Monday, October 21, 2019
Much Ado About A Mite
Berkeley argues for his idealism from the relativity of perception. He compares the size of a mite's foot as seen by the mite itself, by a human and by some smaller microorganism. What, exactly, is the argument? Is the argument successful? If not, how do we resist the sucking of all so-called primary qualities into the mind?
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In Berkeley's dialogues, he uses the medium of his two characters Hylas and Philonous to set up a very interesting argument about how humans perceive the world. Berkeley sets up the idea that perception leads to there being no absolutes. He uses the mite's foot as an example to suggest it would be very small to a person or larger being, but it would appear very large to some microscopic organism. In a similar vein to this, Berkeley talks about hot and cold hands that if dipped in lukewarm water, the hot hand feels cold and the cold hand feels hot. Berkeley makes the point that things cannot be small and large at the same time, and they can also not be hot and cold at the same time. Berkeley uses all of this set up from these examples in his dialogues to make one point. There is no objective reality. This conclusion leads Berkeley to the idea that everything in the world is only there because it is perceived in the mind causing the physical world to vanish. This vacuums all of the things that humans innately believe about the world being physical and objective to all, and this idea places them into the mind. On paper, this argument actually makes a lot of logical sense. While it might be hard for many people to grasp the idea that the physical world exists only in our mind, it seems that the sucking of all of these qualities into the mind is inevitable and logical, forcing humans for the most part to accept the reality of the world. I think this argument actually is successful because there is no way to disprove the fact that there are no objective realities and that size and things like heat are always relative. Maybe some of the conclusions that Berkeley draws after proving this point are a little far fetched, however, this baseline argument that everything exists in the mind (Esse Este Percipi) is a solid foundation to work off and seems pretty sound.
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ReplyDeleteIn Berkeley's Mite argument, he attempts to prove that a human and a smaller microorganism will perceive the size of a Mite's foot differently. Berkeley says that for a human, the foot may be perceived as small, but for a smaller microorganism, the foot may be perceived as large. Berkeley explicitly says that an object cannot be both big and small at the same time. Because of this, he eventually concludes that size has to be an inherent quality in the mind and not in an object.
ReplyDeleteThe argument Berkeley makes is both flawed and unsuccessful. Since one person’s perception of an object can vary from another person’s, units of measurement are necessary and need to be established. The creation of a universally objective standard allows people to accurately identify size from one object to another. Berkeley also states that the perception of an object is inherently an object’s size, but many critics believe that the perception of an object is simply just a description of an object, not its actual size. For example, depending on the perceiver and factors affecting the perceiver, an object may seem and be perceived as big or small. The perception of a big or small object is simply a description of what a person sees, not the actual and true size of an object. Once an object is evaluated with a unit of measurement, the size of an object can be identified. If Berkeley revolved his argument around something like sound, taste, or colors, his Mite’s Foot argument would have been much more successful because there is no way to universally describe these specific characteristics.
Berkeley’s argument for idealism through the relativity of perception means to take all physical properties away from objects, claiming that they are simply results of the mind, and therefore, are nothing more than a bundle of ideas. To prove idealism, Berkeley sets forth the example of a mite’s perception of its foot in comparison to a human’s perception of the mite’s foot. To the insect, its foot may appear rather large, however, to the human, the foot is exceptionally small. This difference in perception on the size of an object proves that size is not a primary quality (a property of an object that is independent from the observer and is instead given to the object by an outside mind,) as the observer is able to perceive it differently than others. When this same concept of variations in perception is applied to other primary qualities (shape or texture, for example), it can easily be argued that every object can only rest in the mind as a bundle of ideas, therefore proving the extreme end of idealism. On paper, this argument sounds airtight when strictly speaking of it conceptually. However, there is a way to quantify any and all primary qualities when including human invention. We have multiple systems of measurement, all of which provide ways to quantify primary qualities such as size. If we were to measure a mite’s foot, we would find it to be X mm long. Although it may appear large to the mite and small to the human, there is an objective length that cannot be disputed. In addition, we are able to convert between systems of measurement, linking all measures of size together. So although Berkeley’s argument makes perfect sense, there is a rather large misstep when it comes to claiming that all primary qualities are also in the mind.
ReplyDeleteBerkeley's argument for idealism can be described using a mite's foot. From the eyes of a microorganism, the mite's foot would appear to be very large. From the eyes of a human, the mite's foot would appear to be extremely small. To the mite, it would look proportional to their body. The different perceptions of this foot clash because the foot cannot be large, small, and proportional all at the same time. He concludes that size is an inherent quality of the mind and there is no objective reality, causing the physical world to disappear. I think his argument is convincing because objectss cannot have opposite qualities. To someone who is colorblind, a purple scarf may look blue, but to me it would look purple. Is there a way to prove that the scarf is purple to the other person? No, it is based on individual perception. One could argue that units of measurement defeat this argument, but that still does not explain why something may look big to one creature and small to another. Whether something is big or small depends on the eyes looking at it, regardless of its size in inches. What if one person's perception of an inch is different than the next person's? How can we agree what an inch really looks like?
ReplyDeleteI believe that the idealism argument in relation to the relativity of perception made by Berkeley is a good one. What exactly he means by this is a mite might perceive a shoe differently than a person perceives it. What the object is really depends on the eye of the beholder. In relation to idealism, different people mind find different meanings in certain bits of knowledge. Like the activity that we did in class where Dr. Ialacci held up an object and asked two people to tell him what it was from different angles. If he holds up a one dimensional circle and one person is seeing it head on and the other person sees it from the side, the object really isn’t a circle to everyone now is it. A mite might think the shoe is a spaceship trying to destroy his home, just like how we saw spaceships in Independence Day as life-destroying weapons. The ships to the aliens might be the size of a Roomba. The shoe in the perception of a human is just something we put on our feet so what on the ground doesn’t injure them. That analogy is what I believe Descartes meant by this.
ReplyDeleteIn Berkeley's dialogue, he uses Hylas and Philos to argue about how humans see the world. Berkley argues that all qualities of objects are in the mind of the perceiver. Instead of having primary (size, shape), and secondary qualities (color, sound, taste, hot, and cold). To prove this point Berkeley uses two arguments to convince the reader. The first argument is of the mite’s foot that tries to disprove primary qualities. It goes when a human is looking down at the foot of a mite, and it is perceived as small. However, the mite’s foot when looked up at by something like an ameba the mite’s foot would be massive. In addition, in this argument he brings up a paradox that something cannot be both big and small at the same time, there for things such as size would have to exist only in the mind. Then Berkeley tries to disprove secondary qualities like heat. To disprove this he uses the example of the different temperature hands. In this argument, there are two hands one that is cold and one that is warm. When these hand are put into the same tub of lukewarm water the hot hand would feel cold, and the cold hand would feel hot. This is another argument that is paradoxical because things like the lukewarm tub of water cannot be both hot and cold, and there for exist in the mind.
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ReplyDeleteBerkeley used the analogy of a mite’s foot to explain how “primary” qualities such as the size of an object must be in the mind. These were his basic premises:
ReplyDelete1. A mite’s foot appears to be very small (also known as ‘teeny-weeny’) to humans like us, but very large (also known as ‘ginormous’ or ‘mungo-bungo’) to microorganisms such as an amoeba.
2. Something can never perform two opposite functions at the same time or have two opposite characteristics at the same time.
3. Size must then be reliant on subjective perception.
4. Therefore, size can only exist in the mind.
Berkeley believed that this conclusion effectively disproved the theories of both moderate realism (the belief that ‘secondary’ qualities such as taste, smell, or the sensations of hot and cold don’t exist, or at least not outside of the mind, but ‘primary’ qualities such as size or shape exist physically as an inherent part of the object) and extreme realism (the belief that both ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ qualities exist physically as an inherent part of the object). This argument is not entirely successful because size and shape are still things that can still be quantified mathematically in a way that sensations like taste and smell cannot. The fact that we can still step back and say from an objective standpoint “x is larger or smaller or the same size as y” proves that size is a quantifiable quality. Therefore, ‘primary’ qualities like size can still exist outside of the mind and be inherent to an object in some capacity.