A Revival of Idealism?

Abstract

The two works under consideration here defend claims that, although different from each other, are to a large extent complementary. Their arguments are to some degree overlapping; and, taken together, they herald a revival of idealism. Robinson argues that the main contemporary forms of materialism in the philosophy of mind are 'quite hopeless' (p. I 24). Foster contends that ultimate contingent reality is wholly non-physical and that the physical world is best taken as a logical product of facts about human sense experience. Although he does not claim to prove that ultimate reality is wholly mental, he suspects that it is (p. 294); and the position at which he arrives bears strong resemblances to the views of Bishop Berkeley. Both authors can be read as developing, in a most stimulating way, certain views advanced earlier by Professor H. D. Lewis. The central argument Robinson uses against materialist theories of the mind is 'quite sinriply, that the materialist cannot within his system allow for consciousness. Ayer has expressed this by saying that the materialist must pretend that he is anaesthetized' (p. 4). To drive home his point, Robinson asks us to consider the following thought-experiment. A deaf scientist becomes the world's foremost authority on the physiology of hearing. He comes to know everything there is to know about his subject except one crucial fact, which science will not tell him: 'what it is like to hear' (p. 4). Robinson emphasizes that the force of his argument does not depend on adopting a particular theory of what we perceive, e.g. that we directly perceive only sense data. Even if one rejects the sense-datum theory, adhering instead to direct realism or the adverbial theory, the problem remains. Something, regardless of how one wishes to characterize it theoretically, occurs when we are conscious; and this the materialist cannot explain. (This is not to admit that direct realism is a plausible theory of knowledge: see the discussion by Foster, pp. 58, 96 ff.) Robinson's argument will be familiar to all readers of Professor Lewis, as it is one which he has insisted on again and again in volumes such as The Elusive Mind and The Elusive Self Lewis succinctly states the main issue at the beginning of the latter book: 'At some point we have to recognize an