Letters
Vol. 12 No. 5 · 8 March 1990
From Galen Strawson
There was a typesetting error in the Contentious Guide to Metaphysics which I offered in the last issue. As it stands, it says that Hume took the existence of mind-independent tables and chairs to be highly improbable but unprovable. It should say that he took their existence to be highly probable but unprovable. Being a sensible man, he naturally believed that there were such things; he was ‘morally certain’ of their existence, in Descartes’s terms; but he knew he couldn’t prove it. (Descartes, by contrast, claimed that we could be absolutely certain about it.) This correction doesn’t make the Guide any less contentious. From one philosophical corner I hear dim cheers for the typesetter. From another, angrier corner comes the protest that neither of the two views of Hume is correct, because the poor man thought that the notion of mind-independent tables and chairs was unintelligible. But Hume’s considered view is that it is a simple if undecidable ‘question of fact, whether the perceptions of the senses be produced by external objects, resembling them’.
Galen Strawson
Jesus College, Oxford
Vol. 12 No. 6 · 22 March 1990
From Désirée Park
Promoting the virtues of Thomas Reid in the 22 February issue, Galen Strawson states that Descartes, Locke, Berkeley and Hume all held similar and incorrect opinions about sensory information. We are told that they ‘hold, with much terminological variation, that there is a fundamental sense in which the only things we ever “immediately” or “directly” perceive are mental items – ideas, or images, or representations. I will call this Premise One.’ This proferred description of the chosen villains is singularly unconvincing. First, the word ‘idea’ is a key term in the writings of all four writers, but does not have the same meaning in any two of them. The terminological variation that Strawson permits himself is simply misleading. Second, the historical relationship between Locke and Berkeley, and between Berkeley and Hume, is obscured by the suggestion in Premise One that all three can safely be netted and labelled together. It is a matter of record that the Berkeleyan idea made a significant departure from Locke’s account of ideas and was not subsequently adopted by Hume.
The phrase esse est percipi appears first in Berkeley’s manuscript Notebooks and signals some features peculiar to the Berkeleyan idea. In the Notebooks too, Berkeley provided a counterpoise to his ideas with a theory of notions which includes minds and concepts. In this manner, Berkeley allowed a theory of representation quite separate from his theory of ideas. His subsequent publications, beginning with An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision, reflect both these theories, though they are distributed unevenly because the surviving Principles is only Part One of a larger work also mentioned first in the Notebooks.
On the evidence, then, Berkelyan ideas escape Strawson’s net. Moreover, when they are properly analysed, ideas remain of interest, not least because they show a way of clarifying empirical descriptions by carefully separating sensory information from theories about it, including theories of representation.
Désirée Park
Wolfson College, Oxford
Vol. 12 No. 7 · 5 April 1990
From D.D. Todd
Galen Strawson’s article ‘What’s so good about Reid?’ (LRB, 22 February) will be welcomed by admirers of Thomas Reid for making accessible to common readers some of Reid’s interesting and important philosophical views. Even so, Strawson misrepresents some of the most important facets of Reid’s philosophy. Strawson makes it appear that because Hume and Reid agree that our basic concepts and beliefs are forced upon us by ‘the constitution of our nature’ and have an irresistible authority over us, they are in no fundamental disagreement. He quotes with approval the exchange between Sir James Mackintosh and Thomas Brown. Mackintosh remarked that Reid and Hume ‘differed more in words than in opinion’, and Brown replied: ‘Yes, Reid bawled out, We must believe in an outward world; but added in a whisper, We can give no reason for our belief. Hume cries out, We can give no reason for such a notion; and whispers, I own we cannot get rid of it.’ In fact, Hume and Reid are in fundamental disagreement on this matter. One, but not the only, matter in contention is their very different conceptions of common sense. Hume thinks of common sense as a blind mechanical instinct operating in the imagination through non-cognitive rules of association of ideas; the beliefs produced by this instinct are non-rational, even irrational, on Hume’s account. Reid rejects Hume’s view of common sense, and regards common sense as the lowest common office or degree of reason – that lowest common degree of reason that entitles people to the denomination of reasonable creatures and without which a person is mentally defective. If Reid is right, then contra Hume, the dictates of common sense, such as our basic external world beliefs, are ipso facto dictates of reason. Reid rejects Hume’s narrow conception of reason as a mere calculative faculty that cannot give rise to any ‘original’ (i.e. constitutional) ideas. Indeed, Reid thinks that the faculty of reason produces a great many concepts and beliefs a priori, e.g. the concepts of premise, conclusion, inference, fallacy and various of our logical beliefs based upon such concepts. None of these can be traced to the only other source of concepts or beliefs, viz sense-perception.
Many people are now strongly inclined to think that Hume’s assimilation of common sense to mechanical instinct is less philosophically helpful or fruitful than Reid’s view of common sense as an office/degree of reason. Certainly, believing in the existence of realities distinct from and independent of the mind does seem more like the intellectual act of affirming a proposition than like anything that can reasonably be understood as mechanically instinctive like breathing, sucking or swallowing, and just as surely Hume’s inclusion of this belief with hunger, lust, benevolence, the love of life, kindness to children, and the desire for punishment of our enemies, as instincts, renders his conception of instinct problematic if not downright suspect.
Finally, it is clear that Hume’s doctrine that we can give no reasons in support of our external world beliefs is entirely sceptical. For Hume, our inability to give any reasons for believing in an external world is itself ground for doubt. But for Reid our inability to doubt that there is an external world makes the sceptical effort to doubt irrational; it is always irrational to attempt to do something that one knows to be impossible. For Reid, rational doubt is evidence-based doubt. The mere logical possibility that some contingent propositions are false (that there are other minds, that there is an external world etc) is not only not good evidence that such propositions are false, or even might be: it is no evidence at all. That is partly why Reid regards scepticism as unreal, pretended doubt.
D.D. Todd
Simon Fraser University,
Vol. 12 No. 8 · 19 April 1990
From Galen Strawson
I love Berkeley, and Désirée Park misreads me (Letters, 22 March). Here are three points. 1. I claimed that Locke, Berkeley and Hume all ‘hold, with much terminological variation, that there is a fundamental sense in which all we ever “immediately” or “directly” perceive are mental items.’ I then offered the words ‘ideas, or images, or representations’ as possible words for these ‘mental items’. In response, Park observes that the word ‘idea’ meant something different to each of these philosophers, and she means this to be an objection to what I say. In fact, it is just an illustration of the ‘terminological variation’ I mentioned, and thought it appropriate to put aside in a review in your journal.
2. I think the above-italicised claim about the three philosophers is true. I’m not sure whether Park wants to disagree, but it looks as if she does, because she says that it is a ‘singularly unconvincing’ description of ‘the chosen villains’ (they’re my heroes). I very much hope somebody will support her in this. She goes on to say mat Locke, Berkeley and Hume can’t be ‘netted … together’ like this, and that ‘Berkeleyan ideas escape Strawson’s net.’ I infer that she thinks that Berkeley did not hold that there is a ‘fundamental sense in which all we ever “immediately” … perceive are mental items’, and I admire her for this.
3. According to Park, I said that the philosophers were ‘incorrect’ in holding the italicised view. In fact, I said that although it is ‘now widely scorned, it is in certain respects very well motivated,’ and that the ‘sceptical problem it … creates is genuine, dream-inspiring … and, on its own terms, insoluble.’ Let me go further: I think it is an entirely defensible view, given the technical slipperiness of the words ‘perceive’, ‘immediately’ and ‘directly’. But this doesn’t stop me thinking that it is greatly to Reid’s credit that he rejected it. It was very important that someone should do so, given the style of the contemporary debate. It introduced an important new way of taking the slippery terms, and of thinking about our epistemic predicament.
D.D.Todd argues correctly (Letters, 5 April) that I ignore important differences between Hume and Reid, and all the points he makes are worthwhile. I have no disagreement with him. It is precisely because Hume and Reid are profoundly opposed in philosophical outlook that it is illuminating to override important differences of detail and indicate respects in which they are in agreement. This is a popular pursuit when discussing Hume and Kant, and I think it is also worth doing with Hume and Reid.
Let me add that I don’t find myself unable to doubt that there is an external world, if by that is meant a mind-independent world. The feeling comes over me quite often in tutorials. I gaze out of the window, and the world is ideas.
Galen Strawson
Jesus College, Oxford
Vol. 12 No. 11 · 14 June 1990
From Désirée Park
Galen Strawson is not entitled to introduce ‘mental items’ and then to complain about ‘slippery terms’. There are two problems in talking about ‘mental items’ as Strawson does (Letters, 19 April) when discussing the opinions of Locke, Berkeley and Hume, and, in his original review, Descartes as well. The first is that the phrase ‘mental items’ is ambiguous, and it is not made clearer by the selection which Strawson offers: that is, ‘ideas’ or ‘images’ or ‘representations’. Ideas, as I pointed out in my letter (22 March), is a key term in the writing of all four philosophers, but does not have the same meaning in any two of them. The ‘representations’ admitted by this group, similarly, are of incompatible kinds, a fact obscured by simply calling them ‘mental items’. For instance, in the case of Berkeley, an idea cannot be a representation at all, since representations belong to his theory of concepts. It happens too that Berkeley uniquely perceives Berkeleyan ideas, which are quite unlike the ideas of the other three. It is true only of Berkeleyan ideas that esse est percipi.
The second, related problem arises from Strawson’s objection to ‘slippery terms’ in his praise of Reid. There was, of course, much confusion about terminology then as now, but for a given writer major terms can be identified and defined. This takes time, but it remains true that discussion is not enhanced by introducing free-wheeling ‘mental items’ and bypassing crucially distinctive ‘ideas’.
Finally, ‘notions’ is a technical term in Berkeley’s writing, a fact that your printing practices obscured in my original letter. Notions allowed for a theory of representation distinct from Berkeley’s theory of ideas.
Désirée Park
Concordia University, Montreal
Vol. 12 No. 13 · 12 July 1990
From Galen Strawson
In my piece about Thomas Reid (LRB, 22 February), I wrote that Descartes, Locke, Berkeley and Hume all ‘hold, with much terminological variation, that there is a fundamental sense in which all we ever “immediately” or “directly” perceive are mental items.’ Désirée Park finds this well-known view ‘singularly unconvincing’ in her first letter (22 March), but she doesn’t say why in her second (14 June). Instead she objects that the phrase ‘mental items’ is ‘ambiguous’, and that I am ‘not entitled to use [it] and then complain about “slippery terms” ’.
The phrase ‘mental items’ is no more ambiguous than the word ‘animal’. It is merely indefinite – like ‘animal’ as opposed to ‘lion’ or ‘turkey’. That is why I used it. I chose a non-committal term in order to state an interesting generalisation about four philosophers as concisely as possible without using any of their own semi-technical terms like ‘idea’, which are (to repeat it) mightly slippery. I think this is something which I am entitled to do. Park says that ‘for a given writer major terms can be identified and defined.’ I agree – although what the definition may reveal is in-eliminable slipperiness. She says that such identification and definition ‘takes time, but it remains true that discussion is not enhanced by introducing free-wheeling “mental items” and bypassing crucially distinctive “ideas”.’ I say – what discussion? There are many discussions. Some are for the ‘learned journals’. Some are for the LRB. I was engaging in a discussion in which I thought it worth pointing out a striking resemblance between four great philosophers, and I hoped I had found an amazingly neutral way of doing so that would not offend any textual scholars. My friends say that this hope was forlorn.
Galen Strawson
Jesus College, Oxford
