isn’t it your opinion that all we perceive through our senses are the ideas existing in our minds?
Phil: It is.
Hyl: But the idea that is in my mind can’t be in yours, or in any other mind. So doesn’t it follow from our principles that no two people can see the same thing? And isn’t this highly absurd?

Then comes Berkeley's counterargument. First, he claims (if I have understood him correctly) that two ideas are the same if "no difference is perceived between them," what contemporary philosophers might call qualitative identity. Two things are identical if they have the exact same features. It follows that you and I perceive the same e.g. red sphere if the red sphere I perceive is exactly like the one you perceive. If I ask, "But are they the exact same sphere?" then Berkeley will assert that I am appealing to an abstracted notion of identity that he rejects.

Where it gets suspicious is when he defends his rejection of said notion of identity. It's kind of a tangle. He seems to reject it by saying that it's a dispute "over a word," because the common meaning of the word "same" is just that two things have the exact same (perceived) features. A few points on this.

First, that's not the common meaning of the word, "same." I'm drinking out of a plastic Pepsi bottle right now that is, by my senses at least, indistinguishable from all the other bottles like it, but still not the same as those bottles. I'm not drinking from every bottle in the world when I drink from this one. Berkeley seems to think that "the vulgar" have no concept of two things having all the same perceptible qualities while being two different things (I guess he never met any twins), but I have no idea where he gets that. He seems to be using "the vulgar" as some kind of weird authority he can appeal to in order to reject a concept of identity that he doesn't like, and it's an authority that we conveniently can't ask to speak for itself. It's OLP tom-foolery before OLP even existed.

If the preceding paragraph is right, then Berkeley seems to be equivocating and then shutting down the charge of equivocation by telling his interlocutor that he's just arguing semantics. Kind of asinine, really.

Wayfarer

Right. And it's because of his commitment to nominalism, that is the exact reason. I have learned recently that Peirce was generally an admirer of Berkeley but judged his nominalism to be a gross error. I think this is a manifestation of that.

The Great Whatever

First, that's not the common meaning of the word, "same." I'm drinking out of a plastic Pepsi bottle right now that is, by my senses at least, indistinguishable from all the other bottles like it, but still not the same as those bottles. I'm not drinking from every bottle in the world when I drink from this one. Berkeley seems to think that "the vulgar" have no concept of two things having all the same perceptible qualities while being two different things (I guess he never met any twins), but I have no idea where he gets that. He seems to be using "the vulgar" as some kind of weird authority he can appeal to in order to reject a concept of identity that he doesn't like, and it's an authority that we conveniently can't ask to speak for itself. It's OLP tom-foolery before OLP even existed. — Pneumenon

Identical twins aren't qualitatively identical though. Nor are separate Pepsi bottles. They're distinguished in quality by their location, for one.

Michael

Wouldn't you say that when I read from one copy of the Lord of the Rings and you read from another copy that we're reading the same story? I would, even though I wouldn't commit to the claim that the story is some single external thing that we are able to "encounter" by reading various different books.

The Great Whatever

↪Michael

Indeed. I take Berkeley's point to be that the 'vulgar' notion of identity is unlike the philosopher's, and that it shifts depending on the conveniences of language. Sometimes it in effect means something like the behavioral confluence surrounding qualitatively similar ideas, and sometimes it doesn't.

In general one should be wary of objections against technical stances from non-technical vocabulary, without checking that one can't be translated into the other. Of course Berkeley always claimed to be defending common sense outright, but this is doubtful.

Pneumenon

Identical twins aren't qualitatively identical though. Nor are separate Pepsi bottles. They're distinguished in quality by their location, for one. — The Great Whatever

For what it's worth, I was riffing on Berkeley's definition of identity, where he specifies that identity is the absence of perceptible difference. I guess I perceive a difference in location between the Pepsi bottles, but I don't perceive any differences in intrinsic properties, although that's a tangle that I'm loathe to get into and that Berkeley would probably reject anyway.

If difference is always perceptible difference, though, and identity is always perceptible identity, then this would make Berkeley's assertion - that your idea of the Pepsi bottle is identical to mine - incoherent, because we only perceive our own ideas of the bottle, not one another's. Berkeley's invocation of God won't make any difference either, because only God has access to His perceptions/ideas, so Berkeley seems to be in a self-imposed epistemic bind there.

I suspect you'd reject this line of reasoning, given that you're not a fan of refuting idealistic doctrines by reducing them to solipsism or pointing at some kind of epistemic closure. But perhaps it works against Berkeley, if not other idealists, and I'm concerned with Berkeley in particular here.

Pneumenon

↪Michael

I dunno about "external" because that's one of those words that philosophers twist and contort and force into doing all kinds of weird shit.

What I would like to say is that yes, we're reading the same story, but I don't think that's the kind of identity Berkeley has a problem with. The question that Hylas seems to be putting to Philonous is, "If we're both looking at a tree, how is it that, given your doctrine, we're looking at the same tree?"

TheWillowOfDarkness

↪Pneumenon

I think the better question is whether the difference is perceived. For a difference to be perceptible doesn't necessarily mean it perceived-- people have been known to make arguments that two Pepsi cans are the same due to having similar properties. Despite different identity being perceptible or knowable, people fail to notice it all the time.

If identity is always percetible, it doesn't follow identity is always perceived. God may know (this is the same Pepsi can, these are different Pepsi cans, etc.) an identity some people don't.

Pneumenon

↪TheWillowOfDarkness

That is true if you are assuming only that all things are perceptible, not necessarily perceived. But Berkeley wants something stronger. He outright says, to be is to be perceived. That's why he has to invoke God, to perceive things and keep them in existence when no humans are looking.

The Great Whatever

Berkeley's assertion - that your idea of the Pepsi bottle is identical to mine - incoherent, because we only perceive our own ideas of the bottle, not one another's. — Pneumenon

Does Berkeley ever claim that our ideas of the Pepsi bottle are identical? I don't recall that. Wasn't his point just that we commonly speak of things as being identical in ways other than being numerically identical? I.e., it's okay to say we're looking at the same Pepsi bottle if we mean something like looking at separate ideas that coordinate our behaviors in a certain way? (fill in the blanks, I don't think he himself ever does)

TheWillowOfDarkness

↪Pneumenon

The problem is Berkeley already accepts that being percetible doesn't mean perception in the first instance. He accepts it's possible for stuff to be known, even if it's not present to a given individual-- that's how God can be posed. There's much to know, even if humans don't.

If Berkeley really thought possibility of knowledge was the same as the existence of knowledge, he'd have no cause to pose God at all. Possible knowledge would terminate in the present individual (and the accusation of solipsism would carry). He clearly doesn't think this though.

Pneumenon

↪The Great Whatever

Hmmm, you seem to be right. I think I misread Berkeley on this point. He does say,

Strictly speaking, Hylas, we don’t see the same object that we feel; and the object perceived through the microscope isn’t the same one that was perceived by the naked eye. But if every variation were thought sufficient to constitute a new kind or new individual, language would be made useless by the sheer number of names or by confusions amongst them.

And he says,

f the term ‘same’ be given its common meaning, it is certain (and not at all in conflict with the principles I maintain) that different persons may perceive the same thing; and that the same thing or idea can exist in different minds. The meanings of words are assigned by us; and since men customarily apply the word ‘same’ where no distinction or variety is perceived, and I don’t claim to alter their perceptions, it follows that as men have sometimes said ‘Several people saw the same thing’, they may continue to talk like that in similar situations, without deviating either from correctness of language or the truth of things.

So "same" just means that there's no perceptible difference between two ideas.

All the same, though, it still comes across as OLP-style nonsense. "All the vulgar really mean is -" (insert complex philosophical analysis here). He's double-crossing somewhere.

Pneumenon

↪TheWillowOfDarkness

I wasn't talking about knowledge, though.

TheWillowOfDarkness

↪Pneumenon

How so? Exactly how is someone going to be aware or not aware, to perceive something or not, without knowing or not knowing it?

Pneumenon

↪TheWillowOfDarkness

The question is whether or not something can exist without being perceived.

The Great Whatever

↪Pneumenon

Maybe. I think Berkeley's philosophy suffers from a false loyalty to common sense. There is nothing commonsensical about Barkeley's ideas, even if they are coherent and theoretically parsimonious.

The sort of English ordinary philosophy he wants to enact is probably doomed since he accepts that people only perceive ideas, which is not a commonsensical notion to begin with, but which is a tenet he probably couldn't have safely dispensed with among his peers.

Pneumenon

I think Berkeley's philosophy suffers from a false loyalty to common sense. — The Great Whatever

Yeah, this is pretty much what I meant. I think we agree on this.

TheWillowOfDarkness

↪Pneumenon

Indeed, which Berkeley clearly affirms-- much stuff exists without humans perceiving or knowing it. Given this position, he then poses God.

God is proposed to, according to Berkeley, give coherence to things existing without it being perceived by us. So his argument is not that it's impossible for things to exist if they aren't perceived, but rather they are impossible if no-one perceives them. It's quite a different argument than to solipsism.

Rather than trying to force everything into one entity, Berkeley is saying it must belong to others.
If we don't know something, then there is something, some significance which doesn't belong to us. Everyone must share the world with something other than themsleves.

Strictly speaking, Hylas, we don’t see the same object that we feel...

But if every variation were thought sufficient to constitute a new kind or new individual, language would be made useless by the sheer number of names or by confusions amongst them.

The meanings of words are assigned by us; and since men customarily apply the word ‘same’ where no distinction or variety is perceived, and I don’t claim to alter their perceptions, it follows that as men have sometimes said ‘Several people saw the same thing’, they may continue to talk like that in similar situations, without deviating either from correctness of language or the truth of things. — Berkeley

Or such statements are simply incorrect and false. That is, if you reject his pluralistic relativism and only accept a monistic relativism in which only the sort of statements which can rightly be qualified with "strictly speaking" are correct and true; whereby truth is relative to only one standard instead of multiple standards. Similar to error theory in ethics, in terms of making a certain sort of common statement false, except that it's not specifically about moral statements.

I'm not making that counterargument, just bringing up its possibility. Although, perhaps to its advantage, it does seem a bit counterintuitive to say that these sort of ordinary language statements are correct and true, when, strictly speaking, they're neither. They might be understandable, expected, ordinary and normal - perhaps even appropriate - but the claim that they're correct and true is a stronger claim. It is intuitive for me to think in reaction to those several people, "No, you didn't see the same person, you saw my brother and I, and we are not the same person." (My brother and I are "identical" or monozygotic twins). Rather than having two truths, you'd have a truth and a falsity.

Wosret

↪Sapientia

Nope, you're identical, and the same in every way. Stop spending your lives polarizing, and denying it.

Did Berkeley Goof?

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