Abstract
The paper provides an account of necessary truths in Berkeley based upon his divine language model. If the thesis of the paper is correct, not all Berkeleian necessary truths can be known a priori.
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Notes
As Saul Kripke has shown us, not all necessary truths are known a priori. See Saul A. Kripke (1980), pp. 135ff.
This will not include a discussion of the use of terms to stir emotions, although I believe that role of language also could be subsumed under the account I provide.
As he writes in his Notebooks, “Wonderful in Locke that he could wn advanc’d in years see at all thro a mist yt had been so long a gathering & was consequently thick. This more to be admir’d than yt he didn’t see farther,” George Berkeley (1948–1957), 1:71. Further references to the Notebooks (PC) will be made parenthetically by entry number. References to the Principles of Human Knowledge (PHK), the Introduction to the Principles (Intro.), the New Theory of Vision (NTV), the Theory of Vision…Vindicated (TVV), DeMotu (DeM), and Passive Obedience (PO) will be made parenthetically by section. References to the Three Dialogues will be made parenthetically by dialogue and page in the Works, volume 2. References to the Alciphron (A) will be by dialogue and section.
Aristotle, Metaphysics Book 11, Chapter 3, 1060a29–1060b5.
See, for example, Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, question 85, reply to objection 1.
René Descartes (1985, 1984). Further references to The Philosophical Writings of Descartes (CSM) will be made parenthetically.
As he puts this in the First Draft of the Introduction to the Principles, “It is, I think, a receiv’d axiom that an impossibility cannot be conceiv’d. For what created intelligence will pretend to conceive, that which God cannot cause to be? Now it is on all hands agreed, that nothing abstract or general can be made really to exist, whence it should seem to follow, that it cannot have so much as an ideal existence in the understanding,” Works, 2:125.
John Locke (1975), Book 3, Chapter 3, Section 1, p. 409; cf. Essay 3.3.6, p. 410; cf. DHP 1 192.
Cf. Kripke, Naming and Necessity, p. 136.
See Arnauld and Nicole, Logic or the Art of Thinking, pp. 61–62.
Some nominal definitions are precising definitions.
Arnauld and Nicole, Logic or the Art of Thinking, p. 126. Arnauld and Nicole distinguish between definitions by genus and difference and what they call “descriptions,” which provide “some knowledge of a thing in terms of the accidents that are proper to it and determine it enough to give us an idea distinguishing it from other things.”
Cf. Locke on monsters and baptism, Essay 3.6.26, pp. 453–454.
Cf. Arnauld and Nicole, Logic of the Art of Thinking, p. 248.
Cf. Richard J. Brook (1973), where Brook takes the connection to be necessary in virtue of “the connection between the divine volition and the divine effects.”
This also fits well with the presumption that God occasionally performs miracles, which would fit into the linguistic model as a metaphorical meaning.
As Norman Kemp Smith noted regarding David Hume’s celebrated problem with his account of personal identity, viz., the alleged inconsistency between the principles “that all out distinct perceptions are distinct existences, and that the mind never perceives any real connexion among distinct existences” (Hume 1978, p. 636; 2000, p. 400), the second principle is a corollary of the first (Smith 1941, p. 558). If a necessary connection between two things obviates their distinctness (particularity), then to deem resemblance a necessary connection between properties implies that those properties are not properly distinct.
If you prefer, all principal causes are acts of will. At De Motu, Section 71, Berkeley refers to laws of nature as second causes.
At least it is taken to be such. I have found no place in which claims that the relation of perception is a necessary connection, although the fact that he regularly claims that it would be contradictory for an idea to exist apart from a mind might be evidence that he held the relation is a necessary connection. The same evidence would show that he took the fact that all ideas exist in minds to be a necessary truth.
Of course, not everyone would agree that this truth is immediately known. See Hume, Treatise, 1.4.5, Paragraph 5, S-B p. 233, Norton. 153.
In “Berkeley’s Archetypes,” Hermathena 171 (2001): 17–20, I argue that ontological archetypes play a comparable role insofar as they provide the ontological ground for claims of identity regarding ordinary objects perceived by multiple people.
Or, insofar as it brings anything into existence, it brings “kinds” into existence, which, given Berkeley’s nominalism, are convenient fictions.
Cf. Brook, Berkeley’s Philosophy of Science, pp. 17–18n16.
Locke, Essay, 2.25.1, p. 319; Hume, Treatise 1.1.5, Paragraph 1, S-B p. 13, Norton p. 14.
Berkeley’s remark in the Notebooks, #649, that “There are innate Ideas i.e. Ideas created with us” might be taken as some evidence that he held that there are such uniformities. If Berkeley understands ‘innate ideas’ in the manner of Descartes (see Comments on a Certain Broadsheet, comments on articles 12–14, CSM 1:303–305), that is, as dispositions to form ideas with a certain content, this suggests that all human minds tend to put ideas together in similar ways.
I examined the method of analysis in the New Theory of Vision in “Analysis in Berkeley’s New Theory of Vision,” a paper I presented at the Berkeley conference in Helsinki, Finland in August 2007. I there argue that analysis is a form of inference to the best explanation.
CSM 1:172 and 173; cf. NTV Sections 27ff. There are numerous other points of agreement: Light and color are the only qualities proper to sight (CSM 1:167; NTV Section 43). There are variations on a no-resemblance thesis, CSM 1:167, NTV Section 117. It is properly the soul or mind that sees, not the eye (CSM 1:172; NTV Section 36).
These “assumptions” might include not only some of the content of the theory, but even logical truths. If Berkeley was a thoroughgoing nominalist, there cannot be such things as eternal logical forms. So, one of the “assumptions” is the principle of noncontradiction. Charles Bolyard tells me, however, that even the medieval nominalists held that logical truths are not mere conventions. So, if Berkeley held that logical truths are not mere conventions, he is part of a well-established tradition.
Locke, Essay, 2.9.1, p. 183, 2.22.2, p. 381.
Of course, Locke was not the only philosopher who held that the mind is passive in perception; cf. Descartes, CSM 2:54. An alternative to contending that Berkeley held that one theory was the best and that he worked only with that theory is to suggest that he entertained several theories and was willing to assume that the common elements of those theories were necessary truths unless and until he showed that those assumptions resulted in inconsistencies. This seems to have been his practice in the works on vision.
And, perhaps, conservator. See Berkeley’s first letter to Johnson, Section 3, Works, 2:281.
I consider only arithmetic, since the issues involving geometry are more complex. See Jesseph (1993), 44–87, especially 69–70.
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Flage, D.E. Berkeley’s Contingent Necessities. Philosophia 37, 361–372 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-008-9146-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-008-9146-4