Realisms [tpm]

[Originally posted at Talking Philosophy Magazine blog]

Abstract: Sometimes it is thought that the fate of philosophy itself is tied to the debate between realism and anti-realism. According to one plausible rendering of the difference between realism and anti-realism in metaphysics belonging to Crispin Wright, “realism” is a modest doctrine, while “idealism” is immodest. If anyone was an idealist, Bishop George Berkeley certain was one. I argue that, by most lights, Berkeley’s metaphysics was modest, which (surprisingly) makes him a realist. The upshot is either that Wright’s articulation of the realist/anti-realist distinction is off-base, or there is less to the realist/anti-realist distinction than meets the eye. I suspect the latter.

“Realism” is a word that gets tossed around the university like a koosh ball. This concept — if there is a concept — is used with varying degrees of plausibility. We’re told that we are obliged to believe in moral realism (unlikely), realism in theology (unstable and speculative), realism about the external world and the people in it (yes), realism about social institutions (I don’t know), and realism in international relations (in Hans Morgenthau’s sense, almost certainly not). In each case, we’re meant to target some area of interest for discussion: the moral, the theological, and so on.

Faced with this onslaught of realisms, it is tempting to think that the word, “realism”, represents different concepts depending on different contexts of use. Echoing Ian Hacking’s question to the social constructionists, we might ask from the outset: “Realism about what? When you say that so-and-so is real, what point are you trying to make?” Maybe there isn’t a single sort of argument that runs through the list. Maybe it’s all just a bunch of language-games.

Still, some hope that we can find various sites of heated controversy that characterize all forms of realism. For them, it is tempting to think that, beneath the mosaic of disparate arguments, there is some kind of general, substantive, and tractable dispute. Maybe, we sigh in relief, the whole thing is more than just the fever-dreams of bored scholars.

Over the next week, I am going to post a multi-part series about realism and idealism. By the end of it, I want to convince you that any debate over Realism is a safari with small game. The history of the debate is a history of verbal clashes and equivocations, whose ultimate legacy appears to be persistent confusion on The Guardian’s editorial pages.

Crispin Wright is going to be our guide on this safari. Wright blesses us with a wealth of useful distinctions in his Truth and Objectivity, which I’ll be using here. As he has it, doctrines of realism are characterized by the features of modesty and presumption. Realism is modest in the sense that it acknowledges that there is an objective world that is independent of our mind, and presumptuous in the sense that it claims that we have epistemic access to that world. Anti-realists are those unhappy thinkers that deny some features of realism.

Anti-realists come in roughly three sorts. There are those thinkers that are immodest, in that they deny that the world is mind-independent; and if anyone is immodest, the metaphysical idealists are. There are those that only deny presumption, and who fall into the same camp as the skeptics. And denial of both modesty and presumption would require a person to belong to the ranks of the nihilists.

Sounds good so far, right? Well, it elegantly captures the spirit of the discussion.

But no — at the end of the day, I doubt that this can’t be the right way of looking at things. Idealists can be, and are, modest. In fact, the arch-idealist George Berkeley was modest after a fashion. For, surprisingly, there is a sense in which Berkeley would — and explicitly did — endorse the notion that objects are independent of the mind. If idealists can be modest, and they are held to be the prototypical sort of anti-realist that denies modesty, we are left to ask whether or not the realism/anti-realism debate is a general dispute at all.

Alright, that’s enough front-matter. Let’s get down to business. What’s the point of the realism/anti-realism talk, in general? Obviously, we conduct conversations using the language of realism and anti-realism in order to help us distinguish between properties of the world and properties of our thoughts. Realists want to preserve an intuition about the authenticity of the external world. Planets and stars and quarks and rabbits and tigers and other junk would all be there, even if we weren’t around to see them. The antirealist wants to avoid justifying their pre-philosophical gambit using notions that are beyond our ken.

One reason why the debate over realism have been difficult to resolve is that, even if all hands agree to speak of a general debate concerning objectivity, the object of the debate remains unclear.

For Wright, there are at least three different objects of study: truth, meaning, and judgment. We think our notion of truth is objective when our description of it transcends the evidence and is independent of our concrete understanding. (Hence, “God is the way, the truth, and the light”, while admittedly having mysterious ways and possessing a dark sense of humor.) We believe that our notion of meaning is objective insofar as the right verdict about the truth-value of a statement is independent of our considered opinions. (My considered opinion might be that I have arthritis in my thigh; and this might make sense in light of the weird concept that informs my use of the term “arthritis”; but then that wouldn’t be a concept of arthritis, would it?) And we think our judgments are objective when they somehow denote “real” features in the world that are discernible by anyone with the right faculties. (Blue is a real property, “American Beauty” really is a good film, etc.)

Wright thinks it is hard to say which of these are necessary features of a realist’s account. But it seems clear enough that the last point of discussion – the objectivity of judgment — is the least impressive. Wright explains: “Objective judgements [sic] are those with a ‘genuinely factual’ subject matter. Once again, this is a largely unhelpful characterization, notoriously diffcult to improve on. But all over philosophy there has been a repeated urge to attempt to draw some such distinction”. (6) If it were to turn out that no substantial disagreement could be found over objectivity of truth and meaning, and all that is left to discuss is objectivity of judgment, then the debate between realism and anti-realism would seem to rest on very thin ice.

~

Many philosophers patrol the armistice line between realism and anti-realism. These philosophers optimistically claim that there is a substantive disagreement between the schools.

Some of these philosophers might be described as hybrid theorists, owing to their acceptance of both realism and anti-realism, albeit in different senses. These philosophers have noticed that the conditions of presumption and modesty are not very clear. They contend that our cognitive abilities have limits, and the degree of access we have to the world must be held up against the horizon-line of our abilities.

This is how I think we should read Kant. He made the distinction between phenomena and noumena (thing-in-itself), and argued that powers of reason could be used to access the former but not the latter. In his way of speaking, noumena could only be contemplated by speculative reason, even though such speculations held no potential for vindication. In other words, the noumenal realm is mind-independent, in that it transcends the evidence accessible to our cognitive powers, while phenomena are mind-dependent.

Other hybrid theorists suggest that there might also be different ways of construing the meaning of “the world”. In effect, such forms of thought would argue that there are two interacting worlds. I think Descartes‘s substance dualism might be cited as an example.

The Kantian and Cartesian views are remarkable because they are optimistic about the use of the realism/anti-realism language, at least once one accepts the nuances they want to add to our conceptions of modesty and presumption. The conviction in favor of the preservation of the realism/antirealism debate is given succinct expression by Wright: “If anything is distinctive of philosophical enquiry, it is the attempt to understand the relation between human thought and the world… If our successors come to reject not the details but the very issue of the contemporary debate concerning realism, it will be because they have rejected philosophy itself.” (1)

But other philosophers have outright rejected the distinction by arguing that we can’t make much sense of what the debate amounts to. Rosen explains, “… after a point, when every attempt to say just what the issue is has come up empty, we have no real choice but to conclude that despite all the wonderful, suggestive imagery, there is ultimately nothing in the neighborhood to discuss.” There can be many kinds of failures at articulation. If the debate, for example, rests upon a misguided use of language (as Wittgenstein insisted), or a muddled understanding of how metaphysical access fits with the substance of the world, or a bogus distinction between appearance and reality (as Rorty claimed), then we ought to abandon all hope of progress towards enlightenment on the issue. At its most extreme, pessimism results in theory quietism, and indifference towards generic realist/anti-realist debates. Whether or not this amounts to a “rejection of philosophy itself” remains to be seen.

I count myself among the pessimists. In order to argue for quietism, in the sense of indifference towards any generic claims about realism, I am interested in exploring the very slight role that immodesty plays in George Berkeley‘s anti-realism. That is to say, I wish to show that, as far as human knowledge of truth and meaning are concerned, he is a realist.

It goes without saying that, as far as the broad caricature of Berkelean idealism goes, objects are dependent upon the operations of the understanding and ideas before the mind (dependent on the mind). Berkeley is at his clearest at the outset of the Principles, when he writes: “It is evident to anyone who takes a survey of the objects of human knowledge, that they are either ideas actually imprinted on the senses, or else such as are perceived by attending to the passions and operations of the mind, or lastly ideas formed by help of memory and imagination”. (89) So Berkeley, when reduced to slogan form, can be considered immodest. But there is no question that he would support explication of what the knowing subject happens to be. For “…all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence, without a mind, that their being is to be perceived or known; that consequently so long as they are not actually perceived by me, or do not exist in my mind or that of any other created spirit, they must either have no existence at all, or else subsist in the mind of some eternal spirit.” (91)

Berkeley chooses John Locke‘s realism as a central target. Specifically, Berkeley argues against Locke’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities. For Berkeley, the distinction between these qualities raises the question of how ideas (secondary qualities) could resemble insensible material things (primary qualities), which cannot be given a credible answer. Hence, the distinction acts as a wedge that can be exploited by the skeptic. So, again, it would seem logical to characterize Berkeley as an anti-realist. He does, after all, abhor the idea of material substances, lurking beneath our sensations like the dullest of ghosts.

Yet this surface anti-realism is merely apparent. A.C. Grayling comments, “Berkeley’s denial of the existence of matter is not a denial of the existence of the external world and the physical objects it contains, such as tables and chairs, mountains and trees. Nor does Berkeley hold that the world exists only because it is thought of by any one or more finite minds. In one sense of the term ”realist”, indeed, Berkeley is a realist, in holding that the existence of the physical world is independent of finite minds, individually or collectively.” (Grayling:168) The fact that Grayling takes pains to talk about realism in terms of finite minds, we can infer that the phrase “independent of the mind” need not be ambiguous about the knowing subject.

The debates that have informed present-day arguments on realism/anti-realism have rested upon different philosophical ways of speaking about the phrase “independent of the mind”. Hence, the denial of modesty is ambiguous unless the definite article is replaced by reference to the kind of knowing subject. If we try to fill in the gaps, we find that there are at the very least three kinds of immodesty: dependence upon our collective of minds, dependence on an individual mind, and dependence on the divine mind. In Berkeley, and in scholarly commentaries on Berkeley, we find explicit illustrations of this threefold distinction. We shall examine each in turn.

Berkeley’s arguments frequently seem to begin from an individualistic point of view. This is evidenced by constant explicit personal references, marked by phrases like “for my part”, “I sense”, and so forth. This is just to say that he chooses a phenomenal examination of the objects of his senses as his provisional starting point. Such a strategy is to be expected of philosophers that have proceeded in the wake of the Cartesian method. Yet he frequently leans away from the egocentric and into the social by explicitly leaving the ultimate verdict up to the audience, and by advertising himself as being of one mind with the “vulgar”. He continually asks the reader to troll their own thoughts and put his claims to the test of their own experience.

But, of course, this starting point is merely provisional. For it is also common knowledge that Berkeley believed that objects, like the tree in the yard, had an quality of “outness” that persisted even when we were not attending to it. As he puts it in the Second Dialogue (through the mouth of Philonous): “…I conclude, not that [sensible things] have no real existence, but that seeing they depend not on my thought, and have an existence distinct from being perceived by me, there must be some other mind wherein they exist.” (Berkeley, 202; emphasis his) We are left, at the very least, with individualistic realism.

Where he drew upon his individual experience for the purposes of explaining that real things must be comprehended by cognitive powers, we fnd him abandoning his own experience in application to his metaphysics. In that way, the tree in the yard continues to exist in such a way that transcends his evidence for it. The passage continues: “As sure therefore as the sensible world really exists, so sure is there an infinite omnipresent spirit who contains and supports it.” So Berkeley’s anti-realism is only relative to the divine knower.

So far, we have looked at the objectivity of truth relative to individuals, and relative to the divine. But we have left out two other issues: the objectivity of meaning, and the collective as a knowing subject. That’s saving the best for last. After all, if it turns out that Berkeley thinks that we have no collective access to the world, then we will have found some grounds for saying that Berkeley is an anti-realist about human knowledge. But if we can’t make that claim, then the whole debate over realism and anti-realism ends up being vapid pontification over God’s ideas.

Whereas, musing over God’s ideas is about as worthwhile as asking the question, “How now Brown Cow?”; and whereas, the realism/anti-realism debate is a keystone to philosophy; we must be resolved to face the possibility that, if Berkeley is not an anti-realist about collective access to the world, we will have shown that much of philosophy is absurd.

~

It is not obvious as to what extent Berkeley would think that the collective subject has a relationship with objective truth. In his commentaries on Berkeley, George J. Stack is quite explicit in denouncing the social collectivist view. “Now, it would seem that, in accordance with Berkeley’s statements, we would have to assume that if twenty men were looking at, say, the moon, they each would perceive certain sense-data which would be mind-dependent. But the collection of sense-data they would identify as THE MOON would be numerically distinct for each perceiver. It would be erroneous to assert that each of the twenty participants would be perceiving the ”same” moon… it follows that no two persons can perceive THE SAME THING at all.” (Stack:68) In Stack’s final interpretation, there is no common object of discussion at all. So in that view, Berkeley denies collective modesty, and (strictly speaking) he denies collective presumption as well. As far as collective knowledge goes, Berkeley must be a nihilist.

I have reasons to doubt that the case is quite so bleak. An incidental comment in Berkeley’s Notebook (A) suggests that Berkeley would endorse collective realism. In passage 801, Berkeley writes, “I differ from the Cartesians in that I make extension, Colour etc to exist really in Bodies & independent of Our Mind.” Clearly, we know something, together. Notice that this is unusually dramatic language for a man who is characterized as the doctrinal champion of immodesty. It is an unusually explicit endorsement of realism, at least when it comes to our knowledge, our minds. Given the boldness of the statement, it seems plausible to read that passage as saying that Berkeley is at least willing to grant that any given knowing subject mediately perceives the same ideas as their neighbors when they gaze out at the moon.

This is not to say that Stack is entirely off-base, however. Berkeley has tended to be skeptical of the notions of identity, individuation, or sameness. How, then, could he agree that many different persons are looking at the same object? The only way that Berkeley can say this is by supposing that ideas across persons are merely similar. As Stack admits, “Berkeley tends to affirm, in regard to this question of identity, that if we take the word SAME to mean what it ordinarily means, then it may be admitted that different observers may be said to perceive the same thing or that the same thing ”exists” for different perceivers. Berkeley assumes that the word ”same” is ordinarily used to refer to those conditions under which no distinction or variety is perceived… In this sense, Berkeley admits that the ”same thing” can be perceived by, and exist ”in the minds” of, different persons.” (Stack, 67)

Admittedly, this is a peculiar view, since we can legitimately wonder how it is that I can see if my ideas can even resemble your ideas – I can hardly pluck your ideas out of your head and lay them side by side next to mine for easy comparison. Actually, I can’t even compare many of my own ideas to one another. For, crucially (in the New Theory of Vision), Berkeley holds the heterogeneity thesis — the idea that my ideas of touch, sight, smell, etc., have nothing in common with one another. Now if my tactile idea of a box cannot even be similar to my visual idea of a box, when both are available to me, then how am I supposed to make the even greater inferential leap by supposing that my tactile ideas are similar to yours? (Berkeley, 60)

It is hard to make sense of Berkeley on this, and I will not pretend that I can resolve his views on identity in any satisfactory way. The matter will, I think, have to be given a provisional resolution by attending to the ambiguity of words like “collective” and “Our Mind”. In one sense, the word “collective” is meant to imply a community of knowers that exchange ideas back and forth like parcels in the mail. This sense is clearly impossible for Berkeley.

But there is another sense of the word, corresponding to aggregate opinion in relation to the divine. In this, there is no suggestion that one person’s ideas can resemble another’s in some way that is introspectively obvious. Rather, one person’s ideas are judged to be similar to another’s person’s only by virtue of God‘s perspective, which we presuppose is out there.

We know that objects possess a quality of “outness” for which God is the guarantor. Perhaps this is the ultimate import of the phrase, “independent of Our Mind”. Let us assume so. What does this tell us about Berkeley’s account? It is as true as ever that Berkeley’s arguments are advertised as a form of anti-realism, e.g., repeating that objects cannot exist without being perceived by some mind or other. But the upshot of his argument, especially when accented by selections from his Notebooks, indicate that his anti-realism is, in effect, restricted to the knowledge of the divine maker. As for sensible objects and their relation to finite humans, he is as modest as can be. And so, in that sense, he is a self-affirmed realist about truth.

It might be objected that the individualistic and collectivistic stances towards realism are nevertheless entirely dependent upon the divine stance toward anti-realism. For it seems that Berkeley wants to argue that individualistic and collectivistic stances are capable of grasping a quality of the outness of sensible data, and that they owe this presumption of outness to the divine form of anti-realism. In that way, it could be alleged that Berkeley is not a realist in any significant sense after all, since his realist doctrines all collapse into his divine anti-realism.

In order for this reductionist objection to be right, it would have to involve an asymmetric dependency – the collectivistic sense of realism would have to be grounded in the anti-realism of the divine, but not vice-versa. So if, for instance, Berkeley claimed that we had knowledge of God through mere faith, then it would be natural to conclude that there was such an asymmetric dependency. But Berkeley’s theology would have him argue quite the opposite. We have reasons to suppose that God exists, and these reasons are manifest in the operations of the real world. “Philonous” is explicit on this point: “Men commonly believe that all things are known or perceived by God, because they believe the being of a God, whereas I on the other side, immediately and necessarily conclude the being of a God, because all sensible things must be perceived by him.” (202, emphasis mine) Making the same point, again: “sensible things really do exist: and if they really exist, they are necessarily perceived by an infinite mind” (202, emphasis omitted). The doctrines of human realism and divine anti-realism are co-dependent. The language of realism and anti-realism about truth proves to be moot.

I have been trying to stress that this analysis of Berkeley forces us to end on a stalemate between realism and anti-realism. Yet at this point, it might be objected that there is a sense in which the game has been fixed in such a way that the anti-realist’s argument has been given surface plausibility. By placing accent on the knowing subject, and refusing to treat the phrase “independent of the mind” at face value, we have tacitly endorsed the idea that any plausible form of realism must take due care to be sensitive to the limits of the knowing subject. The realist, then, can rightfully complain that this trivially entails anti-realism. For they might allege that the demand for that an account be phrased in terms of perspective begs the question in favor of the anti-realist. For we are reduced in Berkeley’s case to a position of speaking in terms of “realism for us, anti-realism for God”, and the relativistic implications of this view are unpalatable to the realist.

I think that’s too harsh. An open-minded realist might argue that the language of “knowing subjects” can be accommodated. All we need to show is that realism holds for all minds alike. That is, the facts of the matter must be independent of all minds, universal to all genuine knowers: me, you, and God too. But then, of course, we are faced with a regress. In the first place, the question arises as to how we are supposed to establish that one subject knows has the same thing as their neighbor. If we say that we know they share the same knowledge because we reliable third-person narrators are observing the two subjects attend to the same stimuli, the question of how we know that, and so on. And if we stop the regress by appeal to the actual states of affairs, we are left appealing to the same bugbear that the open-minded realist had sought to dispatch.

It would be better if we were to hang up our hats on the objectivity of truth.

Unless, of course, we are atheists — in which case the question of God does not arise.

~

Before we conclude our examination of collective truth, we have to answer one more nagging question. How do we know that other people exist? Might they just be the products of some dream of mine? In short, what, exactly, is Berkeley’s solution to the problem of other minds, and how does it bear on the prospects of reading him as a collective realist?

Of course, Berkeley had quite a bit to say on the philosophy of mind in general. Berkeley is a particularist about ideas — he insists that the notion of an abstract idea is unintelligible. And he’s a nominalist, since any jumble of ideas might fit with a single, general name. Nothing connects a set of particular ideas with their general heading except the learned association between pain and ideas, and habitual use of the name to govern the ideas.

But Berkeley famously gives no explicit answer to this problem of other minds. His efforts are largely spent on the problem of the external world. So Stack might object: it is very fine to bring up a few scraps from his Notebook, but it isn’t fine to think that Berkeley is a realist about collective truth.

While it is tempting to inquire at length as to what Berkeley could or could not have said in his own defence, I think that his silence is much more interesting. It is best to say that Berkeley simply takes it for granted as a prior assumption that other people exist, and that they too are governed by the laws of associational psychology. He does not require evidence, argument, or proof. For all intents and purposes, we might treat the existence of other minds as a priori true, for Berkeley. (Or, if that terminology does too much violence to his empiricist project, we at least have to admit that the existence of other minds is dogmatically held.) And that is how he is so casual in his offhanded remark in the Notebook concerning a world “independent of Our Mind”. He could not bring himself to doubt the existence of others, or the prospect that their experiences differ radically from each other.

The focus so far has been on objectivity about truth (and more recently on objectivity relative to the collective of human knowers). However, we are also in a position to inquire into the objectivity of meaning. Since the question of meaning is a subject that is intimately related to collective truth, I have left it till last.

In what follows, I will be assuming that meaning can be understood as the assertability-conditions for sentences or utterances. This is cheating, in a way, because assertion-conditional semantics has been a relatively recent research programme. However, my use of this anachronism in assessing Berkeley is indispensable. For it is difficult to imagine any other candidate theory of meaning that is clearly and uniquely concerned with linguistic meaning, as distinct from the contents of a truth-claim or the contents of a judgment (each of which can be discussed in their own sections). (I am using assertion-conditional semantics instead of truth-conditional semantics because technical debates over the concept of “truth” have relapsed into the muddled state that they were in a century ago.)

Objectivity about meaning involves a distinction between the conditions under which an individual believes a sentence can be asserted, and the conditions under which the sentence really can be rationally asserted. The meaning of a sentence “is a real constraint, to which we are bound… by contract”. (Wright, 5) In other words, an individual can be wrong about the meaning of a sentence, and this wrongness may or may not owe to failures of perception or cognition by the individual. Another way of putting the same point is through discussion of the normativity of meaning.

Here, we have to find the grounds for two kinds of languages — private languages, as formed by the individual alone, and collective languages shared amongst a community.

Recall that, for Stack, Berkeley appears to have a difficult time with the notion of collective modesty. For Berkeley (interpreted by Stack), we cannot speak of two people immediately confronting the same objects of experience. We can only mediately perceive that the same objects are being attended to through the constant observations of the divine.

Suppose that Stack were correct when he interpreted Berkeley on the subject of our collective knowledge of objective truth. What would that tell us about the objectivity of meaning? One consequence would be that, as far as Berkeley is concerned, if we did not suppose that God existed then we would be left with no basis for collective modesty at all. Hence we would have no basis for understanding one another. Our grammars would at best be idiolects. There would be no reason to suppose that “we” share any common ground at all, and we surely couldn’t mean the same or even similar things by our sentences.

But the situation might even be worse. All private languages require rules to follow — we have to be able to look at a sentence and say that it is true or false depending on some stable conditions. Arguably, private languages cannot exist, since in a private language there would be no stable distinction between correctness and error. For when the speaker of a private language were confronted with stimuli that refute his or her semantic rules, they could always unconsciously redefine the rules to make themselves a permanent and exclusive arbiter of what is correct. Some would argue that this would be semanticide, or the death of all meaning. It would entail semantic anti-realism for private languages.

***

Before we make sense of either form of language, we have to recall the salient facts about Berkeley on truth. I have tried to show that Berkeley is a realist about the collective’s stance towards objective truth. His use of the phrase “independent of Our Mind” in the Notebooks (801) is more than merely suggestive — he means it.

But how is it that we know anything? Consider the following passage from the Principles. “Upon the whole, I think we may fairly conclude that the proper objects of vision constitute an universal language of the Author Nature, whereby we are instructed how to regulate our actions in order to attain those things that are necessary to the preservation and well-being of our bodies, as also to avoid whatever may be hurtful and destructive of them.” (emphasis mine) There are two things we need to take away from this section. First, that we are aware of the hand of God because our experience teaches us that we have the skills to look after our own well-being and avoid painful stimuli. Second, we have that relationship by recognizing the universal language, or the meaning, of God’s works. “[T]he manner wherein they signify and mark unto us the objects which are at a distance is the same with that of languages and signs of human appointment, which do not suggest the things signified by any likeness or identity of nature, but only by an habitual connexion that experience has made us to observe between them.” (61-62)

While these are nice things for us to know about truth, they’re not very helpful when it comes to the question of the objectivity of meaning. After all, we — well, most of us — certainly do not defer to God in order to get insight into what we mean by what we say. And it’s certainly not helpful to refer to Him when the common meaning of the language of nature is the proof of Him in the first place.

But actually, when it comes to individual languages, or idiolects, the solution is not hard to find. The arbiter of the meanings of individual utterances is the force of habit that associates two or more unlike ideas to one another, mixed with behavioristic psychology. The meaning of a sentence is established by the conditions under which the sentence warns me about cold and toothy things, and/or draws me towards warm and fuzzy things. That, at least for the moment, seems enough to make sense of how we can possess private languages for Berkeley.

From this point on, collectivistic meaning is not hard to come by. In order to broach the subject of collectivistic meaning, we would have to solve the problem of other minds, and we have to have an account of how individual languages work. I have suggested that the existence of other minds is supposed a priori, for Berkeley. We have individualistic languages due to the facts of associational psychology. Since we know others exist a priori, and that they roughly have “similar” experiences, react to “similar” things with pain, and so on, we have a common basis for distinguishing true from false sentences. In slogan form: so long as we have collective pains, and names for the pains, we have collective languages.

I have endeavored to look at Berkeley in a fresh light. I’ve tried to demonstrate that his metaphysical idealism straddles the lines between realism and anti-realism. I have examined his doctrines in two ways — with respect to the objectivity of truth, and with respect to the objectivity of meaning.

I have made the case that his metaphysics is systematically ambivalent between realism and anti-realism. Since the terms can only be properly applied when they are explicitly connected to a knowing subject, and since the result is not uniformly realist or anti-realist across all knowing subjects, there are no grounds for thinking he deserves either label. And since his view is supposed to be a canonical example of anti-realism, we are left to wonder whether or not an issue of any general significance is under dispute.

At this point, a critic might claim that Berkeley is a hybrid-theorist, of the sort mentioned with respect to Kant and Descartes. If so, then we could preserve the language of realism and anti-realism to describe his general views.

This would not be a successful argument. For Berkeley does not distinguish between different kinds of access by saying that some are more sensitive to skepticism than others, nor does he distinguish between different kinds of worlds. From the first, Berkeley denies the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, out of fear that allowing these different kinds of access will allow the skeptic to gain credibility. (Granted, however, he does distinguish between mediate and immediate perception, and these can be thought of as distinct kinds of access. But the entire point of his metaphysical idealism is to protect both forms of perception from the scrutiny of the skeptic, so they are not distinct in the sense of being threatened by skepticism.)

To be sure, there is a sense in which God has more “access” than we do – He is omnipotent, we are not – but this hardly has the power to generate a categorical distinction of the kind we see between phenomena and noumena. It is phenomena (ideas) and notions (minds) all the way down. And at no point does he suggest that God inhabits a different world from ours. His entire point, on the side of theology, is to provide evidence of God on the basis of the natural order.

All that is left to consider is the objectivity of judgment, which I do not challenge. There is no inconsistency, or threat of inconsistency, in generally stipulating the kinds of things that one considers to be irremediably real. (Berkeley tells us that spirits and ideas are real, while abstract ideas are not, for instance.) But stipulation is exactly the problem; debates over the objectivity of judgment retain an aura of arbitrariness, of being language-games. If this is the only ground upon which Berkeley can draw a general dividing line between things that are real and things that are not, then we are left with nothing to talk about except our interesting opinions.

***

…at least, not so long as we are stuck in the classical debates.

I suggested at the end of the last post, that the use of God as a knowing subject is what contributes to Berkeley’s systematic ambivalence. If we treated atheism as the only viable possibility, and if we could construct a viable epistemology for both individual and collective knowers, then we could be realists about all three kinds of objectivity (truth, meaning, judgment). To make a long essay shorter: if they are interested in keeping their realism intact, then epistemologists must be methodological atheists. And if I am right, this is a claim that even metaphysical theists must concede.