30
Berkeley, Principles, Introduction
Abstract Ideas
Early
modern philosophy was as influenced by developments in early modern religion
as by developments in early modern science.
This is nowhere as much the case as it is in the philosophy of George Berkeley,
later Anglican Bishop of Cloyne, in Ireland. Berkeley lived at a time when religion in
Britain was split along the lines that were described in the chapter on
Bayle. At one extreme was a group of
radical religious rationalists, referred to as the Deists. The Deists believed that religion ought to
be based on reason alone, and that only what could be proven by reason should
be included in the body of religious beliefs.
The earliest Deists had written before Locke, and Locke’s own remarks
about the relation between reason and revealed truth may have been influenced
by them. But Locke had maintained that
it is possible to have a revealed religion that goes beyond what reason can
tell us on its own, as long as the revelation does not directly contradict
reason and reason can authenticate the divine origin of the revelation. The chief Deistical writers, in contrast,
thinkers like Anthony Collins, John Toland, and
Matthew Tindal, were not willing to make such compromises. They wrote books with titles like, Christianity not Mysterious, and A Discourse of Free-Thinking, that
denied revelation and the authenticity of the Biblical miracles supporting
it, and rejected the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, and even the
Resurrection. Most of the Deists
affirmed the existence of a divine Creator, and they maintained that the
Creator is worthy of worship, that the proper form of this worship consists
in obedience to the laws of morality as revealed by reason, and that there
will be an afterlife and a final judgment, though their views were by no
means uniform. For many at the time,
including Berkeley,
their stripped-down religion was no longer recognizably Christian. It was tantamount to Atheism.
At the other extreme were the Fideists, who held that the Holy Spirit compels the elect
to believe the Christian doctrines, however contrary to reason. In the Britain of Berkeley’s day they were
represented by the more radical elements of the Presbyterian church in Scotland. They had had their heyday during the time
of the English civil war. At that time,
a Puritan movement in England, allied with the Scottish Presbyterians, had
beheaded a King who was viewed as inclining too far towards Catholicism, and
temporarily set up a commonwealth.
These were the people that Locke attacked in his chapter on enthusiasm
as dangerous fanatics, whose willingness to accept their own passionate
beliefs as divine revelation and throw down the sovereignty of their own
reason was mirrored in the violence with which they treated others and the
turmoil into which they had plunged the state.
However, anyone who looked at the work
of a Fideist like Bayle (and almost everyone did,
as the Dictionnaire
was one of the most popular and widely read works of the time) could readily
see that there were other things that made fideism dangerous besides its
pernicious political tendencies. The
scepticism Bayle had so effectively employed as an inducement to faith was a
dangerous weapon that could just as readily be turned against faith itself to
produce a spirit of indifference and agnosticism. That spirit seemed to be only too well
exemplified by many of Bayle’s own writings.
Fideism seemed as dangerous to religion as Deism.
The full titles of Berkeley’s major
philosophical works,
A Treatise Concerning the Principles
of Human Knowledge wherein the chief Causes of Error and Difficulty in the
Sciences, with the Grounds of Scepticism, Atheism, and Irreligion are
inquired into,
Three
Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous,
the Design of which is plainly to demonstrate the Reality and Perfection of
Humane Knowledge, the Incorporeal Nature of the Soul, and the Immediate
Providence of a Deity: in Opposition to Sceptics and Atheists
make his concern
to find a middle way between the extremes of scepticism and atheism quite
evident.
At a fairly early point in his life —
his late teens or early twenties — Berkeley
appears to have concocted a radical plan for combating the extreme views on religion
of his day. One need simply deny that
there are any material things in existence.
This would at once deprive the rationalists of their chief source of
pride and security and the Fideists of their chief
sceptical argument.
Berkeley seems to have reasoned along the
following lines:
The modern philosophers, like
Locke and Descartes, had supposed that what we first and most certainly know
are just our own ideas. They would
have liked to think that these ideas are caused in us by extended bodies
existing outside of us, but they ran into serious problems when they tried to
prove that these bodies exist. That
had given Bayle and the Fideists an excuse to
launch their sceptical attack and claim that reason is inadequate to give us
knowledge of the material world. But
had Locke and Descartes not tried to prove that there is material world — had
they instead insisted that the only things that exist are minds and their
ideas — then they would not have opened themselves to attack, and the
sceptics would have had no reason to claim that we do not have knowledge of
the “real” world, since it is hardly possible to deny that we know our ideas,
and much more difficult to deny that we have reason to suppose the existence
of other minds.
But even had Locke and Descartes
succeeded in their project of demonstrating the existence of an external
world, the result would not have been positive for religion. The external world they envisioned is a
world of pieces of extended and perhaps solid matter moving in accord with
constant laws and producing all the phenomena of nature, and all our ideas of
sensation, as a result of their motions and collisions. Miracles do not happen in such a world, and
there is no role for God to play in it, other than to create it and perhaps
arrange its parts in the beginning.
Thus, the success of new philosophy would tend to support Deism.
Recognizing that material objects
do not exist and that the real world can only be a world of spirits and their
ideas would forestall this Deistic conclusion at the same time that it
blocked Fideism. Berkeley regarded it as a brilliant option.
Of course, arguing for a theory a posteriori, that is, by appeal
to the good consequences that would follow were one to accept it, is no way
to prove that it is correct — especially if it seems to be as patently absurd
as denying that there is an external world.
Wishing it were so because if it were all sorts of nice things would
follow does not prove that it must be so.
We need, therefore, to inquire into the philosophical reasons, as well
as the religious motives for Berkeley’s
theory.
Berkeley’s main reasons for denying the
existence of matter are presented over paragraphs 1-24 of Part I of the Principles. (An originally planned Part II was lost
while still in manuscript and never published.) However, these reasons are importantly
supported by a critique that Berkeley
leveled against the notions of abstraction and abstract ideas. This critique, offered in the Introduction
to the Principles, is an
interesting reflection on issues in early modern philosophy of language and
representation that stands on its own quite apart from any reference to Berkeley’s other
doctrines. It is particularly worth
studying as a counterpart to Locke’s account of abstraction and abstract
ideas in Essay III.
QUESTIONS ON THE READING
1. What
is the chief cause of those obstacles and difficulties that have so far
prevented us from making any progress in philosophy?
2. What
is our “most abstract idea of extension” (Introduction §8) an idea of?
3. What
is the one sense in which Berkeley
thought it is possible to abstract?
4. What
are the “proper acceptations of abstraction”
(i.e. the senses in which this ability has been understood according to the
tradition Berkeley
is attacking)?
5. What
are the two arguments against the traditional conception of abstraction that Berkeley had to offer in
Introduction §10?
6. What
was Locke’s reason for claiming that human beings are able to form abstract
ideas?
7. Why
did Berkeley
find this reason to be inadequate?
8. How
can an idea be general without being abstract?
9. What
is the argument against the traditional conception of abstraction that Berkeley had to offer in
Introduction §13?
10.
What is the erroneous supposition about the nature of
language that lies at the root of the supposition that we have abstract
ideas?
NOTES ON THE READING
Berkeley opened his discussion of
abstraction by first outlining the traditional doctrine he proposed to
attack. It is important to be clear
about when Berkeley
was merely describing the views that he proposed to attack, and when he was
giving reasons for opposing those views.
Introduction 7-9, the first two thirds of 10 and 13, and the first
third of 16, in particular, are all devoted to describing positions Berkeley wanted to
attack.
According to the traditional
doctrine Berkeley
set out to attack, abstraction is the ability to separate a thing from its
surroundings and consider it on its own.
Anyone who has studied chemistry will know that there are certain
processes that can cause a chemical compound to precipitate out of a
solution. This is the paradigm example
of abstraction. The chemist takes
something that was originally a mixture and is able to draw something out of
it and separate it from the rest.
Berkeley maintained that many past
philosophers, paradigmatically Locke, had supposed that the mind is capable
of an analogous operation. It was
supposed to be able to take an experience and separate it into its component
“simple ideas.” As Berkeley understood the views of his
predecessors, this mental abstraction involves the same sort separation as
chemical abstraction: he understood Locke to have held that we are able to
form a simple idea like the idea of redness or the idea of extension apart
from having any other simple idea. It
is not clear that Berkeley
was right in understanding Locke this way.
All that Locke may have meant to say is that abstraction involves
focusing one’s attention on something that is present in experience or memory
while ignoring other things, even though those other things remain
there. Forming an abstract idea of
red, for example, would not involve forming an isolated, simple idea of red
in one’s imagination, but imagining some red shape or other and attending
just to the redness and not to the shape.
This is not that far removed from what Berkeley himself took
abstraction to involve at Introduction 16.
Had he been confronted with this
objection, Berkeley
might have been happy to grant it. In
his view, the principal problem with the doctrine of abstraction is that it
leads people to draw certain illegitimate inferences from conceivability to
possibility. Thinking that we can
conceive one thing without having to think of another, they infer that it
must be at least possible for the one thing to exist apart from the
other. Most notably, thinking that we
can conceive extension without having to conceive colour or any tactile
sensation, they suppose that it must be possible for there to be extended
bodies that lack colour or any other sensible quality. And thinking that we can conceive colour or
solidity to exist apart from being perceived, they suppose that it must be
possible for colour or solidity to exist when they are not perceived. Berkeley
considered both of these inferences to be illegitimate, and both of them to
be founded on the radical doctrine of abstraction, understood as involving
the formation of isolated ideas. Had
even the proponents of the doctrine of abstraction only meant to say that
abstraction involves a kind of selective attention rather than a separate
conception, then the arguments for the separability
of primary from sensible qualities and of being from being perceived would
lose all merit. It is only to the
extent that people take the doctrine of abstraction to imply a power of
separate conceivability, and separate conceivability to involve the
possibility of separate existence, that Berkeley
was concerned to oppose it.
Granting that abstraction does
involve separate conceivability, there are four cases that Berkeley was concerned with:
i) cases where a simple idea, like red, triangular, rough,
stationary, or sweet is supposed to be separately conceived.
ii) cases where we are supposed
to conceive a kind of simple idea, like the idea of colour in general, shape
in general, extension in general or the ideas of a sensible quality in
general or just of being in general.
iii) cases
where we are supposed to separately conceive the idea of a kind of substance,
like man, woman, cat, dog, gold, lead, turnip, carrot. These are cases where we are supposed to
conceive just those simple ideas that the members of the kind exhibit in common,
separately from all the other ideas that individuate the members of the kind
from one another.
iv) cases
where we are supposed to separately conceive a generic kind of substance,
like human, animal, or body. These are
“yet more abstract ideas” supposedly formed by conceiving just those simple
ideas that the different kinds share in common, separately from all the other
ideas that individuate the kinds from one another.
There were two other cases that
he was not concerned with:
i) cases where ideas given through one sense are conceived
separately from ideas conceived through another sense, as when colour is
conceived separately from taste or smell.
ii) cases
where spatial or temporal parts are conceived separately from one another, as
when a hand is conceived apart from an arm or an egg apart from the chick it
later becomes.
Berkeley thought that in both of these
cases we can form abstract (i.e., separate) ideas. But in the earlier four cases, the
formation of abstract ideas is impossible.
Berkeley’s Critique. Berkeley offered two
main reasons for rejecting the first four sorts of abstract ideas. The first is given in Introduction 10, the second is added in 13.
Berkeley’s first and main reason appeals to
the contrapositive of the claim that what is conceivable is possible: the
claim that what is impossible is inconceivable. Anyone who accepts the former claim would
have to accept the latter, since the two are logically equivalent. But, Berkeley
claimed, everyone agrees that it is impossible for there to be extension
where there is no shape, for a shape to exist apart from some sensible
quality or other, or for a sensible quality to exist apart from being
perceived. There can be no colour that
is not spread out and located somewhere.
Conversely, whatever is spread out or extended must have some
shape. But for there to be shape there
must be edges, and there can be no edges where there are no contrasting
sensible qualities such as colours or feelings of solidity. Again, if colours and tactile feelings are
just sensations, as everyone at the time supposed they are, then there can be no colours or tactile feelings that are
not perceived since for a sensation to exist is for it to be perceived. Since it is impossible for these things to
exist separately, it follows from the principle that what is impossible is
inconceivable that we should not be able to conceive them separately either.
We might object that it is false
that what is impossible is inconceivable.
Faster than light speeds are impossible. But they are not inconceivable.
Perhaps Berkeley would have tried to defend himself
by saying that he had a different sense of impossibility in mind. Faster than light speeds are only
physically impossible.
But this raises the question of
what other sense of impossibility Berkeley
might have had in mind. One other
sense of impossibility is logical impossibility. But things are only logically impossible if
they involve a contradiction — a claim of the form “Both P and not-P.” It is contradictory to say that something
is both coloured and not coloured. But
it is not obviously contradictory to say that something is both coloured and
not extended. Similarly, it is
contradictory to say that something both exists and does not exist. But it is not obviously contradictory to
say that something both exists and is not perceived.
Another sense of impossibility is
psychological impossibility — an inability on our part to conceive
something. But Berkeley could not have appealed to
psychological impossibility to prove his point without arguing in a
circle. To say that something is
psychologically possible is to say that it is inconceivable. But what Berkeley wanted to prove is that it is not
possible to conceive extension apart from colour or being apart from being perceived. If his reason for saying this was that
these things are impossible in the sense of being inconceivable, then he was
assuming what he was trying to prove.
Faced with this result, some
commentators have suggested that that Berkeley
never intended to argue from
impossibility to inconceivability.
Instead he only ever meant to assert
that, as a matter of fact, abstract ideas of the first four types are
inconceivable. This is suggested by
large parts of Introduction 10, in which Berkeley simply rested his case on
an appeal to his own experience of what he was personally able to, as he put
it, “imagine” or “conceive” or “consider” or “form” or “frame” in his mind,
as well as on appeal to what he took to be the experience of “the generality
of men who are simple and illiterate.”
(Of course, in making the latter point, Berkeley did not mean to concede that
sophisticated and literate people can
abstract ideas. He rather meant to
insinuate that, human nature being everywhere the same, what lies beyond the
mental powers of the simple and illiterate likely lies beyond the powers of
the sophisticated and literate as well, though their commitment to
extravagant theories may blind them to these plain facts of their own common
sense experience. It is a theme of
Berkeley’s thought, already insinuated by Introduction 1-4, that the views of
the simple and illiterate are closer to pure common sense, whereas those of
the sophisticated and literate have as likely as not simply been corrupted
and distorted by false theories.)
But do we really find it
impossible to form an idea of colour apart from shape, or of an animal that
is not of some particular species?
Perhaps it all depends on what we mean by “form an idea.” If forming an idea means something like
making a little picture in the mind’s eye, then Berkeley has a very plausible case. I may not be able to “image” or “frame” or
picture a colour without giving it some particular shape, size, situation,
and motion or rest, or an animal without making it of some particular
species. But if we think that the
formation of ideas might involve something more like grasping a meaning, then
Berkeley’s
thesis is far from obvious. Do I
picture anything when I grasp the meaning of addiction or adversity? If I do, is what I picture at all adequate
to represent what I understand these ideas to mean?
There is, however, another way of
interpreting Berkeley’s
argument, one that does not involve appeal to the claim that he took ideas to
be like pictures or images (plausible thought that claim is). This is to say that he did mean to argue
from logical impossibility to inconceivability — but that the logical
impossibility he meant to argue from is a richer notion than that provided by
analytic truth, where what is logically impossible is what is false simply by
definition. Instead he based his
notion of logical impossibility on Descartes’s and Locke’s notion of
intuitive certainty. What is logically
impossible is what is contrary to an intuitively obvious truth, not just what
is false by definition. It is not
false by definition that orange is more like green than it is like red. But it is intuitively false because, even
in the absence of a definition, we can tell, simply by inspecting the ideas
involved, that this relation does not hold.
Berkeley
did take it to be intuitively or at least demonstratively obvious that
extension is inconceivable apart from colour or colour apart from being
perceived. He might, for instance,
have argued as follows: to say that something is extended is to say that it
has parts set outside of parts. But
for parts to be set outside of parts there must be boundaries or edges where
one part ends and another starts. But
there can be no boundaries or edges where there are no contrasting colours or
feelings of pressure. But colour and
tactile feelings are sensations.
Sensations are states of mind.
So for a sensation to exist is for there to be a mind that is in a
certain state, the state of having or, as we say, perceiving that
sensation. From these non-analytic but
intuitively obvious equivalences it follows that there can be no extension
without sensible qualities and no sensible qualities without perception of
those qualities.
Berkeley’s second reason for rejecting the
first sort of abstract ideas rests on an appeal to the notion that the
formation of abstract ideas would involve performing an incoherent or
inconsistent task, like drawing a picture of a round square. The task in question is forming an idea
that has all of a number of contradictory qualities and none of those
qualities at one and the same time. We
might think that an abstract idea must do this if it is to adequately specify
what things it refers to. The abstract
idea of a triangle, for example, would have to refer to triangles of all sizes
and colours, with all possible sizes of angles. We might think that it would do that by
representing all of those different sizes and colours at once. Yet at the same time, the abstract idea is
just an idea of what all triangles have in common. So it could not have any specific size or
colour. Berkeley considered this to be an absurdity
that follows from the doctrine of abstraction. He drove this point home by capitalizing on
some incidental remarks made by Locke, to the effect that the abstract idea
of a triangle must represent all and none of the differentiating features of
triangles at once. But this was
opportunistic. Locke’s remarks are not
obviously a sound representation of his position. As Berkeley himself represented the
traditional theory over Introduction 7-9, it involves forming an idea by
separating just certain components of our experience from the rest of that
experience — separating, for example, the features common to all triangles
from an experience of a particular triangle.
The resulting abstract idea would contain just what all triangles
share in common. It would certainly
not contain all the features of all triangles at once. Yet it is the latter view of what an
abstract idea is and not the former that Berkeley appears to have adopted in
Introduction 13.
On a more charitable reading of
Introduction 13, Berkeley
was just claiming that it is impossible to form an idea of a triangle that
does not have angles of any particular size, not one that has angles of all
different sizes at once. However, then
his claim in Introduction 13 is no different from his main argument in
Introduction 10. He was not claiming
that abstraction involves forming an idea with inconsistent attributes, but
rather just that it involves performing the impossible task of separating
certain attributes from their necessarily concomitant particularizing
circumstances.
Berkeley’s Theory of Signification. Questionable though Berkeley’s position may be, it is far from
implausible, and he further buttressed it by claiming that there is no good
reason for adopting the rival view.
Berkeley recognized two reasons that might be given for accepting that
we form abstract ideas: that such ideas are necessary if we are to account
for our use of general terms, which make the preponderance of terms in our
language, and that such ideas are necessary for the formulation of scientific
laws and principles, which take the form of generalizations from particular
experience. In addressing both
reasons, Berkeley
developed an alternative philosophy of language.
The reason why people have
supposed that we have abstract ideas, Berkeley
observed in Introduction 11, is that we use general names. We give names to qualities, like redness, that
a number of different objects are observed to share in common, and where
objects are observed to share a number of different qualities in common, we
collect them together into groups and give names to those groups that we then
use to refer indifferently to all the objects in the group. We further suppose, Berkeley observed in Introduction 19, that
language is used to convey our ideas to others, so
that where there is a name there is some idea that is referred to by that
name. This fact about our languages
and this supposition about the meaning of names lead to the supposition that
we must have abstract ideas. For, the
argument runs, if there are general names, but all names must refer to some
idea, then there must be some idea that our general names refer to. This idea can only be the idea of the set
of features that a number of different objects share in common, and since
that set of features does not exist on its own anywhere in the outside world,
but is always mixed in with other particularizing concomitant features in
different, individual objects, it must instead exist in the mind, as a
separate, abstract idea that is named by the general term.
The problem with this argument, Berkeley observed, does
not lie with its first premise. It is
undeniable that we do have and use general names. But Berkeley
took the second premise to be questionable.
It is not the case that there must always be some idea that a name
refers to. Some names do not refer to
anything at all but serve rather to rouse emotions, induce us to act in a
certain way, or put us into a certain disposition. (Think of the names used to praise or
insult someone, or to incite fear and get someone to refrain from performing
a certain act.) And other names, Berkeley observed, may
simply stand ambiguously as signs for a whole class of things.
This makes sense when considered
from the first person perspective. I
can readily understand how I might come to observe that a number of objects
share certain features in common, be led as a result to think of those
objects as all belonging together in a group, and come to use a particular
name to refer to that group and to identify all the objects in that group as
members of that group. From this
perspective, there need be no intermediate, abstract or general idea
connecting the name with the group.
But problems begin to emerge when
we consider how others would understand this name, or how I myself would
understand it at a later time. There
is an immediate objection to the claim that some names are signs for whole
classes of things: some classes are very large. If, upon hearing a general name, like tree,
we had to call to mind all the objects that are referred to by that name, we
would be faced with a daunting task.
One way to get around this difficulty is to suppose that when we hear
a general name we indifferently select just one member from the group of
objects signified by that name and form the idea of that individual. But then how does that differ from our not
treating the name as a general name at all, but merely as the name of that
individual?
In articulating his position, Berkeley was careful to
avoid both of these pitfalls. He
claimed that when we hear a general name we do “indifferently” form an idea
of just one of the objects in the group referred to by that name. But he went on to insist that we take this
idea to serve as a sign that stands for all of the other objects in the
group. When we do this, the idea is
“made general,” though Berkeley
insisted that it does not become abstract, but remains an idea of particular
object. It is just that this
particular idea is made to stand in for all the other objects in the group.
Berkeley gave the example of a geometry
teacher who draws a black, one inch long line segment on a piece of paper. By showing the students how to bisect this
one segment, the geometry teacher has shown the students how to bisect any
line segment. In this case the
particular line segment serves to signify any line segment of whatever length
or colour, in whatever place or time.
An idea of a black line segment of about 40 minimally visible points
in length ought similarly to be capable of serving as a sign for all line
segments of whatever length or colour.
And so it is with all general terms. Hearing the name, “dog,” I form
an idea of a particular dog, but I take this particular idea to stand for all
dogs whatsoever.
There are obvious concerns that
arise with Berkeley’s
theory at this point: how does the one particular idea that we form manage to
stand in for all the rest? Would there
not be some danger that the particular idea, being particular, would not be
able to perform its job adequately but would lead us to conceive of only very
closely resembling objects as falling into the group? For example, if I form
an idea of a particular terrier upon hearing the word, dog, what is to
prevent me from only considering other terriers — or other terriers of that
particular size or colouration — as alone belonging in the class, dog? Or, alternatively, what is to keep me from
considering any four-legged beast, be it a cat or an elephant or an iguana as
also being a dog? Berkeley had little more to say and it is
hard not to escape the conclusion that he was left having to suppose that
something magical happens to make the particular idea signify in just the
right way.
Berkeley was somewhat better able
to apply his theory to account for the second function of general ideas,
their ability to serve as a foundation for the demonstration of general rules
and principles. His argument on this
score is neatly laid out over Introduction 15-16. According to it, any demonstration that is
performed on a “general idea” ought to hold valid for all other ideas that
resemble the “general idea” just in virtue of possessing all those features
that figure in the demonstration. In
this way, a proposition proven by a demonstration performed on a “general
idea” can come to be considered valid of a whole range of particulars. Here, it is the features involved in the
demonstration that explicitly serve to define the scope of the “general idea”
and the sort of problem that arises in connection with the bare communication
of the meaning of general terms does not arise.
ESSAY
QUESTIONS AND RESEARCH PROJECTS
1. Did Berkeley understand
Locke’s position on abstract ideas correctly?
2. Does Berkeley’s rejection of
abstract ideas rest on the supposition that ideas are pictures? Is there another way of understanding what
ideas are that would evade his argument against forming abstract ideas?
3. Is Berkeley’s account of
the meaning of general terms cogent or was he unable to adequately explain
how we come to views different things as all belonging to the same group?
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