page 4 of Berkeley's Argument for Immaterialism

These "set rules or methods" we call "Laws of Nature; and these we learn by experience, which teaches us that such and such ideas are attended with such and such other ideas, in the ordinary course of things" (ibid.). From this Berkeley concludes that God, the "Author of Nature", is the ultimate source of ideas and their connections.

From this in turn it follows that although everything that exists is mind-dependent, it is not dependent on particular or finite minds, but has an objective source and structure, namely, the eternal, ubiquitous and law-like perceiving of an infinite mind. This is the sense in which Berkeley is a realist; the world exists independently of the thought and experience of finite minds (2D166-7) ‹ which explains what he means by claiming to defend common sense, for common sense holds that grass is green and the sky is blue whether or not any of us happen to be looking at either, whereas Locke and the corpuscularians held otherwise‹grass has powers to make us see green, but it is not itself green; indeed, on the Lockean view the world is colourless, odourless and silent until perceived, when it produces in the perceiver visual, olfactory and auditory experiences. But for Berkeley the world is just as we perceive it to be even when we are not perceiving it, because it is always and everywhere perceived by the infinite mind of a deity.

The deity perceives the universe by thinking it, that is, causing it to exist by conceiving it. In a letter to the American Dr Samuel Johnson Berkeley remarks that his view differs only verbally from the theological doctrine that God maintains the universe in existence by an act of continual creation. So the ideas which constitute the world are caused by the deity, and appear in our consciousnesses as the effects of his causal activity: this is the metaphysical way (level 3) of describing what, in ordinary terminology, we describe as seeing trees, tasting ice-cream, and so forth. The latter way of describing the facts is not incorrect; Berkeley's argument is that the ordinary and the metaphysical ways of describing reality are alternative descriptions of the same thing.

A significant feature of this account is its view of causality. Locke had argued that the empirical basis for our concept of causality comes from our own felt powers as agents, able to initiate and intervene in trains of events in the world. This sense of our own efficacy we "project" onto the world to explain chains of events in it, imputing to events we describe as "causes" an agency or power on analogy with our own. For Berkeley the projective move is empirically ungrounded. We indeed have experience of causal agency as spirits, which are the only active things we know. But although it is a convenience to impute causal agency to things (ideas) in our ordinary way of talking, they are inert, and apparent causal connections between them are ultimately owed to the regular, consistent, lawlike causal activity of God.

The Argument's Resilience to Objections

It is obvious that Berkeley's theory rests upon a vital and very debatable assumption, borrowed unquestioningly from Locke who equally unquestioningly borrowed it from the Cartesians, namely, that the place to begin philosophical enquiry is among the private data of individual consciousness, that is, among the ideas constituting an individual's experience. If one accepts this Cartesian super-premiss (a large "if") the early steps of Berkeley's argument appears persuasive, as may be seen by considering a proposed objection to it, namely, that it commits the elementary error of identifying sensible qualities and sensory ideas; for ‹ says the objection ‹ there is a large difference between "the table is brown" and "the table looks brown to me", because the truth-conditions of the two statements differ. The table could be brown without it seeming so to me, and vice versa; so Berkeley's argument collapses.

But this argument begs the question against Berkeley by assuming that claims about what qualities an object possesses are independent of claims about how they can be known to possess them; which amounts to the claim that there are observation-independent facts about the qualities of objects which can be stated without any reference to experience of them. But this claim is exactly what Berkeley rejects, on the grounds that any characterisation of a sensible quality has to make essential reference to how it appears to some actual or possible perceiver. How, he asks, does one explain redness, smoothness and other sensible qualities independently of how they appear? So the objection fails by premissing a seems-is distinction which is precisely what Berkeley opposes on the grounds that it leads to scepticism.

To deny that there is a seems-is distinction is just another way of asserting that sensible objects (things in the world) are collections of sensible qualities, and hence of ideas. So Berkeley takes the contrast he wishes to resist to be one between (a) sensible objects, which as collections of sensible qualities are what is immediately perceived, and (b) objects existing independently of perception but causing it. This is not the same contrast as (c) sense data in the sense of uninterpreted contents of sensory states, and (a) sensible objects. It is important to note this because for Berkeley what is immediately present in experience is the sensible object, not some mediating representation (or collection of representations) different from the object. We do not, he says, infer from colour patches and other sensory data to the existence, in a world beyond them, of books and trees; what we see (and touch etc.) are, immediately, books and trees.

This however prompts another objection, this time that Berkeley is having things both ways: he says that we immediately perceive such familiar objects of sense-experience as books and trees, while at the same time saying that what we immediately perceive are colours and textures. To see what is involved here, consider an argument advanced in more recent philosophy. This says that books and trees are interpretations of, or inferences from, the sensory data of experience, and that in speaking of books rather than colour-patches we are going beyond what talk of colour patches strictly licenses. This is because we take physical objects to exist independently of particular perceivings of them, to be publicly available to more than one perceiver at a time, and so on ‹ none of which is true of the sensory ideas from which they are inferred. So we have to keep (a) and (c) strictly separate.

Berkeley can be defended against this objection by appealing to the distinction of levels. At level 1 we immediately perceive colours and textures, while at level 2 we immediately perceive books and trees. The latter consist wholly of the former, and it is only if one disregards the distinction of levels that one might fall into the mistake of thinking that when one perceives a smooth red book, one perceives redness and smoothness and a book, as if the book were something additional to the sensible qualities constituting it. Just such a view is forced by the materialist view, in which something inaccessible to sensory awareness constitutes the underlying causal origin of the sensible qualities we perceive.

Some critics object that having thus argued that all perception is immediate, Berkeley promptly proceeds to admit a species of mediate perception by inference or "suggestion". The passage cited is the one where Berkeley says, "when I hear a coach drive along the streets, immediately I perceive only the sound; but from the experience I have had that such a sound is connected with a coach, I am said to hear the coach" (1D204). This might count as a case of mediate perception if Berkeley did not immediately add, "It is nevertheless evident, that in truth and strictness, nothing can be heard but sound: and the coach is not then properly perceived by sense, but suggested from experience". The same applies to our practice of saying elliptically that one sees that the poker is hot; again, one does not see heat, one sees that something is hot, that is, one infers on the basis of experience that when something looks like that, it will feel a certain way if you touch it. These are not cases of mediate perception, but of experience-based inference, to which Berkeley gives the name 'suggestion": the ideas of one sense suggest the ideas of another.

The foregoing shows that as long as certain of Berkeley's premisses are accepted, and as long as discussion of the main plank of his views (the notion of God and his metaphysical activity) is deferred, his views are resilient to objection. If we reject the Cartesian super-premiss ‹ that the place to start is the data of individual experience ‹ his views are not so resilient.

These remarks touch upon one set of objections to Berkeley's views. Others, as remarked, more threatening to his position, concern its underpinning, namely, the infinite mind to which a central metaphysical role is allotted. This is discussed below.

Matter and Materialism

The concept of matter is redundant, Berkeley's argument purports to demonstrate, because everything required to explain the world and experience of it is available in recognising that minds and ideas are all there can be. But Berkeley adds to this argument-by-exclusion a set of positive anti-materialist considerations.

An important argument for materialism is that use of a concept of matter explains much in science. Berkeley summarises the view thus: "there have been a great many things explained by matter and motion: take away these, and you destroy the whole corpuscular philosophy, and undermine those mechanical principles which have been applied with such success to account for the phenomena. In short, whatever advances have been made ... in the study of nature, do all proceed on the supposition that corporeal substance or matter doth really exist" (P50). Berkeley's reply is that science's explanatory power and practical utility neither entail the truth of, nor depend upon, the materialist hypothesis, for these can equally if not better (because more economically) be explained in instrumentalist terms. Instrumentalism is the view that scientific theories are tools, and as such are not candidates for assessment as true or false, but rather as more or less useful. One does not ask whether a gardening utensil such as a spade is true, but whether it does its intended job effectively ‹ and not merely effectively, but, as required by Ockham's Razor, as simply and economically as possible.

Berkeley expressed his early version of instrumentalism as a "doctrine of signs", in which the regularity and order among our ideas reflect the steady will of God, which is so reliable that we can represent the connections thus observed as laws. He writes, "the steady, consistent methods of Nature, may not unfitly be styled the language of its Author, whereby he ... directs us how to act for the convenience and felicity of life" (P109). Science is thus a convenient summary, for sublunary purposes, of what at the metaphysical level of explanation would be described in terms of the activity of infinite spirit.

....5/