Hello, Houyhnhnm Land! This is Kenny Pearce, ordinarily of blog.kennypearce.net. I'd like to thank Brandon for inviting me to kick off the guest blog here. I am, as he said in his introduction, a graduate student at the University of California, Irvine, and I'm interested in metaphysics and philosophical theology. I've been invited to Houyhnhmn Land because my research to date has focused primarily on the philosophy of George Berkeley. I want to kick things off with a discussion of Berkeley's theory of 'ordinary objects.' This material is based on a portion of a paper I recently submitted to the Society of Christian Philosophers, Pacific Division Conference under the title "Can Berkeley's God Raise the Same Body, Transformed?"

Ordinary objects are things like tables, chairs, organic bodies, and rocks. One of the main things Berkeley is trying to do in his metaphysics is root out skepticism about ordinary objects: the things that are, are just the ordinary things we perceive. The universe is not made up of atoms or of an immaterial substratum, but just of perceptions. Everything is as it appears. This, however, would seem to run into problems since everything is clearly not as it appears. For instance, if you insert a straight oar halfway in water, it looks crooked. Furthermore, ordinary objects (we think) continue to exist when no finite mind perceives them. Appealing to God's perceptions doesn't help, as I discussed on my blog before, because we can just as easily be skeptical about our perceptions matching up with archetypes in the divine mind as we can about perceptions matching up with mind-independent physical objects.

We want to rescue belief in tables (or in the gardener's cherry tree - Dialogues 234), but Berkeley's theory only gets us round or square splotches of color and sensations of smoothness. What gives?

To this objection, Berkeley answers:

Strictly speaking ... we do not see the same object that we feel; neither is the same object perceived by the microscope, which was by the naked eye. But in case every variation was thought sufficient to constitute a new kind or individual, the endless number or confusion of names would render language impracticable. Therefore to avoid this as well as other inconveniences which are obvious upon a little thought, men combine together several ideas, apprehended by divers senses, or by the same sense at different times, or in different circumstances, but observed however to have some connexion in Nature either with respect to co-existence or succession; all which they refer to one name, and consider as one thing. (Dialogues 245)

In other words, a physical object is a collection of actual and hypothetical past, present, and future perceptions of a variety of perceivers which are lawfully conjoined with one another. This helps to shed light on Berkeley's response to a well-known objection to phenomenalism which we mentioned earlier:

in the case of the oar [thought to be crooked when viewed with one end in the water], what he observes by sight is certainly crooked; and so far he is in the right. But if he thence conclude, that upon taking the oar out of the water he shall perceive the same crookedness; or that it would affect his touch, as crooked things are wont to do: in that he is mistaken. (Dialogues 238)

The oar, it is said, does not “affect his touch, as crooked things are wont to do.” Things are collections of perceptions. Why, one wonders, do we affirm that this particular collection of perceptions is 'straight' given that (1) looking straight and feeling straight are two totally different properties bearing no necessary connection to one another, and (2) the group of perceptions forming the oar includes some perceptions that are crooked? The answer has to do with our earlier observation that we group perceptions based on a lawful connection between them. Objects are called 'straight' in virtue of the perceptions grouped together to form them. However, straight objects will always include some crooked perceptions (remembering that the group contains both actual and hypothetical perceptions). This is because of the laws of optics which specify the behavior of light crossing a boundary between substances of differing refractive indices. The lawful connection between the perceptions is such as to specify that this perception must be crooked.

It will be helpful, in better understanding this point, to consider just what exactly laws are in Berkeley's world. It is Berkeley's view that our perceptions form a language by which God speaks to us. At Principles 108-110, Berkeley claims that the laws of nature form the grammar of this language. Berkeley's theory of sense perception as language is not intended as a figure of speech or loose analogy, but as a literal claim about the nature of the perceived world. Berkeley does not tell us just what the role of physical objects in this language is, but there is one line of speculation which immediately suggests itself. Modern linguists distinguish between 'words' and 'lexemes.' A word is an independent meaningful unit of speech. 'Am,' 'is,' and 'are' are all distinct words. A lexeme is, intuitively, a 'dictionary entry.' We group a variety of words together into a single lexeme based on their having a common definition and filling a conjugation or declension paradigm. 'Am,' 'is,' and 'are' fill the present singular paradigm for the lexeme we call 'to be.' I am, of course, oversimplifying the linguistics here, but this level of detail should be sufficient for present purposes.

We can understand the role of objects as follows: each individual perception is a word, and the objects into which we group our perceptions are lexemes. The perceptual language is significantly more complicated than human languages, and there are an enormous number of positions to fill in each paradigm. Thus, for instance, there is a paradigm position for “bottom 18 inches immersed in water” which, for straight objects longer than 18 inches, specifies that they look crooked. When we group hypothetical perceptions together with the actual perceptions in our mental construction of objects, we are assuming that the rest of the 'conjugation' is 'regular' and filling out the portions of the paradigm we're interested in. What we mean by saying the object is straight, despite the fact that it appears crooked, should now be clear: we mean that the 'base form' or 'root' of the object, if you will, is straight, but the specific 'word' we are looking at happens to be crooked, just as the English word 'man' has an 'a' in the root, although in the plural, 'men,' it becomes an 'e' by ablaut.

How objects persist unperceived is another problem, and I again refer readers to my previous discussion.