Esse est Percepi

In this paper I first intend to give Philonous/Berkeley’s perceptual relativity argument with regard to the mind-dependence of matter, and then present Hylas’ argument involving the veil of perception, that is, the concept that mind-independent objects cause mind-dependent ideas and these ideas resemble the objects in some way. Next I will put forward Philonous’ response to this, in particular the principle ‘nothing is like an idea except an idea.’ Finally, after describing how Locke would respond to this series of arguments and counter-arguments, including a summary of his representative theory of perception, I will explain which view I find the most appealing and which I find the easiest to defend.

Philonous presents the definitions of sensible things and sensible qualities nearly in the same breath. Sensible qualities, he says, are those qualities which are immediately perceived by the senses and sensible things are either just sensible qualities or a combination thereof.[1] At first, Hylas wants to say that immediately perceived qualities are sensible things but it was soon pointed out to him that no regular object is a sensible quality by this definition. For example, when looking at a ball on the table, we would not think that it was a spherical object sitting on a plane without intervening interpretation. We would instead see just a sea of color of various shades and tints, with no way to evaluate the patterns in the colors. The word immediately here is used in contrast to mediately. Something is immediately perceived if it is directly perceived - if no intervening reason or evaluation gets in the way. Philonous uses the example of letters in a book; the shapes of the letters are immediately perceived, but their meaning is mediately perceived.[2]

Philonous uses an argument from perceptual relativity to support the mind-dependence of matter. Mind-independent objects can exist without having to be perceived but mind-dependent objects must be perceived to exist. Berkeley describes a situation in which a person has one hand colder than the other and a water bath with a temperature between those of the hands. ^[3] The person sticks each of their hands into the water, and to the colder hand the water seems hot, but to the hotter hand the water seems cold. The water has not changed, however; and because the water seems different to each of the hands, but has not changed, the water must be mind-dependent. The principle he is attempting to prove with this argument is that sensible things exist in our minds and only in our minds. You could argue that it is only the perceived qualities of the water that have changed, but since all experience of objects is mediated through perception, starting along this line of argument will not get you anywhere significant if you are going to play by the rules of an empiricist.

Here Philonous stands with the conclusion that matter is mind-dependent, but Hylas counters that only the ideas of matter are in our minds, and that these mind-dependent ideas are caused by mind-independent matter. For example, in the situation presented by Philonous above, the water itself would have temperature, but the mind would have the ideas of hot and cold. (This specific use of the word ‘temperature’ is perhaps a bit stronger than Hylas would have it, but I don’t think it is necessarily a stretch in the wrong direction.) Our perceptions are relative and vary because they are mind-dependent, but the objects that cause them are not – although the perception of the temperature of the water may shift, you would agree there is still water because the perceptions resemble the object closely enough.

Philonous thinks this resemblance business is a little on the liberal side. Even by Hylas’ admittance, ideas are malleable and impermanent, while objects are autonomous and permanent.[4] How can these two fundamentally different sets of attributes apply to things that are supposed to resemble each other? As mentioned above as a mere aside, perception mediates all experience, so even if the two opposing types of things managed somehow to resemble each other, we would never be able to know about it because we can only get to know the objects through the ideas.

As if this were not enough, Philonous goes on to present Berkeley’s principle that nothing is (or can be) like an idea except an idea.[5] Because nothing can be perceived without invoking ideas, it would seem that whatever invokes the ideas is not an idea, and furthermore, is nothing like an idea. Although there may be more to his argument than this, I couldn’t find it and I’m not sure I’m entirely comfortable with what I feel to be a rather bold statement about the nature of ideas.

Locke uses the terms ‘quality’ and ‘idea’ slightly differently than Berkeley does. For Locke, qualities are in objects and ideas are in minds. There are two kinds of qualities: primary and secondary. Primary qualities are inherent to objects; they cannot be separated; one example is extension. Secondary qualities are powers of the primary qualities to provoke various sensations in the perceiver; examples are color, smell, and taste.[6]

Locke has a representative theory of perception wherein all (simple) ideas are caused by qualities and some of these ideas resemble the qualities, namely the ideas we have of primary qualities.[7] The earlier relation of temperature versus hot/cold as applied to the perceptual relativity example is an accurate summation of Locke’s views as well. This theory is similar to Hylas’ objection to Philonous’ perceptual relativity argument. Locke’s just goes a little further and specifies the circumstances in which ideas resemble and do not resemble objects.

I don’t think Locke would accept Philonous’ statement that nothing is like an idea but an idea. Locke holds that we cannot invent simple ideas ourselves, the only place to get those is through perception and those simple ideas are a fair representation of the actual objects. Locke also believes in the veil of perception, but I think the key here that makes his argument a stronger reply to Philonous than Hylas’ is in his attribution of ‘powers’ to the objects. Instead of saying that some - since no rhyme or reason is given here the overall effect is that they are random – ideas resemble the object and some do not, Locke gives a system by which to analyze our perceptions: primary versus secondary qualities.

Even though Locke’s response would be better than Hylas’ was, I don’t think Berkeley would accept this reply as satisfactory. Locke does provide a better account of why some ideas would resemble the object and some wouldn’t, but Berkeley still wouldn’t think that ideas and objects were closely enough related that they could resemble each other at all. This strikes me as being another presentation of the mind/body problem. Ideas and objects are fundamentally different, so how can they interact? Berkeley solves the problem by saying that objects/bodies don’t exist.

Despite their disagreements I think you could combine Locke’s and Berkeley’s views without being disloyal to either of them through the addition of God – and actually the combination ends up being rather similar to Malebranche’s view of occasionalism. Everything is a mind or is in a mind (an idea), but the ‘objects’ exist in God’s mind, with the veil of perception then being not between objects and minds but between God’s mind and the minds of everyone else. However, even if you liked Locke and Berkeley so much that you wanted to combine their views on perception, Occam’s razor should get in the way.

I feel, like I think many people today do, that Hylas’ substance dualism (the existence of two essentially different types of things, minds and matter) is far more acceptable to me instinctively. It may not be the most reasonable way to feel, but there is still a little bit of a stigma for me with the effect of ideas seeming sometimes (at least somewhat) to be imaginary and that if everything was to be a mind or an idea, then it would be imaginary.

On the other hand, I can talk myself into accepting Berkeley’s view, at least intellectually. Being a solid supporter of finding (and hopefully accepting) the simplest explanation, the fact that Berkeley can do away with the mind/body problem is very satisfying. One objection I had been turning over in my mind was that what if, sometime in the future, we were to encounter sentient beings who had experiences (and scientifically persuasive proof) of the existence of extra things - phenomena, dimensions, whatever – of which we had no experience. These things would have existed before we were aware of them; how then could they exist although we had no experience of them? Obviously you would have to expand your definition of a ‘mind’ as time went on and as experience warranted to make your views as accurate as possible. Because I find Berkeley’s view to be the most logically appealing, that makes it the most defensible position for me as well.

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[1] Dialogues p 416

[2] ibid. p 416b

[3] PHK p 475b

[4] ibid. p 432b

[5] ibid. p 432b-433a

[6] ECHU p 286b

[7] ibid. p 287