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Lecture Notes for Nov. 23
Berkeley: Introduction to PHK
George Berkeley (1685-1753).
Trinity College, BA 1704, elected junior fellow 1707. Ordained 1709. 1713: in
London. 1713-14: in Sicily as chaplain to Earl of Peterborough. 1716-20: on
continent as tutor to George Ashe. 1721: senior fellow at Trinity. 1724: made
Dean of Derry. 1724-8: in London to lobby for college in Bermuda. 1728:
married. 1728-31: in America, chiefly Newport RI. 1734: Made Bishop of
Cloyne. 1752: resigned bishopric.
Principal writings:
1709: New Theory of Vision
1710: Principles of Human Knowledge (2nd ed. 1734)
1713: Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous
1721: De Motu
1732: Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher
1733: The Theory of Vision Vindicated and Explained
1734: The Analyst
1735: A Defense of Freethinking in Mathematics
1744: Siris: the Virtues of Tar-water
Hume sent Berkeley his Treatise of Human Nature around 1738, but so far as is
known received no reply.
1. The Principles of Human Knowledge is a young man’s work par excellence.
Although not Berkeley’s first major philosophical treatise, it is his masterpiece,
and he published it at age 25. [Berkeley’s first major treatise, A New Theory of
Vision, should be read with PHK, which it supplements in crucial ways.] This is
an absolutely incredible achievement: here we are reading the work of a man of 25
written nearly 300 years ago. At that age, neither Raphael nor Mozart had yet
achieved works of a comparable order of genius in their respective fields of
endeavor.
2. Nevertheless, the Principles didn’t make quite the splash Berkeley expected, so
he followed it up with another, more accessible work, written in dialogue form.
This book, Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous [’Hylas’ from Greek for
matter defends materialism, ‘Philonous’ from Greek for lover of mind/spirit], was
an immediate success, making Berkeley one of the hits of the London literary
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season, including an introduction at court to Queen Anne by his fellow Irishman,
Jonathan Swift, the author of Gulliver’s Travels.
3. By profession a clergyman, Berkeley served in various posts that involved his
traveling around Europe and eventually to America. Finally, he received a secure
position in northern Ireland with a good income and, in his 50s, was raised to the
rank of Bishop of Cloyne in the established Protestant church.
All the while he continued publishing on a variety of topics – philosophical,
theological, political, medical, mathematical, scientific, etc. [Berkeley objected
strongly to the standard literalist interpretation of calculus and Newton’s realist use
of it to represent natural phenomena.] Nevertheless, the Principles remains his
masterpiece, the work that assures his place near the summit of the philosophical
canon.
Principles: origin, purpose
1. The Principles was originally planned to consist of four parts. For unknown
reasons, Berkeley never pursued his plan to completion. He did produce a
manuscript of part II but this was lost on a sea voyage and he never rewrote it.
Instead, he made a few amendments to part I for the second edition in 1734, mostly
terminological, particularly as concerns the mind (no ideas of mental actions and
passions, only notions, the term ‘idea’ being reserved for sensations and copies of
sensation in memory and imagination).
2. The Principles begins with a look at the current state of philosophy and a
diagnosis of the reason why it is in such a dismal state.
Philosophers espouse principles they suppose to be certain and indubitable, but
when they pursue them to their consequences, they inevitably “run into absurdities
and contradictions.” And with the application of each new fix or patch to escape
unwanted implications, new difficulties always seem to crop up elsewhere.
3. Yet, philosophers have a convenient way of rationalizing this predicament:
having premised the great infirmity of human understanding in their philosophies,
they have no difficulty explaining the shortcomings of their own systems in terms
of that same infirmity, thus shifting the blame from their own defective
philosophizing to the supposed incapacity of the human mind to fully and
definitively resolve philosophical problems.
4. To Berkeley, these excuses are too easy. Like mathematics, philosophy
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proceeds by intuitively evident deductions; and so long as these deductions are
performed with the strictest care, they should never “end in consequences which
cannot be maintained or made consistent.” If this happens none the less, the
proper conclusion to draw is that the fault lies with the premises, and
ultimately the supposedly certain and indubitable principles on which
everything else rests.
5. Here, Berkeley thinks, a new start can be made. It is his conviction that if our
minds have the capacity to ask a question, i.e. if the question is real and legitimate,
then it must also lie within our capacity to answer it, and to do so in such a way as
to avoid giving rise to new absurdities and contradictions.
6. The fault lies not with human understanding, whose contents (ideas) are
impossible to mistake and never ambiguous: an idea is either there or it is not, and
if it is there, it must appear exactly as it is in reality and be in reality everything it
appears to be. It lies instead with the principles of understanding philosophers
have been led to adapt because of prejudice and preconception. So long as we
persist in these principles, we just raise “a dust, and then complain, we cannot see.”
7. Berkeley thesis is that the principal source of erroneous principles is a
misunderstanding of the nature of language and his objective in the introduction to
PHK is to correct it at its source.
8. Its source is the tendency of philosophers to correlate the semantic abstractions
of language, useful and at times indispensable though they are, to abstract ideas in
the mind, on the principle that in order for any word to have real, objective
significance, there must be an idea in the mind corresponding to it which it
primarily and immediately signifies.
9. The universal remedy to this illusion is to set words aside, examine our ideas
directly, and determine what knowledge can and cannot be yielded by them:
Since therefore words are so apt to impose on the understanding, whatever
ideas I consider, I shall endeavour to take them bare and naked into my
view, keeping out of my thoughts so far as I am able, those names which
long and constant use hath so strictly united with them... [W]e need only
draw the curtain of words to behold the fairest tree of knowledge, whose
fruit is excellent and within the reach of our hand. (PHK Intro. §21 and §24;
p. 469 and p. 470).
4.
Targeting abstract ideas
1. Berkeley made Locke the principal target of his critique against systematic
isomorphism not because he viewed him as more culpable than other abstractionist
philosophers but, quite the contrary, because he saw the role of abstract ideas in
Locke’s philosophy as a last vestige of traditional metaphysics (Platonism,
Cartsian images of true and immutable natures, etc.) without which Locke might
himself have transformed sensibilist theory of understanding in the manner
Berkeley was left to do (C[ommonplace Books] §§ 567, 678, and 811).
2. By discarding this remnant, Berkeley believed he could achieve what Locke
professed to do (ECHU IV/vi/§1) but never quite did (PHK Intr.-draft 381-2): free
ideas from their verbal accouterments and behold them entirely “bare and
naked.”
3. When this is done the first thing to go are material substances, which prove to
be incompatible with the essential nature of everything present to us in sensation.
The same fate befalls Locke’s notion of ideas of diverse senses and his distinction
between ideas of primary and secondary qualities.
4. Although causality, by contrast, retains objective validity, a correct
understanding of the nature of language results in the restriction of its scope to the
actions and passions of minds, so that nothing in the sensible realm (the earth,
human bodies, landslides, etc.) can be understood as causally efficacious.
5. Likewise, temporal ideas (succession and duration), which Locke traced to an
origin in the reflexive perception of the successive actions of our minds, now find
their sphere of application demarcated by their origin: “A succession of ideas I take
to constitute Time, and not to be only the sensible measure thereof, as Mr. Locke
and others think” (Letter to Johnson, March 24, 1730).
6. These and similar changes can be summed up by the term “idealism”. The key
thing to recognize is that all depend on the rejection of abstract ideas in the
Introduction to the Principles. And for this reason the critique of abstract ideas
was Berkeley’s most important and influential contribution to the history of
modern philosophy through Kant (both Hume and Kant were idealists in much the
same sense Berkeley was).
Berkeley’s critique of Locke: a false start
5.
1. The main obstacle in the way of appreciating the actual import of Berkeley’s
analysis is his misrepresentation of Locke’s view as far more different from his
own than it really is. Because the target is so inflated, Berkeley’s critique of
abstract ideas tends to be more scattershot and less focused than it could and
should be.
2. According to Berkeley, Locke holds “that the mind can frame to it self by
abstraction the idea of colour exclusive of extension, and of motion exclusive of
both colour and extension” (PHK Intr. §7). Or, alternatively, by “leaving out” the
differences in what it finds resembling, the mind “considers apart or singles out by
it self that which is common.”
3. In this way, Berkeley’s Locke supposes that
we are able to form a most abstract idea of extension, which is neither line,
surface, nor solid, nor has any figure or magnitude but is an idea entirely
prescinded from all these. So likewise the mind by leaving out of the
particular colours perceived by sense, that which distinguishes them one from
another, and retaining that only which is common to all, makes an idea of
colour in abstract which is neither red, nor blue, nor white, nor any other
determinate colour. (§8; p. 464)
4. Berkeley’s last example is particularly revealing in view of the real Locke’s
assertion that “there is nothing can be left out of the Idea of White and Red, to
make them agree in one common appearance,” so that ‘color’, far from signifying
an abstract idea of the kind Berkeley describes, is nothing but “a Word, which
denotes only the way they get into the Mind” (ECHU III/iv/§16).
5. Berkeley evidently overlooked this illustration of Locke’s view (which he
affirmed both of all simple ideas and of complex ideas of simple modes such as
figure in geometry) that because “simple Ideas, and their Names, ... have but few
Ascents in linea prædicamentali ... from the lowest Species, to the summum
Genus,” we are completely dependent on words to attain the more general views
on which our most cognitively parturient propositional thought depends.
6. Thus, Berkeley’s failure to recognize that Locke limited abstract ideas to
elements that agree in sensible appearance and traced the rest to irreducibly
linguistic abstractive considerations undercuts his claim that Locke supposed that
we cannot form general concepts of color, extension, or humanity (PHK Intr. §9)
except by means of abstract ideas in which “numberless inconsistencies” are
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“tacked together” (§14).
Also it is as good as an explicit denial of the abstractionist isomorphism
Berkeley rejected, at least the crudest kind, with one-to-one correspondences of
words to abstract ideas. For ECHU III/iv/§16 expressly denies that there are
abstract ideas corresponding to any but the least general semantic abstractions.
7. Berkeley’s characterizations of Lockean abstract ideas in PHK Intr. §§ 7 - 9
point to a still more fundamental misapprehension. While Locke does indeed
employ such locutions as “consider singly”, “single out by it self”, and “leave out,”
Berkeley supposed this to mean that “a general abstract idea ... prescinds from the
species or individuals comprehended under it” (A Defense of Freethinking in
Mathematics §45): visual ideas of extension without color, color without
extension, or motion without extension and color; of a human who has neither
male nor female characteristics; of an animal that is neither naked nor covered with
hair, feathers, or scales; of a body without any particular shape or figure; and so
on.
8. In other words, Berkeley seems to have thought that there is only one way
Lockean “leaving out” can be construed: the literal excision of contents from ideas
of sensation or their images in thought so that what results is not possible as a
concrete, sensible image at all (that is, not a possible object of imagination, in the
sense that everything imaginable is ipso facto capable of being given in sensation
as well).
9. However, there is another way of construing Locke: instead of leaving contents
out of the idea itself, we leave out certain of its contents from our consideration of
the idea, so that “forming an abstract idea” simply means limiting our
consideration of a concrete individual object (in sensation or thought) to certain
features of it, to the exclusion of others – abstraction as selective attention.
10. For example, if I picture my father to myself, I can use this concrete, fully
determinate image to form the abstract idea of a man by leaving out of my
consideration of it – without in any way altering the image itself – all the features
in it which distinguish him from James, David, Thomas, and other men. Using the
same image I started with, I can produce the idea of a human being by leaving out
of my consideration of the image everything that differentiates my father from
Wanda, Hortense, Abigail, and other women, again without compromising the
concrete particularity of my image in the least.
And this process can be continued in relation to Rex the Wonder Horse
(animal), the fern on the sill (complex living being), the pendulum clock
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(complex being), and so on, without my ever being obliged to extract so much as a
hair on the head from my image of my father in order to make it abstract.
Or, alternatively, I can attend solely to the color of my father’s skin and ignore
everything else about his physiognomy, and then use it to denote all things of the
same pinkish pallor indifferently, regardless of whether they bear the least
resemblance to my father, or to men, humans, animals, living things, or corporeal
things in general.
Indifferent denotation
1. To determine whether the latter conception of abstract general ideas differs in
any significant regard from Berkeley’s own, let us turn back from Locke to
Berkeley and examine how he explained universals. According to Berkeley,
universality, so far as I can comprehend, not consisting in the absolute,
positive nature or conception of any thing, but in the relation it bears to the
particulars signified or represented by it: by virtue whereof it is that things,
names or notions, being in their own nature particular, are rendered universal.
(PHK Intr. §15; also §§ 126-8)
2. For example, “Considering length without breadth is considering any length be
the Breadth what it will” (C §722). The line in idea, whether in sensation or
imagination, is completely determinate and individual. In considering it
universally, we do not alter the idea itself in any way, we merely put it to use as a
sign. I shall use the term indifferent denotation to designate the account of
general representation propounded by Berkeley (p. 466):
an idea, which considered in itself is particular, becomes general, by being
made to represent or stand for all other particular ideas of the same sort. To
make this plain by an example, suppose a geometrician is demonstrating the
method, of cutting a line in two equal parts. He draws, for instance, a black
line of an inch in length, this which in it self is a particular line is nevertheless
with regard to its signification general, since as it is there used, it represents
all particular lines whatsoever; for what is demonstrated of it, is demonstrated
of all lines or, in other words, of a line in general. And as that particular line
becomes general, by being made a sign, so the name line which taken
absolutely is particular, by being a sign is made general. And as the former
owes its generality, not to its being the sign of an abstract or general line, but
of all particular right lines that may possibly exist, so the latter must be
thought to derive its generality from the same cause, namely, the various
particular lines which it indifferently denotes. (PHK Intr. §12)
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3. The same line (i.e. the same idea of a line present to us in sensation [seen or
touched] or imagination [visualized, imaged tactually]) may have innumerable
indifferent denotations, corresponding to what we call ‘line’, ‘inch’, ‘black’,
‘length’, and so on. In each of these significative uses, it indifferently represents
all possible particular ideas that agree with the denotation, without regard to the
differences between them qua sensations or images. Thus, an idea, “in itself
particular,” becomes general because of the significative use to which it is put,
without itself changing in any way (losing any of its concrete individuality).
4. How then did Berkeley explain what the mind does when it singles out one of
the many possible significative uses (indifferent denotations) of which any given
idea admits? Here is where the question of whether and how Berkeley differs from
Locke starts to become acute. For the answer Berkeley offers seems
indistinguishable from the second way of construing Lockean “leaving out”
described earlier:
though the idea I have in view whilst I make the demonstration be, for
instance, that of an isosceles rectangular triangle whose sides are of a
determine length, I may nevertheless be certain it extends to all other
rectilinear triangles, of what sort or bigness soever. And that because neither
the right angle, nor the equality, nor determinate length of the sides are at all
concerned in the demonstration. It is true the diagram I have in view includes
all these particulars; but then there is not the least mention of them in the
proof of the proposition. It is not said the three angles are equal to two right
ones, because one of them is a right angle, or because the sides
comprehending it are of the same length. Which sufficiently shews that the
right angle might have been oblique, and the sides unequal, and for all that the
demonstration have held good. And for this reason it is that I conclude that to
be true of any obliquangular or scalenon which I had demonstrated of a
particular right-angled equicrural triangle, and not because I demonstrated of a
particular right-angled equicrural triangle, and not because I demonstrated the
proposition of the abstract idea of a triangle. And here it must be
acknowledged that a man may consider a figure merely as triangular; without
attending to the particular qualities of the angles, or relations of the sides. So
far he may abstract. But this will never prove that he can frame an abstract
general inconsistent idea of a triangle. In like manner we may consider Peter
so far forth as man, or so far forth as animal, without framing the
forementioned abstract idea, either of man or of animal; inasmuch as all that is
perceived is not considered. (PHK Intr. §16; pp. 467-8)
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5. The figure I employ in a demonstration relating to all triangles is inevitably
equilateral, isosceles, or scalene, of a definite size, with angles of definite
inclination, etc. How do I single out this indifferent denotation (triangles in
general) from among all the others I could have used this same figure to signify? I
do it by considering only those features of the figure pertinent to this indifferent
denotation, without attending to all the other features – features that, if I considered
the figure with a different indifferent denotation in mind, I might have needed to
take into consideration. Thus, for Berkeley, the difference between one indifferent
denotation and another seems to be entirely an affair of selective attention.
6. Yet, is this not precisely the view Locke expounded twenty years earlier? So it
seems:
Words are general ... when used for Signs of general Ideas; and so are
applicable indifferently to many particular Things. And Ideas are general,
when they are set up, as the representatives of many particular Things: but
universality belongs not to things themselves, which are all of them
particular in their Existence, even those Words, and Ideas, which in their
signification, are general. When therefore we quit Particulars, the Generals
that rest, are only Creatures of our own making, their general Nature being
nothing but the Capacity they are put into by the Understanding, of signifying
or representing many particulars. For the signification they have, is nothing
but a relation, that by the mind of Man is added to them. (ECHU III/iii/§11)
7. If you compare this with what Berkeley says in §§12-16, I defy you to detect
any basic difference between their views on the generality of ideas. Just as
Berkeley held that “a word becomes general by being made the sign, not of an
abstract general idea but, of several particular ideas, any one of which it
indifferently suggests to the mind” (PHK Intr. §11), so did Locke assert that
words become “applicable indifferently to many particular Things” when used as
signs for ideas “which are all of them particular in their Existence.” Just as for
Berkeley, ideas, which are “in themselves particular,” become general by virtue
of “the relation [each] bears to the particulars signified or represented by it,” so
too, for Locke, ideas are not general in themselves but only by virtue of the
significative use “they are put into by the Understanding,” so that generality is
“nothing but a relation, that by the mind of Man is added to them.”
8. Surely, if Berkeley were correct in thinking his view diametrically opposed to
Locke’s in the way he claimed, we should not expect to encounter a passage like
this in Locke. Prolix Locke may be; difficult sometimes to pin down; but, up to
this point, there is no daylight between Berkeley’s conception of universality and
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his:
Every Man’s Reasoning and Knowledge, is only about the Ideas existing in
his own Mind, which are truly, every one of them, particular Existences...
Universality is but accidental to [knowledge], and consists only in this, That
the particular Ideas, about which it is, are such, as more than one particular
Thing can correspond with, and be represented by. (ECHU IV/xvii/§8).
9. Berkeley does cite a text in which Locke may seem to embrace the view he
accuses him of doing (on the h/o I-B rather than II-A). I don’t want to take time to
analyze the text and show you why I don’t think the text proves what Berkeley
says it does. Suffice it to say that this text is not about abstraction or generality at
all but a quite different point. It is a point Locke initially made in Bk I, long before
he analyzed abstraction and generality, in the course of debunking the evidence in
favor of innatism, and it is in the context of innatism that he recalled it in Bk IV.
If we remember his insistence elsewhere that abstraction is a way of
considering ideas that are in themselves concrete and individual, and his view that
abstraction without language can afford us only the most basis general views, then
we’ll see that Berkeley’s reading of this text does not stand up under scrutiny.
So instead of dallying any longer, let us move forward to see how Berkeley’s
account of abstraction truly differs from Locke’s.
The separability principle: the cardinal tenet of Berkeley’s theory of ideas
1. The key point of difference is the separability principle Berkeley formulates in
§10 (p. 465):
Whether others have this wonderful faculty of abstracting their ideas, they
best can tell: for my self I find indeed I have a faculty of imagining, or
representing to my self the ideas of those particular things I have perceived
and of variously compounding and dividing them. I can imagine a man with
two heads or the upper parts of a man joined to the body of a horse. I can
consider the hand, the eye, the nose, each by itself abstracted or separated
from the rest of the body. But then whatever hand or eye I imagine, it must
have some particular shape and colour. Likewise the idea of man that I frame
to my self, must be either of a white, or a black, or a tawny, a straight, or a
crooked, a tall, or a low, or a middle-sized man... To be plain, I own my self
able to abstract in one sense, as when I consider some particular parts or
qualities separated from others, with which though they are united in some
object, yet, it is possible they may really exist without them. But I deny that I
can abstract one from another, or conceive separately, those qualities which it
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is impossible should exist so separated. (PHK Intr. §10)
2. This principle would be taken over by Hume and made the centerpiece of his
philosophy, and Kant too would take it over from Hume though with subtle but
important alterations.
3. As formulated by Berkeley, the separability principle concerns “the discerning
faculty,” imagination. Imagination can separate ideas to the extent that real
differences can be discerned between them. By what criterion can we fix the
bounds of the imagination’s powers of discernment? Obviously, not the physical
impossibility that things should exist so separated: the faculty that can join the
upper part of a man to the body of a horse is certainly not constrained by
mammalian biology; aerodynamics do not prevent it from conjuring up flying
horses; and relativity theory does not prevent it from transporting itself to distant
stars in the blink of an eye.
4. The limits of imagination coincide instead with the scope of possible sense
perception (‘perception’ understood as the most elementary level of consciousness,
cf. ECHU II/ix): “nothing enters the imagination which from the nature of the
thing cannot be perceived by sense, since indeed the imagination is nothing else
than the faculty which represents sensible things either actually existing or at least
possible” (De Motu §5).
5. Berkeley’s criterion for determining the scope of possible sense perception (=
imagination) is whatever could still appear to us even if every trace of past
experience, education, and reasoning were obliterated: “those things alone are
actually and strictly perceived by any sense, which would have been perceived, in
case that same sense had then been first conferred on us” (First Dialogue 204).
Thus, Berkeley’s separability principle is the thesis that the human
imagination is only able to conceive “separately such objects, as it is possible
may ... be actually perceived asunder,” but “does not extend beyond the
possibility of ... perception” (PHK I §5).
6. We have seen that the difference between using an idea in one indifferent
denotation as distinct from others consists in selective attention: if my idea is a
scalene triangle, I can attend to the inclination of its sides and the size of its angles
and so use it to signify all and only scalene triangles; or I can leave these features
out of consideration and use it to signify all and only triangles, i.e. indifferently to
whether they are scalene, isosceles, or equilateral; or I can leave out the fact that it
encloses a space by means of three straight lines and use it to signify all and only
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polygons; or I can leave out the straightness of the lines and use it signify all and
only figures that enclose a two-dimensional area; or leave out its twodimensionality and use it to signify all and only figures that enclose an area of any
dimensionality; or leave out its serving to enclose an area and use it to signify all
and only figures of every kind; and so on.
7. For Berkeley, selective attention is unobjectionable so long as the items
differentiated in it are distinct by the criterion of the separability principle. But
Locke went well beyond this, supposing that such things as the visible shape of the
triangle and its particular light and color (chromatic illumination) are not just
distinct significative uses of the same idea but distinct ideas in their own right,
each the object of its own separate act of abstractive consideration. Distinctions
like this clearly fail the separability principle test since it is impossible (even in
idea, not merely physically) to see this shape in the absence of this pattern of light
and color, or to see this pattern of light and color in the absence of the shape.
8. The distinction between the timbre and pitch of a tone likewise fails the test
because it is impossible to hear timbreless pitches or pitchless timbres; as does the
distinction of a line from its length, a motion from its swiftness or its swiftness
from its acceleration, a color from its particular hue, the heat of a skillet one
touches from the pain, etc.
9. Features we ascribe to ideas that fail the separability principle test may be
termed aspects of these ideas, and the corresponding mental faculty, affirmed by
Locke but denied by Berkeley, aspect discrimination: the capacity to selectively
attend to an image in such a way as to immediately discriminate features in it
(aspects) that cannot be perceived in the absence of one another (“distinctions of
reason,” as early moderns often termed them).
10. For Berkeley, distinctions of reason (aspects) are not distinctions of ideas at all
because nothing can pertain to our ideas that fails to meet the criterion of the
separability principle. Aspects are completely illusory, a misapprehension of what
in fact are merely distinct indifferent denotations (significative uses) of one and the
same idea:
Qu. is it not impossible there should be General ideas? All ideas come from
without, they are all particular. The mind, tis true, can consider one thing
without another, but then consider’d asunder they make not 2 ideas. both
together can make but one as for instance Colour & Visible extension. (C
§318)
13.
11. What is true of abstract differences is true as well of abstract common qualities.
For example, even while denying that there is any common quality that can be
immediately discriminated in red and yellow for the word ‘color’ to signify, Locke
affirmed that there is such a quality in the case of, say, scarlet and burgundy for
‘red’ to signify (ECHU III/iv/§16).
For Berkeley, however, this is just an illusion wrought by the semantic
abstractions of language. Just as there is no special capacity of aspect
discrimination, there is none that allows us to attend to the common aspects of
ideas either. There are only the individual hues themselves, distinct according to
the criterion of the separability principle, with nothing objectively in them to
account for our grouping them under the same term.
12. Of course, the utility of so doing is obvious; and since we tend to think of them
as forming a spectrum from light to dark, we are also apt to choose hues falling
roughly in the middle as the “best” paradigms of this concept. But if we have any
inclination to consider this paradigm, or anything else pertaining to the appearance
of these hues, as “common” to them all, Berkeley’s separability principle
immediately intervenes to prevent us. We find these hues to resemble one another
but not the hues we group under ‘yellow’, ‘orange’, ‘blue’, etc., not because we are
endowed with a special faculty of aspect discrmination that enables us to
immediately discern some intrinsic common quality in the former that is lacking
in the latter but simply because, upon comparison (of ideas distinct from one
another in accordance with the criterion of the separability principle), we find them
to resemble one another but not any of the others (resemblance is an extrinsic
relation between things distinct under the separability principle).
13. And here we arrive at the crux of the divergence between a philosopher who,
like Locke, affirms and a philosopher who, like Berkeley, denies aspect
discrimination. For the former, resemblances are sometimes a function of the
aspects we immediately discriminate in an idea, prior to and independently of
comparisons to other ideas, and which might in principle have been evident to us
from the moment we first became acquainted with the idea. For the latter, aspects
are merely a shadow cast on ideas by their different significations, and
resemblance is a strictly relational affair – a function entirely of the comparison
of ideas distinct from one another according to the criterion of the separability
principle.
14. So, even though Berkeley’s account of generality per se is for all intents and
purposes indistinguishable from Locke’s, they diverged radically in their
conception of the capacity whereby the mind abstracts its ideas preliminary to
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employing them as universals to indifferently denote other (equally particular)
ideas.
15. It thus becomes clear that Berkeley, thanks to his separability principle, was in
the end correct to distinguish his view of universality from those of Locke and
every other previous philosopher in terms of an absolute, unqualified rejection of
abstract ideas (“words become general by being made to stand indiscriminately for
all particular ideas which from a mutual resemblance belong to the same kind,
without the intervention of any abstract general idea,” MP 7 §7). It is just that this
difference is considerably narrower and less drastic than Berkeley portrayed it to
his reader.
How error results from misunderstanding the nature of language
1. For Berkeley, the distinction between an idea “considered in itself” (PHK Intr.
§12) – the “absolute, positive ... conception of a thing” (Intr. §15) – and its
significative uses is absolutely fundamental: the same idea can have many such
uses, each of which requires us to consider it in a different (resemblance) relation.
Whereas for Locke, a new significative use is ipso facto a new idea, involving its
own distinctive considerative procedure of selective attention (sometimes to the
point of attending to different aspects), for Berkeley it is not invariably a new idea,
it may merely be a new signifying relation into which an existing idea is placed,
and aspect discrimination does not come into it at all.
2. What Locke thought of as different types of ideas, some specific to one sense,
others common to diverse senses – for example, “Sight, ... conveying to our Minds
the Ideas of Light and Colours, which are peculiar only to that Sense, and also the
far different Ideas of Space, Figure, and Motion” (ECHU II/ix/§9) – Berkeley
treated merely as an instance of “the embarrass and delusion of words”:
we can no more argue a visible and tangible square to be of the same species
from their being called by the same name, than we can that a tangible square
and the monosyllable consisting of six letters whereby it is marked are of the
same species because they are both called by the same name... The extension,
figures, and motions perceived by sight are specifically distinct from the ideas
of touch called by the same names, nor is there any such thing as one idea or
kind of idea common to both senses. (A New Theory of Vision §§ 140 and 127)
3. The greatest threat posed by language to the philosophy of human understanding
is that it reflects differences between the indifferent denotations of ideas
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exceedingly well, while being almost entirely insensitive to differences between
the ideas themselves:
Strictly speaking ... we do not see the same object that we feel... But in case
every variation was thought sufficient to constitute a new kind or individual,
the endless number or confusion of names would render language
impracticable. Therefore to avoid this as well as other inconveniences which
are obvious upon a little thought, men combine together several ideas,
apprehended by divers senses ... but observed however to have some
connection in nature, either with respect to co-existence or succession; all
which they refer to one name, and consider as one thing. (Third Dialogue,
245)
4. The reasons we assign the same words to certain visual and tactual denotations
have nothing to do with the qualitative character (similarity or difference) of the
ideas on which these indifferent denotations depend and everything to do with the
most ordinary, down-to-earth human purposes (“language being accommodated to
the prænotions of men and use of life, it is difficult to express therein the precise
truth of things, which is so distant from their use, and so contrary to our
prænotions,” New Theory of Vision Vindicated §35; also PHK I §52).
5. Though there is a great deal more to Berkeley’s explanation of the common
terminology of vision and touch, the basic point is clear: identity or diversity of
terms is never, in and of itself, evidence of the identity or diversity of the ideas they
signify. Though Locke went some way towards this realization, his conception of
generality as founded on (if not entirely explicable by) abstractive considerations,
with the implication that each new such consideration is a new idea, prevented him
from attaining the escape velocity requisite to break free of the powerful force of
the habitual “union ... betwixt words and ideas,” and so effect “an entire
deliverance from the deception of words” (PHK Intr. §23).
Towards a new philosophical ontology
1. One of the most common criticisms of Berkeley’s theory of understanding,
traceable back at least to Reid, is that it threatens a radical impoverishment of our
conceptual apparatus. As one 20th-century critic, Gareth Evans, put it:
Berkeley ..., constrained by a theory of concept formation that would not
allow for the formation of ideas of any other than sensory properties, ...
concluded that these spatial concepts [shape, motion, and hardness (solidity)]
were sensory concepts, but related to the sense of touch as heat is. This is
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possible only by supposing that the concept of solidity is a sensory concept, as
we have seen that it is not, and further, by supposing that the concept of the
motion of the subject, and of the parts of his body, are concepts of kinesthetic
experience, which they are not.
2. The response to this objection should now be obvious. For what Berkeley’s
critic means by ‘concepts’ – principally, general terms and whatever they are
correlated with in the mind – correspond to Berkeleyan indifferent denotations, i.e.
a significative use to which ideas are put, rather than to ideas as such (conceived
“absolutely,” “positively”, “in themselves”). Since the separability principle in no
way restricts our ability to form new indifferent denotations, it is potentially
limitless (especially after all the varieties of resemblance on which the signification
of ideas can be based are factored in).
3. In particular, the concepts that Berkeley supposedly would have to abjure are,
quite the contrary, easily explicated. Just as we can distinguish the indifferent
denotation of figure from that of color or timbre from pitch without postulating
aspects or otherwise violating the separability principle, we can just as easily
distinguish these pairs of indifferent denotations from the indifferent denotations is
perceived by sight and is perceived by hearing. Similarly, the indifferent
denotation solidity is distinguishable from the indifferent denotation is perceived
by touch, shape and motion from is perceived by sight or is perceived by touch, and
so on for all the other “concepts” Berkeley’s critic mentions.
4. Nor would Berkeley need to stop there: he could perfectly well allow that
these separated indifferent denotations may in turn be combined to yield new,
compound indifferent denotations to any complexity required in order to
accommodate all our expressive needs in thought or action – including one
coinciding with the concept of a “material object existing unperceived” which his
critic (Evans) mistakenly believed Berkeley incapable of explicating, owing to the
putative “poverty of the mechanisms of concept formation which the empiricists
recognized.”
5. This, again, is because limitations restrictive of the power of human
understanding to form ideas no more circumscribe its powers to distinguish and
combine the indifferent denotations of ideas than the senses prevent our
imagination from employing their data to fashion images of fantastical substances
with magic properties and powers unlike any encountered in actual sensory
experience.
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6. Yet the converse is true as well: the significative uses to which ideas can be put
no more enhance, extend, or otherwise alter the ideational powers of human
understanding than the imagination enhances, extends, or otherwise alters the
powers of the senses to furnish ideas of sensation (for images are always only
possible sense perceptions). And, most important of all, the limitless potential to
vary and combine the significative uses of ideas does nothing to free the ideas
themselves from the far stricter criterion of distinguishability enshrined in the
separability principle:
Nothing is easier than to define in terms or words that which is
incomprehensible in idea; forasmuch as any words can be either separated or
joined as you please, but ideas always cannot ... take a little care to distinguish
between the definition and the idea, between words or expressions and the
conceptions of the mind. (A Defense of Freethinking in Mathematics §48)
7. What made the separability principle so important to Berkeley was his use of it
as an ontological touchstone: a means of deciding which of the things we can
conceive by means of indifferent denotations correspond to things actually
existing, or capable of existing, in the real world disclosed to us in and through our
ideas.
In the context of his sensibilist theory of ideas, this “real world” is one and the
same with “the sensible world”, i.e. the reality to which our only immediate access
is by means of the senses with which our minds happen to be endowed, viz. ideas.
8. Using this standard, we can, for example, (i) conclude from the fact that we
cannot hear pitchless timbres or timbreless pitches that the pitch and timbre of
tones do not exist in reality, only tones do; (ii) conclude from the fact that space is
impossible to perceive visually independently of color and light, and impossible to
perceive tactually independently of distinctively tactual qualities such as soft/hard,
wet/dry, and warm/cool, that neither space nor any of its simple modes are ideas
common to vision and touch; and (iii) conclude from the fact that apples, houses,
mountains, and other objects in the natural world are not distinguished in idea
(only in indifferent denotation) from is perceived by sight, touch, hearing, smell,
and/or taste that their being is being perceived (esse is percipi).
9. In all these cases, perfectly legitimate semantic distinctions of indifferent
denotation fail to translate into ideational distinctions; and since for Berkeley, just
as for Locke, ideas are the only real existents ever present to our thought, no
exclusively semantic distinction can be accorded the least ontological meaning
or objective validity.
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10. Lacking ontological worth does not of course detract from the usefulness of a
semantic distinction:
To trace things from their original, it seems that the human mind, naturally
furnished with the ideas of things particular and concrete, and being designed,
not for the bare intuition of ideas, but for action and operations about them,
and pursuing her own happiness therein, stands in need of certain general
rules or theorems to direct her operations in this pursuit, the supplying which
want is the true, original, reasonable end of studying the arts and sciences.
Now, these rules being general, it follows that they are not to be obtained by
the mere consideration of the original ideas, or particular things, but by the
means of marks and signs, which, being so far forth universal, become the
immediate instruments and materials of science. It is not, therefore, by mere
contemplation of particular things, and much less of their abstract
general ideas, that the mind makes her progress, but by an apposite
choice and skilful management of signs: for instance, force and number.
(Alciphron or the Minute Philosopher 7 §11)
11. Because the concepts employed in the sciences seldom if ever pass the
separability principle test, they reflect not the nature of things but of signs. For this
reason, even our most objective-seeming scientific notions are, in the end, mere
fictions, with no relation whatsoever to “the truth of things”:
just as geometers for the sake of their art make use of many devices which
they themselves cannot describe nor find in the nature of things, even so the
mechanician makes use of certain abstract and general terms, imagining in
bodies force, action, attraction, solicitation, etc. which are of the first utility
for theories and formulations, as also for computations about motion, even if
in the truth of things, and in bodies actually existing, they would be looked
for in vain, just like the geometers’ fictions made by mathematical
abstraction. (De Motu §39)
12. Significative uses, however indispensable they may be to human thought and
action, play a completely different kind of role in the economy of human
understanding than ideas. To accord objective, ontological worth to them even in
the face of the separability principle, no matter how tempting we may find it, can
result in nothing but illusion:
About general and abstract terms men may make mistakes; they see their
value in argument, but they do not appreciate their purpose. In part the terms
have been invented by common habit to abbreviate speech, and in part they
have been thought out by philosophers for instructional purposes, not that they
are adapted to the natures of things which are in fact singulars and concrete,
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but they come in useful for handing on received opinions by making the
notions or at least the propositions universal. (De Motu d§7)
13. Significative uses are an incredibly effective means of exploiting frequently
encountered resemblances among ideas to integrate and order them in ways that
otherwise are impossible, with indisputable benefit to our species. Yet if the only
objects with which we are, or can ever be, acquainted are the ideas immediately
present to us in sensation, then semantic distinctions that have neither meaning nor
validity with respect to ideas cannot even be conceived to have objective worth,
much less actually have it.
14. The moral is that we should never confuse our success in operating with such
distinctions with evidence of their correspondence to reality (C §727). For this
success does not make them any less mere signs, or any more a new mode of
perception comparable to the senses:
We actually perceive by the aid of the senses nothing except the effects or
sensible qualities and corporeal things entirely passive, whether in motion or
at rest; and reason and experience advise us that there is nothing active except
mind or soul. Whatever else is imagined must be considered to be of a kind
with other hypotheses and mathematical abstractions. This ought to be laid to
heart; otherwise we are in danger of sliding back into the obscure subtlety of
the Schoolmen, which for so many ages like some dread plague, has corrupted
philosophy. (De Motu §40)