The semantics of sense perception in Berkeley

Pearce, Kenneth L.

doi:10.1017/s0034412508009396

Cited by 5 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…The second set of texts is almost uniformly ignored. This is quite odd, since -as I have argued before (Pearce 2008), and will now argue again -unless information about other minds is provided to us by the language of nature,…”

Section: Semanticsmentioning

confidence: 91%

Language and the Structure of Berkeley's World

Pearce¹

2017

Oxford Scholarship Online

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According to George Berkeley, there is fundamentally nothing in the world but minds and their ideas. Ideas are understood as pure phenomenal ‘feels’ which are momentarily had by a single perceiver, then vanish. Surprisingly, Berkeley tries to sell this idealistic philosophical system as a defense of common sense and an aid to science. However, both common sense and Newtonian science take the perceived world to be highly structured in a way that Berkeley’s system does not appear to allow. This book argues that Berkeley’s solution to this problem lies in his innovative philosophy of language. The solution works at two levels. At the first level, it is by means of our conventions for the use of physical object talk that we impose structure on the world. At a deeper level, the orderliness of the world is explained by the fact that, according to Berkeley, the world itself is a discourse ‘spoken’ by God—the world is literally an object of linguistic interpretation. The structure that our physical object talk—in common sense and in Newtonian physics—aims to capture is the grammatical structure of this divine discourse. This approach yields surprising consequences for some of the most discussed issues in Berkeley’s metaphysics. Most notably, it is argued that, in Berkeley’s view, physical objects are neither ideas nor collections of ideas. Rather, physical objects, like forces, are mere quasi-entities brought into being by our linguistic practices.

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Section: Semanticsmentioning

confidence: 91%

Language and the Structure of Berkeley's World

Pearce¹

2017

Oxford Scholarship Online

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“…Like Kenneth Pearce, however, I see no reason to think that the communication is only one directional 13 . Pearce writes that ‘according to the theory of sense perception as language, our every interaction with the physical is a statement in an ongoing discourse with God himself’ (Pearce (2008), 256). If finite spirits have the power to produce ideas of sense in other spirits, as we seem to when we interact with shared environments or draw maps for each other (for example), there is nothing inconceivable about finite spirits speaking the divine language.…”

Section: The Putative Disanalogiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…17.It is worth noting that Pearce's view on pragmatics has evolved. Whereas the analysis of Berkeley's philosophy of language in Pearce (2008, 263) leaves room for a distinction between pragmatics and semantics, the analysis in Pearce (2017, 171) does not. I have no settled opinion on this subject – though I speculate that such a distinction may enable us to develop a uniquely Berkeleyan account of art in terms of human utterances or inscriptions in the language of nature that violate certain sorts of pragmatic norms.…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Semantic compositionality and Berkeley's divine language argument

DeRose

2022

Rel. Stud.

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Critics of Berkeley's divine language argument usually dismiss it for one of two main reasons: (1) it appears to be a mere variation on Descartes's argument for the existence of other minds, or (2) there is too little similarity between human languages and the ‘discourse of nature’. I will first show that the compositional features of language on which Berkeley partially bases his argument include systematicity and productivity – not merely the generativity on which Descartes's is based. I will then show that the analogy between human languages and the discourse of nature is stronger than typically appreciated, even given contemporary understandings of language.

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“…Unlike most of Locke's early religious critics, Berkeley accepts Locke's account of faith, along with these consequences (Pearce 2014 …”

Section: Faith and Reasonmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It seems, though, that Browne was mistaken and King was Berkeley's primary target in Alciphron (Berman 1976, 23;O'Higgins 1976, 94). Berkeley would, however, have been familiar with Browne's earlier discussion of the doctrine of analogy in his Letter against Toland (Browne 1697, 37-58;see Berman 1976, 21-22;Pearce 2014). On Berkeley's relation to Browne, see CGB, §246;TVV, §6;Olscamp 1970b, ch.…”

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confidence: 99%

Berkeley’s Philosophy of Religion

Pearce

The Bloomsbury Companion to Berkeley

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The semantics of sense perception in Berkeley

Cited by 5 publications

References 2 publications

Language and the Structure of Berkeley's World

Language and the Structure of Berkeley's World

Semantic compositionality and Berkeley's divine language argument

Berkeley’s Philosophy of Religion

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