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Single Idea 3937

[filed under theme 12. Knowledge Sources / B. Perception / 2. Qualities in Perception / e. Primary/secondary critique ]

Full Idea

By 'solidity' either you do not mean any sensible quality, and so it is beside our enquiry; or if you do, it must be hardness or resistance, which are plainly relative to our senses.

Gist of Idea

'Solidity' is either not a sensible quality at all, or it is clearly relative to our senses

Source

George Berkeley (Three Dialogues of Hylas and Philonous [1713], I p.173)

Book Ref

Berkeley,George: 'The Principles of Human Knowledge etc.', ed/tr. Warnock,G.J. [Fontana 1962], p.173

A Reaction

Berkeley fails to recognise that a quality can have primary and secondary aspects (hot/high temperature). He is right that primary qualities are not directly perceived. They are judgements.

The 17 ideas with the same theme [criticism of the primary/secondary distinction]:

12721 Light, heat and colour are apparent qualities, and so are motion, figure and extension [Leibniz]
19358 Colour and pain must express the nature of their stimuli, without exact resemblance [Leibniz]
3934 A mite would see its own foot as large, though we would see it as tiny [Berkeley]
3935 The apparent size of an object varies with its distance away, so that can't be a property of the object [Berkeley]
3937 'Solidity' is either not a sensible quality at all, or it is clearly relative to our senses [Berkeley]
3940 Distance is not directly perceived by sight [Berkeley]
6726 No one can, by abstraction, conceive extension and motion of bodies without sensible qualities [Berkeley]
6728 Motion is in the mind, since swifter ideas produce an appearance of slower motion [Berkeley]
6727 Figure and extension seem just as dependent on the observer as heat and cold [Berkeley]
2239 If secondary qualities (e.g. hardness) are in the mind, so are primary qualities like extension [Hume]
16924 I count the primary features of things (as well as the secondary ones) as mere appearances [Kant]
5679 We can't grasp the separation of quality types, or what a primary-quality world would be like [Dancy,J]
5680 For direct realists the secondary and primary qualities seem equally direct [Dancy,J]
3885 We only conceive of primary qualities as attached to secondary qualities [Scruton]
3910 If primary and secondary qualities are distinct, what has the secondary qualities? [Scruton]
7053 Treating colour as light radiation has the implausible result that tomatoes are not red [Heil]
9308 If subjective and objective begin to merge, then so do primary and secondary qualities [Svendsen]