The 18th-century philosopher George Berkeley can be deemed to be a scientific constructivist, an idealist or an empiricist. So is Berkeley one or none of the above? Indeed, does it matter which label we attach to him?
Readers will note how Bishop Berkeley’s ideas seem very contemporary in resonance. Indeed, 21st-century idealists like Donald Hoffman, Bernardo Kastrup, etc. are harking back to George Berkeley — at least to various degrees. Then again, perhaps it can be argued that Berkeley himself was harking back to even older philosophical traditions.
So George Berkeley can be seen as an idealist, empiricist or an instrumentalist. Of course, some of these isms can be upheld together at one and the same time. Others can’t.
In any case, some readers may get annoyed with all these isms. And because of this plethora of labels (as with many other debates on “dead philosophers”), it’s probably best to simply discuss what George Berkeley actually believed and not spend too much time attempting to squeeze him into a neat and tidy retrospective box.
All that said, and in respect to the title of this essay, Berkeley can indeed be seen as a scientific constructivist (or at least as a proto-scientific constructivist).
Is George Berkeley a Scientific Constructivist or an Idealist?
That’s primarily because constructivists argue that science consists in “mental constructs” which have the purpose of explaining and describing measurements and experiences (or observations) generally. Yet, and noting the abundance of isms just mentioned, this too reads like a simple description of empiricism. In fact, it certainly squares well with — and here we go again — constructive empiricism.
Where scientific constructivism may differ from what Berkeley himself believed is its emphasis on the idea that scientific knowledge is constructed by scientific communities. This is a (partly) sociological angle that doesn’t seem to completely ring true in Berkeley’s 18th-century context.
That said, Berkeley mightn’t have had a problem with this sociological position. Indeed, he even argued as much himself in various places (if in his own 18th-century prose style). For example, Berkeley once stated the following:
“[M]athematical entities have no stable essence in the nature of things; and they depend on the notion of the definer. Whence the same thing can be explained in different ways [].”
Oddly enough, Berkeley-as-idealist (i.e., rather than Berkeley-as-empiricist) can be deemed to be more radical than 20th-century scientific constructivists. That’s because, on one reading at least, constructivists are said to believe that the world is actually independent of human minds. However, they also believe that our knowledge of the world (somewhat obviously) is not. And that’s because our knowledge of the world is said to be a “social construction”.
Arguably, Berkeley-as-idealist might have scoffed at such a distinction because talk of “the world itself” is (to quote Ludwig Wittgenstein) “a wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it is not part of the mechanism”.
[Some claims about social, scientific and other kinds of “social construction” seem banal and/or truistic. For example, saying that the English language, a motorway, money, or even a particular sexual kink is a social construction is a statement of the bleeding obvious.]
Now let’s turn to Berkeley’s philosophy of physics.
Berkeley on Newton and Intrinsic Properties
George Berkeley was certainly very interested in physics. Indeed, his first published book was on physics — An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision (1709). More specifically, much relevant material (in relation to this essay) can also be found in Berkeley’s Philosophical Commentaries (1707–1708), in which he discusses Isaac Newton’s Principia.
In broad terms, George Berkeley believed that physics doesn’t provide us with any (as it’s been put) “true insight” into the nature of the world.
Thus, Berkeley pre-empted the position of panpsychists like Philip Goff who often tell us that physics has nothing to say about what they call “intrinsic properties”. Indeed, Newton himself believed that physics only mathematically maps the actions, relations and correlations of bodies with mass — yet it has nothing to say about the forces themselves. That is, physics (at least at that time) had nothing to say about what forces actually are.
All this is almost to deem physics as being (another ist!) behaviourist in nature. That is, in Newton’s day, physics took a behaviourist stance on physical phenomena, rather than on human beings and other animals. In other words, physics was — and perhaps still is — about the behaviour of bodies and forces (i.e., or the behaviour of bodies when subject to forces).
In more concrete terms, Berkeley made a distinction between the mathematics involved in describing gravitation and refraction, and the (as it were) real nature of gravity and light. Here again, the maths simply describes the effect of forces (e.g., gravity and light) on bodies. It doesn’t tell us what gravity and light are.
Now, to use the terms of contemporary analytic philosophy, it can be said that Berkeley believed that the terms (for example) “action”, “attractive force” and “impetus” had no referents. However, we do know that bodies move and that they move in very-specific ways in very-specific situations (or conditions).
Yet all this didn’t mean that Berkeley also believed that we should eliminate such terms. He still believed that such terms are useful. It’s just that they don’t refer to anything.
So, for all that, the mathematics of physics can be perfect when it comes to descriptions and predictions. (At least in can be if the physicist gets his sums right.)
To sum up: Berkeley believed that the whole of Newtonian mechanics is simply a “set of equations” and nothing more. Newton, on the other hand, believed (at least according to Berkeley himself) that there’s more to physics than mere equations.
Berkeley on Occult Qualities
Berkeley’s position on physics (or at least on Newtonian physics) — as mainly expressed in his De Motu (1721) — was (proto) instrumentalist in nature. Indeed, it even retrospectively chimes in with Bas van Fraassen’s own constructive empiricism.
At least on some readings, then, Berkeley believed that science is essentially all about the description and explanation of the regularities, which are discovered primarily through experiment and observation. Indeed Berkely himself once wrote:
“[T]o be of service to reckoning and mathematical demonstrations is one thing, to set forth the nature of things is another.”
[The very notion of observation is problematic on an idealist reading, if not on an empiricist reading.]
On a broadly instrumentalist reading, then, scientific theories are “useful fictions”. These useful fictions, nonetheless, do explain the data. Indeed, on some positions, such theories can even be taken to be true. (Perhaps primarily because such theories have nothing to say about intrinsic properties, noumena, “nature itself”, etc.)
Berkeley even went so far as to argue that forces are “occult qualities” which “expressed nothing distinctly”.
This is hardly a surprising position (at least in retrospect) for a 18th-century empiricist. After all, you can’t see, touch, smell or whistle gravity or any other force known to 18th-century physics.
Berkeley put it more technically than that when he stated that
“something unknown in a body of which they have no idea and which they call the principle of motion, are in fact simply stating that the principle of motion is unknown”.
Simply put: motion is known. However, what causes motion isn’t known. Again, Berkeley goes further. He states an empiricist position in which those who
“affirm that active force, action, and the principle of motion are really in bodies are adopting an opinion not based on experience”.
Berkeley then advanced a position that may seem more akin to idealism (if to subjective idealism) than to empiricism. That is, Berkeley believed that forces are the products of what he called the “soul”. Therefore, forces are “incorporeal thing[s] [which] do not properly belong to physics”.
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