I thought I'd try something here. Since there's been some renewed interest in figuring out what the hell is wrong with this forum, I thought I'd try to create a thread that expresses what I'd like to see more of here.

I just picked up Berkeley's Principles of Knowledge and Three Dialogues. It's a piece of the historical canon that I've never been forced to read for a class and never had much impetus for picking it up until now (realizing that Berkeley's one of the only early moderns whose work I have not touched on except very briefly years ago).

So what I thought was that if I post a link to the Three Dialogues, those who would like to can read it along with me, and can bring up questions and issues from the text here so that we can actually discuss them.

Here is a link to the text of The First Dialogue: www.bartleby.com/37/2/1.html (since Berkeley's been dead forever, the text is free on the internet, thus there is no impediment preventing participation in this thread except time and effort, but I promise you don't need much to reach the level of a C+ student in PHIL101. In fact, simply actually reading the text would probably be enough to get you there.)

Here is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) article on Berkeley and his works: plato.stanford.edu/entries/berkeley/

You should skim that to help understand what's going on in the Dialogues.

An example of a good post for this thread would be the following (which will be the first discussion question, from the beginning of the dialogues):

See: plato.stanford.edu/entries/berkeley/#2.2.2

Philonous begins his first argument by contending that sensible qualities such as heat are not distinct from pleasure or pain. Pleasure and pain, Philonous argues, are allowed by all to be merely in the mind; therefore the same must be true for the sensible qualities. The most serious difficulties with this argument are (1) whether we should grant the œno distinction premise in the case of the particular sensory qualities invoked by Berkeley (why not suppose that I can distinguish between the heat and the pain?) and (2) if we do, whether we should generalize to all sensory qualities as Berkeley would have us do.

Here, it's clear that the voice of Berkeley (Philonous) is jumping from a claim that sensible qualities are indistinguishable from mental qualities to the conclusion that therefore all sensible qualities must be mental (and therefore at least all the things we perceive are not material, but mental/ideal).

This seems like a pretty weak argument - I purposely framed it as a "jumping to the conclusion", because I think it's a hasty generalization from the seeming indistinguishability of some sensory qualities from mental ones, to the idea that all sensory qualities must be mental.

But maybe we forget that the argument itself isn't very good and ask whether if it WERE the case that sensory qualities like heat are indistinguishable from mental qualities (or, so Berkeley thinks they are) like pain, does it follow from my being unable to distinguish these that they therefore must be identical (that is, that heat is not material but mental)?

What if human cognition just fails to distinguish because that's just how our cognitive apparatus is set up (I'm anachronistically anticipating Kant here, by the way). It doesn't thereby follow that these things MUST be, as things in themselves, cognitive, does it?

But in that case, if it doesn't, how could we know whether they were mental or material if our cognitive apparatus necessitates the correlation between the sensation of heat and the mental feeling of pain? (this is central to Kant's work, it's a tough question).

A quicker second discussion question concerning the actual text of the dialogues:

Hyl. I was considering the odd fate of those men who have in all ages, through an affectation of being distinguished from the vulgar, or some unaccountable turn of thought, pretended either to believe nothing at all, or to believe the most extravagant things in the world. This however might be borne, if their paradoxes and scepticism did not draw after them some consequences of general disadvantage to mankind. But the mischief lieth here; that when men of less leisure see them who are supposed to have spent their whole time in the pursuits of knowledge professing an entire ignorance of all things, or advancing such notions as are repugnant to plain and commonly received principles, they will be tempted to entertain suspicions concerning the most important truths, which they had hitherto held sacred and unquestionable.
Phil. I entirely agree with you, as to the ill tendency of the affected doubts of some philosophers, and fantastical conceits of others. I am even so far gone of late in this way of thinking, that I have quitted several of the sublime notions I had got in their schools for vulgar opinions. And I give it you on my word; since this revolt from metaphysical notions to the plain dictates of nature and common sense, I find my understanding strangely enlightened, so that I can now easily comprehend a great many things which before were all mystery and riddle.
Hyl. I am glad to find there was nothing in the accounts I heard of you. 8
Phil. Pray, what were those?
Hyl. You were represented, in last night™s conversation, as one who maintained the most extravagant opinion that ever entered into the mind of man, to wit, that there is no such thing as material substance in the world.
Phil. That there is no such thing as what philosophers call material substance, I am seriously persuaded: but, if I were made to see anything absurd or sceptical in this, I should then have the same reason to renounce this that I imagine I have now to reject the contrary opinion.

The emphases in this section are interesting. It sounds to me like Berkeley is only rejecting the existence of matter qua substance, but not rejecting the common sense notion we use to talk about things as being material or physical. It seems, then, that a Berkeleyan Idealist would simply take there to be two kinds of immaterial thing, the kind common sense calls 'material' and the kind common sense calls 'immaterial'.

In that case, what is the point of being a Berkeleyan Idealist? Why not just skip a step and say that the common sense talk trumps the philosophers and so saying that everything is immaterial while retaining talk of material and immaterial is just incoherent.

This is actually fairly similar to Chalmers' way out of Matrix Skepticism (the skeptical view that the material world is really the computational world of a computer matrix) - that the Skeptical hypothesis is really a metaphysical one, regarding what constitutes the fundamental makeup of reality, but having little or no effect on how we talk about reality in general.

Does this make sense, or is there more strength to the philosophical notion of "substance" than we seem wont to admit?

A possible answer is in another section of the SEP article, here:

3.1.1 The status of ordinary objects

The basics of Berkeley's metaphysics are apparent from the first section of the main body of the Principles:

It is evident to any one 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, either compounding, dividing, or barely representing those originally perceived in the aforesaid ways. By sight I have the ideas of light and colours with their several degrees and variations. By touch I perceive, for example, hard and soft, heat and cold, motion and resistance, and of all these more and less either as to quantity or degree. Smelling furnishes me with odours; the palate with tastes, and hearing conveys sounds to the mind in all their variety of tone and composition. And as several of these are observed to accompany each other, they come to be marked by one name, and so to be reputed as one thing. Thus, for example, a certain colour, taste, smell, figure and consistence having been observed to go together, are accounted one distinct thing, signified by the name apple. Other collections of ideas constitute a stone, a tree, a book, and the like sensible things; which, as they are pleasing or disagreeable, excite the passions of love, hatred, joy, grief, and so forth.

As this passage illustrates, Berkeley does not deny the existence of ordinary objects such as stones, trees, books, and apples. On the contrary, as was indicated above, he holds that only an immaterialist account of such objects can avoid skepticism about their existence and nature.

I take B's talk of 'indistinguishable' here simply to mean 'indistinguishable in kind'. I think B's idea of sensible qualities is rather like that of Hume's notion of an impression: an immediate, present-to-consciousness quale of some simple, determinate sort (heat, cold, etc.).

The point about pain he's making is that pleasure and pain always piggyback on some other sort of immediate sensible quality, e.g. heat, as when I burn myself in Philonas's fire example. This isn't so much a positive argument for B's idealist thesis as it is a sort of check against what we would call a move towards a causal theory of perception on Hylas's part--which would be a fairly standard move. Hylas would say (roughly) that heat is a thing in the world that impinges itself upon our senses, thus causing pain. Philonas's rejoinder is to say, in so many words "We don't experience it that way, as heat followed by pain. The way we experience it the heat and the pain are all bound up with one another in the same immediate perception. Hence there's no difference."

If we try to make a positive argument out of this we get something like the following:

(1)All sensations of pain are identical with some sensible quality.
(2) Sensations of pain are mental.
(3) Therefore sensible qualities are mental.

The contentious premise is the first one. This is why B goes to such lengths to support it in the first dialogue.

Like you say, Hype, it's a weak (and I'd put in sloppy too) argument. So let's go on to your more interesting question:

if it WERE the case that sensory qualities like heat are indistinguishab le from mental qualities (or, so Berkeley thinks they are) like pain, does it follow from my being unable to distinguish these that they therefore must be identical (that is, that heat is not material but mental)?

I think the answer must be clearly not. For one thing, we could have a case of qualitative identity on our hands, and not a case of numerical identity. We could have, say, a class of heat sensations (H) that is qualitatively identical to some class of pain sensations (P). We can even posit a causal relation between them such that H <--> P, but that still would not show that the two sensations are numerically identical. B needs (at least) to rule out the possibility of qualitatively identical states before he can get us there, even if we grant him that we cannot distinguish pains and sensations.

Oh yes, he's also got to tell us why we should think that the identity of H and P would mean that both are mental, when we could just as easily conclude on the same evidence that both are physical!

td

well to be fair to the good prof Berkeley, there was not in his time much of an understanding of what &quot;heat&quot; was. so, he would seem to be neglecting that there is a &quot;atomical level&quot; of which heat is that has a PHYSICAL impact on matter. ie, if the human body were to be made up of tytaniam and such, heat might be pleasure rather than pain. {blah blah} whilst T D's p 1 is contensious, it is the vaucousness of p 2 that spoils the soup for me. p 2 is correct, but leaves out the fact that pain is also physical, and that too: must be accounted for is you are a mere block of lead to be melted. its abstracted by omission . me thinks

come to think of it: what the hell is heat ----anyway ?????????

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come to think of it: what the hell is heat ----anyway ?????????
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pV = nRT, but what are you doing not following the rules in this thread? Are you going to read the Three Dialogues along with us or are you going to just post random half-cocked ideas without any desire to engage with philosophical text?