Idealism: objections
Michael Lacewing
enquiries@alevelphilosophy.co.uk
Unperceived objects
• When objects are not being perceived, then
they don’t exist!
• There was a young man who said, God
must find it exceedingly odd
when He finds that the tree
continues to be
when no one’s about in the Quad.
The response
• Dear Sir, your astonishment’s odd,
I’m always about in the Quad.
And that’s why the tree
continues to be
since observed by, yours faithfully, God.
• Ideas we perceive are not just caused by
God’s mind, but exist in God’s mind
– Though not perceived by God.
Illusions
• How can idealism explain
illusions?
– Since we perceive ideas, there
must be an idea that
corresponds to the illusion.
• We aren’t misperceiving in an
illusion, e.g. a ‘crooked’
pencil
– But we make a mistake if we
think it would still be crooked
out of water
– To mark this, we rightly say,
‘The pencil looks crooked’.
Hallucinations
• What about hallucinations?
– Hallucinations are dim, irregular, and confused
– The idea perceived is part of the order of nature
(coherent reality)
– The idea is caused by the mind of God.
• Objection: these only mark differences of degree,
but hallucination is different in kind from
perception
– Berkeley can agree: the third criteria marks a
difference in kind (if there is one)
– And these are criteria for how we can tell, not what
hallucinations are.
Scientific investigation
• In science, we manipulate objects to gain
new perceptual experiences (e.g.
dissection). How does idealism explain what
is happening?
• The thing we see, e.g. under the
microscope, is not the same thing as seen
with the naked eye – each idea is distinct
– Language functions to pick out bundles of ideas
that are typically connected
– Science doesn’t investigate the ‘true nature’ of
some unified object.
Scientific investigation
• Physical objects, as ideas, can’t cause
anything, e.g. the heart can’t pump
blood
– Science doesn’t discover causal relations
between physical objects.
• Science investigates the regularities in
our experiences, the connections
between them.
Objectivity
• How can you and I see the same tree
when the idea in your mind is numerically
distinct from the idea in my mind?
– The ideas are exactly resembling – it’s the
same tree in that sense.
• This isn’t enough: there is only one tree
– We both perceive a copy of the idea of the
tree in God’s mind.
• Objective space and time exist in the
mind of God.
Solipsism
• Solipsism: the view that only oneself,
one’s mind, exists.
• If everything that I perceive is minddependent, do I have any reason to
think that anything exists apart from
my mind?
– In fact, does anything exist apart from
ideas? Does even my mind exist as a thing?
Reply
• The mind is that which (actively) perceives, thinks, and
wills, while ideas are passive.
• I am aware of myself as capable of this activity.
• Therefore, I am not my ideas, but a mind.
• Being a mind myself, I have a ‘notion’ of what a mind is.
• Therefore, it is possible that other minds exist.
• My perceptions don’t originate in my mind.
• Therefore, they are caused by some other mind.
• The complexity, regularity, etc., of my experience
indicates that this mind is God.
• (I can also infer from experience that other minds exist.)
On God
• (The existence and role of God is not assumed but
reached by argument.)
• What I perceive is in my mind, not God’s mind.
• God can’t have the sorts of perceptual experiences I
have
• God doesn’t perceive as I do, and does not undergo
sensations, such as pain.
• The ordinary objects of my perception change and
go out of existence, but God’s mind is said to be
unchanging and eternal.
• Therefore, what I perceive couldn’t be part of God’s
mind.
Response
• What I perceive is a copy of the idea in God’s mind.
• The ideas of physical objects exist in God’s mind not
as perceptions, but as part of God’s understanding.
So while God doesn’t feel pain, he knows what it is
for us to feel pain.
• The whole of creation exists in God’s mind,
eternally.
• What I perceive, which changes, is what God wills
me to perceive, and ‘things…may properly be said
to begin their existence…when God decreed they
should become perceptible to intelligent creatures’.