<p>Berkeley famously accused the ‘Non-Naïve Realist’ theories popular in his day—which held the so-called ‘secondary qualities’ (e.g. colours, sounds and smells) to be mind-dependent in a way that the ‘primary qualities’ (e.g. shapes, sizes and motions) are not—of entailing radical scepticism. I present an argument against Non-Naïve Realism which takes Berkeley’s charge as its primary inspiration: I argue that, if sense-experience systematically misattributes mind-independence to the secondary qualities (as it does if Non-Naïve Realism is true), then we ought to distrust sense-experience when it presents any quality, whether primary or secondary, as being mind-independent. This implies that Non-Naïve realism is a self-undermining position, since its truth would entail that we cannot know it to be true.</p>

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A Berkeleyan Argument against Non-Naïve Realism

  • Christophe de Ray

摘要

Berkeley famously accused the ‘Non-Naïve Realist’ theories popular in his day—which held the so-called ‘secondary qualities’ (e.g. colours, sounds and smells) to be mind-dependent in a way that the ‘primary qualities’ (e.g. shapes, sizes and motions) are not—of entailing radical scepticism. I present an argument against Non-Naïve Realism which takes Berkeley’s charge as its primary inspiration: I argue that, if sense-experience systematically misattributes mind-independence to the secondary qualities (as it does if Non-Naïve Realism is true), then we ought to distrust sense-experience when it presents any quality, whether primary or secondary, as being mind-independent. This implies that Non-Naïve realism is a self-undermining position, since its truth would entail that we cannot know it to be true.