Peacocke on Berkeley: Outline

First: claim that Berkeley was right about our inability to perceive an unseen tree. Then:

3 questions.

1) What is the nature of this distinction between what is in the image and what, in the same imaginative project, is imagined: "the question of the image/imagination distinction" (20)

2) Wittgenstein and King's college (or a clone?) being imagined to be on fire. "We will want to know what it is that makes one singular content rather than another a component of what is being imagined; and we will want to know why it seems that there is a sense in which it is absurd to suppose the imaginer might be mistaken about the identity of that content." [Both (1) and (2) are "the question of content"--(pg 20).]

The third question is why Berkeley is right about the unperceived tree (it is assumed that he is.)

General Hypothesis: to imagine something is always at least to imagine, from the inside, being in some conscious state. (21)

"the sense in which your imaginings always involve yourself is rather this: imagining always involves imagining from the inside a certain (type of) viewpoint, and someone with that viewpoint could, in the imagined world, knowledgeably judge `I'm thus-and-so,' where the thus-and-so gives details of the viewpoint." (21) [IEM]

..."the condition [of the imaginer] seems to be a conceptual truth. It is not just a reflection of each person's egocentricity...it is a consequence of two conceptual truths: one of them is the General Hypothesis, and the other is that for each thinker, the content `I am not the person with *these* conscious states' is not epistemically possible." (21)

From this we derive the following more specific "constitutive hypothesis", the Experiential Hypothesis:

To imagine being [phi] in these cases is always at least to imagine from the inside an experience as of being [phi]. (22)

Peacocke writes that this "may seem uncontroversial: but I shall, in developing from it answers to our three questions, argue that it can be used in defense of Berkeley's doctrine about unperceived trees and in criticism of some received philosophical views on imagination." (23)

Imagining and supposing: "I shall say that these are difference [between e.g. suitcase and suitcase with a cat behind it] in which conditions are S-imagined to hold. 'S' is for 'suppose'--although S-imagining is not literally supposing, it shares with supposition the property that what is S-imagined is not determined by the subject's images, his imagined experiences." (25)

Back to the tree:

"In defending Berkeley's claim, I am not denying that one can imagine an array of physical objects and then make-believe that it is unperceived, or then conceive of it as existing unperceived, or make the supposition that it was, will, or might be unperceived. one may even imagine a tree and then, in a second imaginative project, imagine a world in which no one sees *that* tree. What I am asserting is only that if what is imagined is a physical object, then the imagined experience of the object is, in the imagined world, a perception." (30)