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Comments on Daniel E. Flage’s “Berkeley’s Contingent Necessities”

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Abstract

According to Daniel Flage, Berkeley thinks that all necessary truths are founded on acts of will that assign meanings to words. After briefly commenting on the air of paradox contained in the title of Flage’s paper, and on the historical accuracy of Berkeley’s understanding of the abstractionist tradition, I make some remarks on two points made by Flage. Firstly, I discuss Flage’s distinction between the ontological ground of a necessary truth and our knowledge of a necessary truth. Secondly, I discuss Flage’s attempt to show that, according to Berkeley, the resemblance relation does not constitute a necessary connection.

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Notes

  1. See, for example, John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, edited by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), Book 3, Chapter 6, Section 7, p. 443: “Why do we say, This is a Horse, and that a Mule; this is an Animal, that an Herb? How come any particular Thing to be of this or that Sort, but because it has that nominal Essence, Or, which is all one, agrees to that abstract Idea, that name is annexed to?”

  2. See also Daniel E. Flage, Berkeley’s Doctrine of Notions: A Reconstruction based on his Theory of Meaning (London & Sidney: Croom Helm, 1987), pp. 30–36.

  3. Locke, Essay, 3.3.1, p. 409.

  4. See George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, Part I, Introduction, Section 13.

  5. Thomas Reid rejected the principle that “our conception of things is a test of their possibility, so that, what we distinctly conceive, we may conclude to be possible; and of what is impossible, we can have no conception”: see Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, edited by Derek R. Brookes (University Park, Pa: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), Essay IV, Chapter 3, p. 327. Thus, he had no difficulty talking about universals as non-existent intentional objects of our minds: see Reid, Essays, V.2, 359–64.

  6. See Locke, Essay, 4.7.9, pp. 595–96.

  7. I rely for my account of two kinds of abstraction on Roderick T. Long, “Realism and Abstraction in Economics: Aristotle and Mises versus Friedman”, The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics Vol. 9, No. 3 (Fall 2006): 3–23 (see especially pp. 5–9).

  8. Long, p. 7.

  9. See Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ I.85. 1 ad 1, in Thomas Aquinas, On Human Nature, edited by Thomas S. Hibbs (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999). In support of his identification of two types of abstraction, Long also quotes Aristotle, On Memory 450a1–7, Physics 193b22–36, Metaphysics 1077b23–1078a29, and Abelard as summarized by John Marenbon, The Philosophy of Peter Abelard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 166–7. Armand Maurer also refers to these two types of abstraction as precisive and non-precisive: see Thomas Aquinas, On Being and Essence, 2nd edition, edited by Armand Maurer (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1968), p. 39, note. As Long says, in precisive abstraction, certain actual characteristics are specified as absent, while in non-precisive abstraction, certain actual characteristics are absent from specification (see Long, p. 7). The case of a triangle that has multiple inconsistent characteristics would be a type of abstraction where certain characteristics are specified as all being present at the same time. Thus, in addition to the type of abstraction that takes the triangle as not having angles or sides of a determinate size, we should also consider a form of abstraction that takes the triangle as having angles and sides of all sizes.

  10. Long, p. 7.

  11. See Kenneth P. Winkler, “Berkeley and the doctrine of signs”, in The Cambridge Companion to Berkeley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 126–38.

  12. See Reid, Essays, II.14, p. 177.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, 6080 Haley Center, Auburn University, Auburn, AL, 36849-5210, USA

    Giovanni Battista Grandi

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Grandi, G.B. Comments on Daniel E. Flage’s “Berkeley’s Contingent Necessities”. Philosophia 37, 373–378 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-008-9148-2

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