In his recent post, Alan Fox mentions Samuel Johnson in defense of the existence of external reality. He is referring, of course, to Johnson’s famous criticism of Berkeley’s idealism as described by Johnson’s biographer, James Boswell:
After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satsified his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, “I refute it thus.”
Johnson’s “refutation” has always struck me as weak and based on a misunderstanding of idealism. Did Johnson think that if idealism were true, his foot would pass through the stone unimpeded?
While I accept (provisionally) the existence of the external world, I also think that an idealism in which sight is illusory is surely capable of manifesting an illusory sense of solidity as well. Kicking the stone proved nothing.
Thus I refute Johnson, though I’m sure I’m not the first to do so.
Having the students explain why Johnson’s refutation would not have persuaded Berkeley is a standard exercise.
Somewhere — I don’t recall exactly where, though it may be in the Enquiry — Hume remarks that Berkeley “failed to convince anyone that his views were irrefutable.” Or words to that effect.
Whether anyone has refuted Berkeley, or whether Berkeley could be refuted, is a much-debated topic. My own view is that Berkeley’s views rest on a Cartesian conception of mind, and some equivocation over the sense of “physical object”.
If you insist on a Cartesian conception of mind, in which the mind only has direct access to its own “inner” contents (e.g. ideas, imaginings, sensations), and then say that “physical object” just means “a bundle of sensations”, then one can arrive quite quickly at the view that everything “physical” is actually “mental”.
The rest is just filling in the details — like arguing that we invented the idea of “space” in order to explain the discrepancy between visual sensations and tactile sensations, etc.
On the other hand, if one rejects the Cartesian conception of mind, then Berkeley’s views just don’t even get their way out of the gate.
KN,
True, though a Cartesian conception of mind is also compatible with realism, of course. It’s just that everything real is experienced indirectly, through the mind.
I cannot read Johnson’s mind, so it is a bit hard to say what he was arguing.
As I see it, Berkeley’s idealism depends on the assumption that perception is the passive receiving of input.
In my opinion, human cognition is inexplicable on that assumption of passive perception. One possible way of reading Johnson, is that he was demonstrating that we actively generate input.
Of course, Berkeley would never has accepted that refutation.
Johnson’s biggest problem is that he’s quite deliberately effecting what all, idealists and realists, expect to happen when he kicks a rock.
Discoveries and surprises, and the necessity for empiricism for knowing about “the world,” seem contrary to any pristine idealism–not that one can’t always save idealism somehow, but it gets rather more ad hoc than recognizing F=ma and relativity as discoveries about matters independent of mind. Whether that helps “realism” or “materialism” I’m not sure, but that it’s not all “just minds” working with “ideals” seems to be less ad hoc than if it were all “ideal.”
Glen Davidson
Kicking the mental image of a rock is one thing; and if it breaks the mental image of one’s toe, what then?
To carry the test a bit further; if one is such an idealist, dare one take the mental image of a loaded gun, place it against the mental image of one’s head, and use the mental image of one’s finger to pull the mental image of the trigger?
Wouldn’t hesitation to do so suggest doubt about Berkeley’s idealism; if in fact that is what Berkeley meant?
What is to be gained by living as though the world is just a mental image as opposed to living as though the world is real?
It would seem that pragmatism is a bit more direct and makes a bit more sense in this case; and besides, it works. We already know the senses produce illusions; and we even know how those illusions are produced. Thus we already recognize that direct appearances are not necessarily what they seem; hence the need for scientific investigation and communal assessment of data.
So Berkeley’s idealism is only a trivial reinterpretation of what we already know; but it has the disadvantage of not telling us how to deal with those “images” of our minds.
Glen,
Not really. Berkeley’s idealism posited God as the Mind in which things were instantiated. Not surprising, given that he was Bishop Berkeley, after all. Discoveries and surprises are still possible if the mind sustaining “reality” belongs to Someone Else, and not to us.
Also, I can envision a solipsistic idealism in which “reality” is created by one’s subconscious. Discoveries are still possible in such a world, but they are discoveries about one’s self rather than about external reality.
True. I think Occam’s Razor is a pretty good reason for rejecting idealism, because realism is a simpler hypothesis than idealism. That doesn’t count as a refutation, though, since Occam’s Razor is merely a heuristic.
Neil,
Regardless of what Johnson was thinking, I can’t see any way in which kicking a stone refutes idealism
No, because under idealism one can still move around, poke, prod, taste, sniff, and lay one’s ear on the tracks. It’s just all happening in what is effectively a virtual reality.
It’s quite similar to the brain-in-a-vat scenario, except that with the envatted brain, there is still an external reality — just not the one you think is out there.
KN,
Do you believe there’s any plausible way in which we can directly apprehend external reality, rather than indirectly? (I know Neil does, but I haven’t been persuaded by his defense of Gibson, particularly when it comes to illusions.)
Mike,
Nothing, really. It still doesn’t tell us whether idealism is true or not.
No, because the truth of idealism doesn’t imply that nothing bad can happen to you. “Stubbing” one’s “toe” would still hurt (which is why Johnson was wrong). Having one’s “fingernails” “pulled out” would still hurt like hell. Why assume that “shooting” one’s “head” would be harmless?
Well, it does solve some philosophical problems. For example, it gets rid of the interaction problem that plagues dualists.
Claiming that matter doesn’t exist is more than just “a trivial reinterpretation of what we already know”, don’t you think?
Perhaps, but at the expense of introducing some knotty theological problems. It would seem that the deity has some rather ungodly thoughts.
But those were earlier times where analyzing such ideas may have had some use in directing attention away from the intractable problems of theology to an external world that was tractable and responded to investigations with understandable answers.
These days, realism seems more direct and simpler.
Kids can think up stuff like this. Perhaps its just 20-20 hindsight from my perspective.
Weak argument? There is no argument. You act as if the world is as it is or as you believe it to be. It makes no difference to the rock.
Well, if you make a probability argument that there may be a real world, but we are likely living in a simulation created by creatures in that unknowable real world, then you can get published in philosophy journals and have a widely cited paper.
Not that I am saying that sort of philosophy is a bad thing.
Simulation Argument
Anyone who has read any physics knows the world isn’t what we naively perceive. The interesting question is what is the most useful way of proceeding.
Did Johnson never have a single dream in his life? Who hasn’t run into something or walked on the ground in a dream? Or opened a door? Can you not kick a rock in a dream? Can you not feel the pain of hurting your foot in a dream?
Idealism probably cannot be refuted in any significant way; the real question is if it can be supported in any significant way. I think that QM research has provided at least some support for the idealistic view of reality.
Depending on what parameters are involved in an idealistic reality, one might be able to conduct more individualistic experiments in order to explore the limits of what can be experienced if some form of idealism is true. In the same way that one can do a lot of things deliberately in dreams when experimenting with lucid dreaming, I think that there may be ways of – at least to some degree – practice lucid waking with the understanding that there is a state of consciousness “more awake” than what we experience here.
I simply don’t get dualism in any form.
Mind is some sort of stuff, whether it is of the same sort as rocks or not.
Kicking the rock demonstrates that while the rock may or may not be real, it is of the same stuff as mind. At least that’s the intended interpretation.
The realism I subscribe to doesn’t care what is mind and what is physical. What it cares about is regularities in perceptions.
I’m with Neil on this point — I’m a direct realist about perception. I would say that illusions just aren’t perceptions at all, although they involve some of the same capacities that are drawn on in perceptions. The price I pay for this view is, I think, rather mild: that perceivings do not form a natural kind along with illusions and hallucinations. I’m perfectly happy to take this step, whereas my mentor thinks that’s crazy.
I’d go one step further than Neil and say that the very idea that we can draw some sort of boundary between what is “internal” and what is “external” is itself a mistake. I don’t think it would even occur to someone who hadn’t been corrupted by Descartes’s ingenious attempt to reconcile Galilean physics with Augustinian Christianity. I think it’s a mistake to treat introspection as more reliable than extrospection, whether in terms of being “immediate” whereas the latter is “mediated,” or in terms of being more “certain” or more “reliable.”
Rather, I treat introspection and extrospection as being on an epistemic par — neither is more certain or more fundamental or more immediate than the other. And this is precisely the move that Kant himself makes when he refutes idealism, in the little section of the Critique of Pure Reason called “Refutation of Idealism”.
I don’t understand what it means to say that humans have direct perception of reality when human perception and cognition of what they perceive is known to be so faulty. Do Neil and KN think that some form of intersubjective, scientific empiricism prevents or weeds out perceptual limitations and cognitive biases?
How is a “direct perception of reality” manifest in any way? As an understanding? As a statement? When one looks at the sun and notices it is in a different location later, what is the “direct perception of reality”? Does a color blind person not have a direct perception of reality, or a faulty one? What about a blind person?
The problem with the claim of “direct perception of reality” is that our senses are tuned to only “pick up” a small slice of experiential potential, and to translate that information in certain ways for our particular cognitive makeup. As soon as that information is organized physically, it is interpreted conceptually according to a priori perspective.
IMO, the idea of “directly perceiving reality” is just a non-starter for the simple fact that by the time any perceptual data reaches the point of being a coherent thought, it’s already been processed through physical and conceptual interpretation.
In what sense is the term “perception” being applied? To “notice” reality, or to “understand” reality? Neither makes sense. Faults and limitations are known to occur in the trivial “notice” sense; and we know that we have faults and limitations and misunderstandings in the “understand” sense. It seems to me that the notion that humans directly perceive reality is so much a non-starter that I’m wondering if Neil & KN are using some more idiosyncratic concept of what “perception” means.
In Berkeley’s own texts, he appeal to the Razor in favor of idealism, against materialism. Here’s the argument (done quickly, from memory):
(1) a sensible object is a bundle of sensations to which a word (itself a sound or mark) is applied, or associated — so when I say “apple” you imagine a bundle of sensations: red, sweet, juicy, tangy, hard, and so on.
(2) all sensations are mind-dependent — they are “inside” some mind or other (you don’t have sensations floating around in the world, outside of the minds — sensations are necessarily and essentially mental contents);
(3) so, all sensible objects are mind-dependent, and everything directly perceived is inside the mind;
(4) however, the cause of the sensations could be something material or something mental;
(5) where ‘material’ means that which is independent from all minds entirely;
(6) hence we cannot perceive material (everything perceived is mental) nor can be it imagined (everything imagined is mental);
(7) but if matter cannot be perceived or imagined, then the term “matter” does not refer to anything — it is a mere flatus vocis, an empty sound.
(8) and in positing the existence of matter, we are making an ontological commitment to something we cannot comprehend;
(9) so, an ontology consisting only of minds and their ideas (including sensations) is simpler than an ontology that includes minds, ideas, and matter, since matter adds no explanatory value — hence, by the Razor, we should dispense with matter entirely.
(10) but the cause of the sensations cannot be my own mind, since then I would not be able to distinguish between the ideas of imagination (dreams, fantasies. etc.) and the ideas of sense;
(11) whereas the ideas of sense — i.e. sensations — are infinitely richer and more complicated than any ideas of imagination that I can produce;
(12) and so the cause of my ideas of sense must be a mind that is infinitely richer and more complicated than my own;
(13) and this can be only the mind of God.
(14) hence God must exist as the cause of all of anyone’s sensations; this solves the objectivity problem and overcomes the threat of solipsism
William J. Murray,
I think this is a fair challenge, and one I’m willing to accept.
My view is not, obviously, that we correctly perceive all of reality. Rather, my view is that perceiving, when successful, discloses that which is real — that there is no barrier or further obstacle to be surmounted between what is perceived and what is real. When I see a sunset, what I take in, perceptually, is the reality of the sunset. (A color-blind or blind person cannot perceive anything in the visual modality, but what he or she perceives in the other sensory modalities is what is real.)
Implicit here is the demanding and substantive claim that perceiving is not sensing. Merely having a sensation is necessary but insufficient for perception; a sensory event, considered merely as such, is not disclosive of reality.
What is disclosive of reality is perceiving, which requires a whole host of bodily skills and habits, some of which are probably innate and/or species-specific, and many of which are acquired and culturally-specific, and a few of which are specific to the individual.
When a friend smells something funky coming from my fridge, I don’t think, “well, it’s not real for me!” because I have a poor sense of smell. I think, rather, that because I have poor sense of smell, my friend is attuned to features of reality that I’m not attuned to. And when he says, “that was a terrible rendition of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto,” I notice that my friend’s superior knowledge of music enables him to notice nuances of tempo that I don’t have the ability to notice. That doesn’t mean that the flaws in the performance aren’t real — it just means that I lack the capacity to discern them.
Notice the dissimilarity between the two cases. In the first case, my friend is equipped with superior sensory refinement than I am; her sensory events are different from mine. In the second case, my friend and I had the same sensory events (one supposes) — it’s not the case that his hearing is better than mine — but his training in music allows him to perceive things that I didn’t, even though we had the same basic sensory events.
(We could also consider a third case — my cat Franz can perceive things that I cannot perceive, because his hearing and smell are far better than mine or any humans.)
My view, roughly, is that all perception is like that — it requires discernment and competence, some of which is acquired, and in many cases, the acquisition of discernment happens at a very young age so that in our adulthood, we take it for granted.
So the fact that there are species-specific, culturally-specific, and individual-specific conditions or constraints on perception, does not show any perceptual episodes are not disclosive of some feature or aspect of the world as it really is.
(The metaphor I used to use with my students to get this across is that our perceptual and conceptual capacities are like the aperture on a camera, modifying how much of the world can be taken in — they don’t stand in the way of our taking in the world per se. Now that I’m teaching students who don’t know what pre-digital photography was like, the metaphor no longer works on them.)
William,
Something we agree on!
In an earlier discussion with Neil, I pointed to a set of motion illusions and asked how they could be reconciled with the idea of direct perception.
Neil’s response didn’t make sense to me, but perhaps KN’s will.
Alan,
Johnson believed he had refuted Berkeley. You did too, apparently, since you cited Johnson in support of this:
KN,
The motion illusions I mentioned above are a counterexample. We perceive motion where there is none in reality.
Mike,
Kids can think stuff up, but they generally can’t analyze it, draw out the implications, and either defend or reject it with the same competence as a highly intelligent adult like Berkeley.
That’s because you don’t understand direct perception. You see it as making stronger claims than it actually makes. So you attempt to refute it by giving evidence against claims that you mistakenly think it makes.
KN,
Either he fails to notice that the Razor should be slicing God out of the picture, or more likely he thinks that God is a necessary part of the picture under both idealism and realism, and thus doesn’t tip the scale either way.
Neil,
If so, then I’m hoping that you or KN can explain what claims it actually does make, and why illusions (such as the motion illusions I cite) are not evidence against it.
If I combine this with your formulation of petrushka’s question in the other thread, where I understand you to say that all matters of fact are accessible to empirical inquiry, then is it fair to conclude that a perception of a matter of fact cannot be deemed successful until it has been subject to empirical inquiry.
That would imply that one cannot tell and illusion from a perception without such inquiry, which seems consistent.
Given my Bieiber versus Beeethoven comparison at the other thread, that musical example caught my eye. Is it right to interpret you as saying there is a matter of fact or at least correctness in some sense about musical judgements?
I’m going to leap right onto the grenade you’re dangling out in front of me and deny the obvious: that we perceive the motion yet there is none in reality. Instead, I’m going to say that what we directly perceive is the unreality of the motion that we sense, or put otherwise, the unreality of the apparent motion — that the sensed motion is only apparent.
When I perceive the duck-rabbit illusion, I perceive it as an illusion — I can see it as a duck, or as a rabbit, depending on what features are pushed into the perceptual background and what features are pushed into the perceptual foreground. (The precise sequence of eye-movements across the image might have something to do with this; I don’t know.)
Suppose I see what seems to be oak tree from far away, and then I get closer and realize it’s an elm tree. I wouldn’t say, “I directly perceived my tree-sensations and misclassified those sensations” or “I directly perceived my tree-sensations and made a bad inference on the basis of those sensations,” but “I directly perceived the elm tree, but I mistook it for an oak tree because I was viewing it under unfavorable circumstances — so my taking it to be an oak tree was only an apparent perception.”
That’s the whole point of “looks”-talk and “seems”-talk. If normal perception wasn’t directly about real objects and their features, it seems harder to account for the role of looks-talk and seems-talk in our discourse.
Hi Keith
Aplologies for my terse answer, partly due to a phablet and checking it at a moment I didn’t really have time to respond.
What I mean is that the idea that because our perceptions can be fooled we should consider that the world we perceive is somehow not real is just so implausible that I think it requires about as much consideration as Johnson gave it. I am reinforced in my provisional assumption that the external world is there daily, constantly with never a contra-indication and I am happy to concede that our perception of it is poor and incomplete. The approach works for now and I don’t see the need to worry about hypotheticals and absolute certainty. I’ll leave that to those that need certainty.
Other commenters have made points that gel with me, particularly Mike Elzinga.
And KN, of course.
If his portrayal of Bishop Berkeley’s argument is correct, then it is not an argument that gives me any pause to reconsider my pragmatism. My wife refutes it by calling “get off that damn computer and feed the cat”.
I would say, rather, that all perception is itself implicitly an inquiry — because of the role that habits and skills play in constituting perception. We don’t need to conduct experiments to see what color something is — we can tell just by looking at it! — but only because we have learned how to see colors through the sort of inquiry that we engaged in as toddlers, and in which we were patiently guided by our caretakers (“see the duck? isn’t that a pretty yellow? can you say ‘yellow’? say ‘yellow’.”)
Kantian Naturalist,
I’ll add that KN’s view of perception seems about right to me.
Of course, Berkeley never denied the existence of the external world — by which I mean, Berkeley never denied, or even attempted to deny, that there is a world independent of each and every finite observer and which is the cause of the sensory experiences that each and every finite observer has.
What he flatly denied is that the basic character of this external world is material — specifically, he denied that inference-to-the-best-explanation for the cause of our sensations is that the cause is anything material. Instead, he argued that the cause of our sensations, being themselves mind-dependent, is itself fundamentally mental in character — the mind of God.
There is no arguing about taste.
Your perceptions are not subject to argument. Nor are you your moral judgments. If you are counting matters of taste as knowledge outside scientific investigation, I would say you are making trivial claims.
A non-trivial claim would be something that everyone can agree on, but which is not true by definition.
This is not entirely inconsistent with some versions of physics. That which considers reality to consist of relationships rather than of objects. Mathematics rather than billiard balls.
Not knowing the literature of philosophy, I once speculated here that omniscience implies omni-existence. That there is no reason to assume that being one of God’s thoughts is different from existing. An omniverse as distinct from multiverse.
I’m speaking (or writing) for myself here. I cannot guarantee that Gibson would have agreed.
As a representionationalist, you presumably see perception as a rather sophisticated system that models and uses algorithms to decide what is in front of us.
By constrast, I see perception as strung together with chewing gum and baling wire (to use a metaphor). That is, it involves ad hoc neural constructs, and a lot of ongoing fiddling with the structure to tune it and tweak it to get the best results. Overall, it is a lot simpler than what you presumably take it to be.
One of the reasons I favor direct perception, is that it seems to better fit what biology can do. Biology can easily handle the ongoing tweaking and tuning, but it is difficult to see how it could manage the advanced planning needed for a representationalist implementation of perception.
I love that refutation.
My own understanding of perception is that it is entirely devoted to doing stuff to survive and reproduce. Perception has to be reliable to be useful. That it isn’t perfectly reliable indicates it balances statistical reliability with energy efficiency.
It’s a very complicated Bayesian thermostat. Jury rigged, yes.
That’s definitely one of the few theologies I’ve encountered that isn’t internally inconsistent on its face. Does that heresy (and I have no doubt it’s considered a heresy) have a formal name?
I agree that there is no arguing about taste, but I don’t equate taste or opinion with knowledge. And I don’t think something has to be agreed to by everyone to be knowledge.
I suspect it is possible to make a case for a definition of knowledge that goes beyond science. One would need to adopt some of the processes of the scientific community; some that come to mind are: use of rational, principled discussion; review by experts in the field ; recognition of tentativeness of conclusions; need to consider consistency with other knowledge.
Mathematics would be one possibility with the claim being we gain mathematical knowledge by proving it as a consequence of axioms.
Also possibility might be moral knowledge. Aesthetic knowledge seems also to be possible but probably a harder case to make.
If one starts by saying that knowledge is only possible about matters of fact and facts are statements about the real world, then that would limit the discussion. (although this is not how KN rephrased the challenge as I read him).
I don’t get the argument that asserts illusions – e.g., motion illusions, visual illusions, auditory illusions, etc, – are an argument against realism.
The mere fact that we know about the existence of illusions would suggest we know the difference between perceptions and reality. If we didn’t believe there was a reality to be perceived, and if we couldn’t compare differences between that reality and our perceptions, how would we even know about illusions? Are illusions then illusions?
In fact, multiple perceptions generally converge on reality; especially the multiple inputs from different individuals of various backgrounds and cultures as well as the perceptions of other species. We already know, through the use of instrumentation, that there are phenomena we don’t perceive because their effects lie outside the bandwidth of our senses; yet they are perceived by other species or by our instruments. Why would we know about that if idealism were the case?
Occam’s razor may sometimes be useful, but it is a fact that things don’t often turn out to be as simple as our first thoughts about them would suggest. Systematic investigation and cross-comparisons among different tests that try to account for systematic effects are procedures that have developed from experience; experience that suggests pretty convincingly that there is a reality to which our senses are alluding, however imperfectly.
Mere recognition of that imperfection drives further investigation for different data that gradually fill in the picture. If idealism holds, what are these illusions that we are aware of all about?
Morality is certainly more important than taste in food or music, but but I would say it is no less a matter of appetite and opinion. I am not aware of any moral precepts that aren’t ultimately based on pleasure and pain (in the broadest sense of the words).
Rationality, in the sense of formal rules of reasoning, would seem to be a rather recent invention. I would say it has evolved because it is useful.
These discussions demonstrate to me that rational discourse is not perfected and is still evolving.
It seems to me there is no difference between realism and an ideal held by a deity or external agent. Regularity is my word for realism.
Climbing the ladder of complexity in evolved systems, both plant and animal, suggests that perception comes at a later stage of complexity; probably with the formation of hierarchies of memory that can keep a record of the changing states of itself as well as the organism in which these memories reside.
Heliotropes and systems that simply follow gradients don’t require memory; but having such capability has selective advantage in systems that can reproduce.
I think you have said elsewhere that you are a utilitarian and I take the above to mean you would evaluate a moral decision by the totality of pleasure and pain it produced. Under that paradigm, I would argue that one knows the right thing to do after due consideration (as per previous list) of actions and outcomes.
Of course, one can question the utilitarian approach, or, if one accepts consequentialism, one can question how one should evaluate consequences. But I don’t think these issues are matters of taste or opinion either.
I agree that pragmatic considerations are a part of finding the right processes to generate knowledge. That applies to science too.
I’ll take that as agreement that we must always be tentative to some extent in our conclusions, and not, for example, as a comment on the state of my rationality (smiley face to indicate humor goes here).
I’m sorry, but I still see a tension among:
1. One knows reality by direction perception
2. If something is a matter of fact, it must be consistent with the result of empirical inquiry.
3. Color illusions (which mislead toddlers and adults).
I suspect my problem lies in understanding how you define matters of fact, reality, and illusions in these situations.
I think it may appear facile to compare the morality of child torture to preferences for flavors of ice cream. I understand that this seems just a bit eccentric.
But I am not arguing that moral decisions should be given equal weight with tastes in food or music. I am arguing that they have the same origin.
I’m not speaking for KN or anyone else, but I think you’ve hit upon why science exists.
The answer is that you make a model or theory of “reality,” one that has entailments, and you test your model.
The creative or imaginative aspect of science is often ignored.
Representationalism versus bales of wire seems like a question that can only be determined by further science inquiry.
My unsophisticated IT engineering view is that it is an implementation decision: is nature using a table driven approach or a code-driven approach? Or some other design. Or at least, which type of model works better experimentally in predicting what the brain does?
Of course, any proposed model has to be consistent with creation of the brain through evolution. (FWIW, Millikan is a representationalist philosopher who proposes such models, at least at a philosophical level of detail).
It seems reasonable to suppose that some combination of representation and non-representional approaches will have been used.
Similarly, I think current research on vision indicates that there is both bottom up and top down processing.
Agreed. My problem is that I take “empirical inquiry” to mean science, so how can one know matters of fact by direct perception if such perception conflicts with science. I’m pretty sure that is not what KN is saying, but I am not sure why it is not what he is saying.