Notes on Berkeley's Idealism.

In PHK:18, 42 Berkeley brings up dreams. This is reminiscent of Descartes dream argument of the Meditations. The point of the bringing up dreams is to make the following point: when we are dreaming, it seems as though we are looking at rocks and books, seeing the stars, talking with people, when in fact we are doing no such thing. So suppose you are dreaming about doing a physics experiment. You dream that you are dropping a rock from a high place, and you are timing how long it takes to fall, or perhaps it is a more sophisticated dream, and you are dreaming about looking at vapor traces made by sub-atomic particles in a cloud chamber. Now suppose that I am watching you dream. I can see plainly that there are no rocks, no cloud chambers, no stop-watches, none of the things you are dreaming about. How can this be?? Well, because all the things you have access to are ideas in your head. Sure, it seems to you like there are rocks and cloud chambers and stuff. Of course. That's what ideas do -- they seem to be things other than ideas. That's their job, so to speak.

Given this, is seems plausible to suppose that even when you are awake, all you have access to are ideas. Again, they seem to be rocks and sheets of paper and stars millions of miles away. But that's not surprising. Again, that's what ideas do. They seem to be things other than ideas.

The first thing to notice is that Locke is in exactly the same boat here. Locke starts off by saying that all the mind has access to are its own ideas (of sensation and reflection). Those of you who are finding Berkeley's metaphysics implausible (and bringing up things like your perception of the piece of paper, or the stars, etc.) but didn't raise a stink about Locke apparently didn't really understand the full force of Locke's position.

[As an aside, it is very interesting to note that we can discuss Locke on the fact that all we have access to are ideas, I can even explicitly bring up the veil of perception doctrine that it clearly entails, and nobody gets irritated. But when Berkeley comes along and just points out that according to this very view, we can never know anything at all about anything we might posit to be mind-independent, and that everything we see is just ideas, everyone gets all irritated as though Berkeley is somehow offending your common sense and saying something silly. If that is your reaction, then you didn't really appreciate the force of Locke's position that all the mind has access to are ideas, nor did you appreciate the epistemological predicament that the veil of pereption puts one in. Berkeley isn't all of a sudden taking these innocent ideas of Locke's and perverting them into some sort of odd metaphysics. Rather, he is just pointing out some conclusions that follow immediately from those principles that Locke and others argue for.]

Locke is also, just as much as Berkeley, locked into the appearance side of the veil of appearance. What Locke does, though, is to stipulate that some of those ideas really resemble things as they really are, and that it is these things that somehow cause you to have those ideas. But both of those claims are strictly speaking indefensible, for they would somehow require what is impossible: for use to somehow get outside the veil of appearance and compare real things with the ideas they cause, and to check and see if real things act causally on sense organs.

Now of course we can make observations on objects, and see how they operate. But one needs to notice that all the observations and experiments one could possibly do are all done within the appearance side of the veil of appearance. Another way of making the point is that they are all observations or experiments that could be performed by someone in an elaborate dream, with no dream-independent things actually corresponding to them at all. Locke does address this (See 4:4:1-5), because he realizes that a rampant idealism threatens given his claim that all the mind has access to is its ideas. Since he, unlike Berkeley, takes it that 'real things' have to be mind-independent, he finds this possibility unpalatable. But by any reasonable standard, Locke's arguments to the effect that there is a reality that corresponds to (some of) our ideas are weak. Berkeley realizes this, but since he makes the move of equating reality with ideas, he feels no threat that idealism subverts anything real.