To be is to be perceived Discuss

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“To be is to be perceived” Discuss

The title of the essay is a view taken by Idealists, essentially saying that to exist, you need to be perceived. Idealism is the view that what is real depends upon the mind, and in the philosophy of perception it makes the claim that the material world does not exist outside of the mind. According to the idealist Berkeley, all that exists are minds, the ideas present in those minds, sensations and thoughts. One thing we can definitely be sure of knowing is that we have a mind, and with it we perceive various colors and shapes. For idealists however, to suppose that there is a material world that is the cause of these sensations, would be a leap of faith that they believe is not necessary to make. There are a few advantages to idealism, including the fact that it faces no linking problem, unlike representative realists and how it overcomes the problem of material substance. However, there are also many problems to idealism as well; including the problem of unperceived objects, as well as hallucinations and illusions.

The philosophy of idealism was founded by Bishop George Berkeley. He termed sense impressions, as well as other contents of the mind, as ideas, and claimed that physical objects don’t exist independently of the mind but are in reality just collections of such ideas. One advantage this philosophy had over realism, indirect realism in particular was that it doesn’t face the challenges of the linking problem.

Representative realists have a lot of difficulty explaining how we can know that there are physical objects ‘behind’ the sense data that we perceive. This is known as the linking problem because it highlights the problem of ‘linking’ our sense-data to the things they are meant to represent. For example, if I look a table, according to representative realism, the only thing I perceive is the sense data of the table. In this case, the problem here is linking this sense data of a table to some physical object from which we are receiving the sense data. If we don’t perceive the table directly, then how can we know if there is a table at all?

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  However, for idealists they aren’t fazed by this problem because the philosophy idealism states that there are no physical objects behind the sense data we perceive anyway. Therefore, when an idealist is looking at the table, all they are seeing is the sense data of the table. Since there is no physical object behind the sense data of the table, then idealists won’t have to face the linking problem. An ‘object’, according to Berkeley, is simply a bundle of ideas with no physical existence independent of sensation.

Furthermore, another strength to idealism is its ability to overcome the ...

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