Notes � Comparative, ideas + concepts

Berkeley is discussing �abstract general ideas�, especially Locke�s formulation of them. He goes so far as to say that there may be not other single idea in philosophy at the root of so much confusion. When we talk of abstract ideas, we consider ourselves to have the ability to extract what is common from a group of particulars. For instance, when presented with images of a variety of objects, we can pick out all the red ones, all the square ones etc. On this basis, we form the abstract notions of colour, extension, motion etc. which are not bound to any particular objects.

He interprets Locke as saying that we really can form such abstract general ideas, and that this faculty is what separates man from animal. Indeed, words are signs for these AGIs, and so language depends on and follows from our formulation of them. Berkeley points to young children gabbling about trinkets and sweets, and asks whether it makes sense to claim that they have already formed general notion as a prerequisite to even this level of conversation.

In contrast, Berkeley thinks that we have an idea in our head of a particular, partly imagined and partly based on memory, which we use to stand for all the ideas it is supposed to represent. When we consider a triangle, Locke says that we are imperfectly performing the difficult task of conceiving an idea that is �neither oblique nor rectangle, neither equilateral, equicrural, nor scalenon; but all and none of these at once�. Berkeley argues that the image that forms in our minds is of a single, particular triangle, from which we can make deductions that apply universally to triangles in general.

Berkeley points to words as the root of the problematic notion of abstract ideas. You cannot talk of words as significations of a determinate, abstract idea. He sees words as encumbering, distracting curtains, that we should make every effort to look to the naked, undisguised ideas behind them.

Notes - Grayling, �Empiricists�

Introduction

empiricism =

defining commitment is to the primacy of experience in the acquisition of knowledge)

the view that the source + test of contingent knowledge is experience, primarily sensory experience (5 senses, plus instruments that extend their range), as well as introspective awarenss of the contents + operations of the experiencer�s own mind

2 kinds of empiricist: one in which experience is said to be the source of concepts, the other in which it is said to be the guarantee of their legitimacy

if one accepts realism in respect of the physical world, the view that the world exists independently of experience, one seems to be in conflict with empiricism, which cannot allow sense to claim about what transcends experience

Allais: we cannot know about the world a priori

is usually contrasted with rationalism, which argues that the only knowledge worth aiming for is eternal, immutable truth, and this cannot be obtained from the contingent opinion or belief we gain from experience about our particular part of the universe at this time, so rationalists rely on reason and natural endowment.

Locke

Locke has to allow for weak innatism, i.e. that our minds are not such blank slates that they lack the capacity and processes for receiving, storing, contrasting and reasoning about the experience inputted to it. He does reject strong innatism that there are propositions that we are born knowing to be true. This was also important for his political views, in allowing him to deny the divine right of kings.

His finished view is that our concepts derive from experience, and knowledge consists in grasp of relations between them.

The function of a sign is to stand for or represent something other than itself. There are two kinds of signs: ideas and the words used to communicate them.

Locke asks how we come by our ideas, �by �ideas� meaning �whatever it is, which the Mind can be employ�d about in thinking� (Ii8). They come from experience, of external sensible objects and internal observation of the operations of one�s own mind � sensation and reflection.

Combination, comparison and abstraction are a further psychological account of the classification of complex ideas, added in the fourth and final edition of the Essay.

Locke is often criticised for using the term, �idea�, in a variety of different senses:

states of mind such as feelings and sesnations

acts of thinking, such as considering and paying attention

images or pictures in the mind�s eye

concepts � Locke sometimes appears to mean the act of conceving and sometime the concept itself

the �most notorious use� � intermediaries between minds and objects

Not all ideas represent the same way. Ideas as images represent not qualities or things, but other ideas. He�s trying to give an account of mind and its operations at the same time as addressing questions about the relation of knowledge and its objects within corpuscular science.

Locke is usually seen as being committed to an indirect representatational theory of perception, which holds that there are ways in which representation can be treated as reliable even though we cannot break out of the circle of ideas in which the theory places us. This requires us to assume as true the realist view that there is a world of physical things, among which causal relations obtain. Locke used this to support his distinction between primary and secondary qualities, which is tied to the corpuscularian physics he supported.

Berkeley argued that the primary-secondary qualities distinction was unimportant in supporting a representational theory of perception. Despite the differences (primary are available to more than one sense, measurable etc.), both primary qualities and secondary qualities are sensible, that is to say, objects of sensory awareness. All of the sceptical criticisms that are levelled at secondary qualities can be extended to primary qualities.

Since knowledge is mainly discussion about kinds, we need to understand how we use names, which are expressions of kinds and generality.

Berkeley attacked Locke�s account of abstraction and general ideas on the ground that general terms function by standing indifferent,l,y for any of the particular things that fall under them, that is, by having a particular use � not by denoting an indeterminate �general idea� which is an amalgam of the things it signifies. Locke is also overly reliant on visual imagery as the model for ideas.

Berkeley

Berkeley�s aims are twofold: to combat scepticism in support of common sense; and to defend religion against atheism.

Berkeley should not be understood as saying that nothing exists except when it is thought of by me or you or other finite minds, but rather �with reference to mind�.

Berkeley is breaking down the veil of perception, by saying that the objects are simply collections of ideas, that ideas reside in the mind etc.

Hume

Discussion with Ben Cannon

how is Berkeley misunderstanding Locke???

Locke: abstraction = the process of going from the particular � universal

by stripping away all that�s particular, leaving us with what is unique about the category

the reason we do this is to communicate, because we couldn�t talk + use language without categories/nouns to refer to all of a group of particulars

Berkeley: how can we have determinate abstract ideas of table?

using a particular to refer to the general all

imagination vs conception, Cartesian pentagon vs chiliagon, definition vs actual visualisable idea???

�/span> are ideas images?

is Locke�s abstract idea imagistic??? if not, he�s safe

what then is an idea??? that�s where the problem is. it all comes down to different uses of �idea�???

does Hume help???

ideas vs impressions etc. - but they�re both sensory???

Humean idea � concepts (e.g. relations of ideas)

Locke on maths/logic??? � by necessity abstract

identity = intuitive/demonstrative

number as imagistic in origin??? at 2 removes

abstraction vs induction

Notes � web pages

Excerpts from commentaries

Britannica � epistemology, John Locke

Although Locke along with most distinguished modern philosophers repudiated Aristotelianism and the Scholasticism to which it gave rise, a doctrine of abstraction survives in his philosophy. Abstraction occurs when "ideas taken from particular beings become general representatives of all of the same kind." That is, to abstract is to ignore the particular circumstances of time and place and to use an idea to represent all things of a certain kind.

Routledge � Locke

For Descartes, human reason is only accidentally involved with the senses, whereas for Locke there are no purely intellectual ideas. The task traditionally assigned to intellect � universal thought - Locke assigns to �abstraction�, taken to be the mind�s in some sense separating out elements of raw experience and employing them as �standards and representatives� of a class.

Locke�s treatment of abstraction accords with such express sensationism. �Abstract ideas� are particulars, universal only in� �the capacity, they are put into�of signifying or representing many particular things� (Essay III.iii.11). Locke means that in abstract thought the mind relates to, and employs, sensory images in a certain way, not that it manufactures sense-transcendent objects of intellect. Abstract ideas are what we have distinctly before the mind in general thought, but distinctness may be achieved by �partial consideration�, not absolute separation:� �Many ideas require others as necessary to their existence or conception, which are yet very distinct ideas. Motion can neither be, nor be conceived without space� (Essay II.xiii.11-13). The very abstract ideas of being and unity are ideas of anything whatsoever considered as existing, or as one. Geometry gave Locke his paradigm of �perception of the relation between ideas�. But where Cartesians saw the role of geometrical diagrams to be the stimulation of intellectual ideas, for Locke, as for Hobbes, the object of reasoning and source of �evidence� is the diagram itself, whether actual or imagined. (Kant�s �intuition� owes something to Locke.) Given these structural features of his theory, it seems undeniable, as some have denied, that Locke�s ideas are essentially sensory (or reflexive) images (see Hobbes, T. �4; Kant, I. �5).

Routledge � Berkeley

The primary influence on Berkeley is unquestionably John Locke, whose Essay concerning Human Understanding Berkeley had studied as an undergraduate and continued to dwell on afterwards. The long introduction to Berkeley�s Principles is for the most part a sustained attack on the view that we can frame abstract ideas, focusing on Locke�s account of abstraction. Illegitimate abstraction is ultimately blamed for the supposedly untenable distinction between primary and secondary qualities, the belief in �material substance�, and the view that objects have an existence distinct from �ideas�, all of which are features of Locke�s position (see Locke, J. ��2-5). Yet Berkeley also owed a great deal to Locke whom he likened in the notebooks to �a Gyant� and who should be seen as his mentor as well as one of his philosophical targets. It is therefore understandable that Berkeley has most often been seen as the second of the three great British Empiricists, as successor to Locke and precursor of Hume, these three being placed in opposition to the three great Rationalist philosophers, Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz. Certainly, it would be tempting to say that the importance of Locke�s influence on Berkeley could hardly be overestimated, were it not for the fact that it sometimes has been.

If only as a corrective, then, it is important to stress that while it is evident that Locke was often in Berkeley�s mind as he formulated his own position, and while there is no doubt that none of Berkeley�s major works would have existed in their present form had Locke never published the Essay, Berkeley would have insisted that much more was at stake than whether Locke got things right. He targeted certain views and assumptions that were very widely held. Thus Locke is the only philosopher he actually identifies and quotes from in the attack on abstract ideas, but even there he sees himself as opposing, not simply some quirky view of Locke�s, but one which, as he put it in a letter, �Mr. Locke held in common with the Schoolmen, and I think all other philosophers� (Works, vol. 2: 293). These certainly included Malebranche, for example, who, Berkeley elsewhere complained,� �builds on the most abstract general ideas� (Works, vol. 2: 214). Again, when he says that �Some there are who make a distinction betwixt primary and secondary qualities� (Principles �9), he really does mean �some�, and not just Locke; and the same could be said of his opposition to the notion of �material substance�. In short, Berkeley often had his eye on other thinkers too, and some of these must also count as influences. As is now widely recognized, these included writers in the Cartesian tradition, most notably Malebranche but also probably Pierre Bayle.

Routledge � Hume

Hume follows Berkeley in taking every idea to be fully particular or �individual�, and to refer to something of which we have had or might have an impression. Abstractness and generality get into ideas by the use to which they are frequently put in our thinking. A particular idea becomes general, on a given occasion for a given thinker, if, for the purposes in hand, any other idea from a certain set could be substituted for it - if it is serving as a representative of that group of resembling ideas. The words of the thinker�s language label these sets (are �annexed� to them), and fix the sort of �resemblance� determining their membership. So if our purpose is to consider a claim about all triangles, we will begin with an �image� before our minds of, say, an equilateral triangle, but we may and should substitute other ideas of other types of triangles to test the claim. As Hume puts it, it is as if the thinker had� �a whole intellectual world of ideas� available to them, all of them ideas of particulars, but �collected together� in groups and �plac�d under a general term with a view to that resemblance which they bear to each other�. We show a capacity to �pick out such as were most proper for our purpose� (Treatise: 24). Hume terms this instinct for relevance �a kind of magical faculty in the soul�. At times he speaks as if the crucial resemblances are recognized before the resembling ideas are �plac�d under a general term�; at other times it seems as if the prior availability of such terms is crucial to the operation of abstraction, as he analyses it. To treat language as a great aid to abstraction and generalization, rather than an indispensable precondition, would sit better with Hume�s views about the role of generalization in causal inference, since he attributes causal inference to animals who lack language. He says that� �men�surpass animals in reasoning�, and that �books and conversations enlarge the sphere of one man�s experience and thought� (Enquiries: 107).

Web page � Berkeley, Psi phenomenon etc.

Berkeley pinpoints the origins of the materialist misunderstanding in the prevailing belief that there are what he called �general abstract concepts�, and that our concept of matter is such a concept. This, he says, is down to language:

I come now to consider the source of this prevailing notion, and that seems to me to be language
[ Treatise, �8]

This adumbrates the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, two and a half centuries later, where Wittgenstein blames the continuance of seemingly deep philosophical problems on our misunderstanding our own use of language. In his Tractatus, he says:

"�309. What is your aim in philosophy? - To shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle."

For Berkeley, the �general abstract concept� is the slipway by which the doctrine of materialism is launched. Really, this is a technical detail, and you can understand what Berkeley�s theory says without knowing anything about any �general abstract concept�. Nevertheless, this notion is a key to understanding what Berkeley saw as the veil of ignorance that bars people from sharing the vision that he had had. For, matter is the most general and most abstract of any concept, and Berkeley states over and over that it is devoid of any sensible meaning: hence it is unintelligible to claim that matter really exists. But, he reasons, the root of this problem is our willingness to believe in abstract general concepts at all. If we can stop ourselves picking up this bad mental habit in the first place, we shall be less vulnerable to the temptation to believe that there is anything in that most general concept, namely matter.

Berkeley uses the following terminology. An �abstract idea� is any idea cut out from particular ideas. It can be an area of a visual image, or a segment of some sound. For instance, from this page, you might mentally abstract the letter "e". Berkeley does not allow the term �abstraction� to mean cutting out an aspect of some particular idea, such as the shape of the letter "e" as opposed to its colour. That somewhat goes against the modern usage, but we shall return to that difference of usage later. A �universal concept� is a concept that encompasses a (broad) range of particulars. For example, Berkeley would say that we carry in our mind a number of instances of the letter "e" to serve as exemplars: whenever we subsequently recognise an instance of the letter "e", we do so by comparing the new letter with the examples we have seen before, although this comparison and recognition happen quickly and automatically, so that we are not normally aware that we are doing it. Only if we were recogising characters from a language that we do not know, for example Arabic or Japanese, would we be consciously aware of making those mental comparisons. Berkeley stressed that a general term signified a collection of particular ideas:

... there is no such thing as one precise and definite signification annexed to any general name, they all signifying indifferently a great number of particular ideas.
[ Treatise, �18]

Finally, a �universal abstract concept� is an impossible mixture of a range of particular concepts, as opposed to an assembly of particular exemplars. This was the key to John Locke�s theory of how we recognise things, which Berkeley emphatically rejected. Locke thought that we form a general picture of, say, the letter "e", which lacked the details of any individual, particular letter that we have ever seen; and when we recognise something as the letter "e", be it printed or handwritten, we do so by comparing it with that universal idea. Berkeley�s argument against this was that it was simply nonsense to suppose that anyone could have such a �universal� idea. Every idea we have is particular, and has specific details.

I must emphasise the connection with the idea of matter, otherwise it will seem that we are off on a digression here. The view advocated by Locke, which was the prevailing view at the time, was that we have universal abstract ideas of all sorts of things and, in particular, the word �matter� refers to the idea of stuff in general, the substance that underlies all that we see in the world. Now, according to Berkeley, we can never have any abstract universal idea at all, because every idea we have is of some particular thing we have seen, felt, tasted, smelled, or sensed in some way. So, whenever we say, for example, that horses exist, then we are referring to occasions when people have seen horses, or touched on them, or sat on them - in short, occasions when we have had direct sensory awareness of them. The sentence, "Horses exist", means something definite because it relates to particular experiences; likewise, the sentence, "Unicorns do not exist", again means something definite because of particular experiences of pictures of mythical unicorns. These sentences do not refer to any abstract, general ideas, but rather they refer to collections of particular ideas. And, if someone were to say that things in general exist, this means only that we have some sense experiences of some things. But if someone were to claim that �matter� exists, and does so independently of anyone�s perceiving it, then we have lost any definite, sensory meaning: we have slipped into meaninglessness. We have been tricked by our belief that we have abstract universal ideas, into thinking that �matter� refers to something separate from any sense experience.

When we try to grasp the notion of �matter�, we find ourselves conceptually empty-handed, with nothing but the vacuous medieval concept of �quiddity� or �thingness�, which is as empty as a concept can be:

... the vague and indeterminate description of matter or corporeal substance, which the modern philosophers are run into by their own principles, resembles that antiquated and so much ridiculed notion of materia prima to be met with in Aristotle and his followers.
[ Treatise, �11]

Berkeley is, I think, entirely right in his analysis of the meaning of the term �matter�, and in his critique of what he calls �abstract universal ideas�. He may not, however, be right in thinking that this accounts for the popular resistance to his philosophy. Personally, I think that what he has described is more like a surface symptom of the veil of ignorance, and the root cause lies in the somatic models that we automatically build up of our immediate surroundings. As I have said, this issue is not central to our concerns. We need to focus on Berkeley�s metaphysics, rather than on the sociological reasons for people�s not accepting the metaphysics. The validity and usefulness of Berkeley�s philosophy does not hang on this question.

Excerpts from primary texts

�9. Because maxims or axioms are not the truths we first knew. First, That they are not the truths first known to the mind is evident to experience, as we have shown in another place. (Bk. I. chap. i.) Who perceives not that a child certainly knows that a stranger is not its mother; that its sucking-bottle is not the rod, long before he knows that "it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be?" And how many truths are there about numbers, which it is obvious to observe that the mind is perfectly acquainted with, and fully convinced of, before it ever thought on these general maxims, to which mathematicians, in their arguings, do sometimes refer them? Whereof the reason is very plain: for that which makes the mind assent to such propositions, being nothing else but the perception it has of the agreement or disagreement of its ideas, according as it finds them affirmed or denied one of another in words it understands; and every idea being known to be what it is, and every two distinct ideas being known not to be the same; it must necessarily follow, that such self-evident truths must be first known which consist of ideas that are first in the mind. And the ideas first in the mind, it is evident, are those of particular things, from whence, by slow degrees, the understanding proceeds to some few general ones; which being taken from the ordinary and familiar objects of sense, are settled in the mind, with general names to them. Thus particular ideas are first received and distinguished, and so knowledge got about them; and next to them, the less general or specific, which are next to particular. For abstract ideas are not so obvious or easy to children, or the yet unexercised mind, as particular ones. If they seem so to grown men, it is only because by constant and familiar use they are made so. For, when we nicely reflect upon them, we shall find that general ideas are fictions and contrivances of the mind, that carry difficulty with them, and do not so easily offer themselves as we are apt to imagine. For example, does it not require some pains and skill to form the general idea of a triangle, (which is yet none of the most abstract, comprehensive, and difficult,) for it must be neither oblique nor rectangle, neither equilateral, equicrural, nor scalenon; but all and none of these at once. In effect, it is something imperfect, that cannot exist; an idea wherein some parts of several different and inconsistent ideas are put together. It is true, the mind, in this imperfect state, has need of such ideas, and� makes all the haste to them it can, for the conveniency of communication and enlargement of knowledge; to both which it is naturally very much inclined. But yet one has reason to suspect such ideas are marks of our imperfection; at least, this is enough to show that the most abstract and general ideas are not those that the mind is first and most easily acquainted with, nor such as its earliest knowledge is conversant about.� - Locke, Essay

general and universal belong not to the real existence of things; but are the inventions and creatures of the understanding, made by it for its own use, and concern only signs, whether words or ideas. � Essay (III iii 6)

Words become general by being made the signs of general ideas: and ideas become general, by separating from them the circumstances of time and place, and any other ideas that may determine them to this or that particular existence. By this way of abstraction they are made capable of representing more individuals than one; each of which having in it a conformity to that abstract idea, is (as we call it) of that sort. � Essay (III iii 11)

can there be a priori knowledge that is independent, but not antecedent to, experience, because the experience grows our mind and gets us thinking along certain lines, for instance???

is there an error in the Grayling pg 527 on �qualitative� difference between impressions and ideas