Re “was Berkeley making such an obvious mistake?”, I think this is historians’ majority view, but multiple people have tried to come up with more reasonable versions of the argument; see Gallois (1974) and Downing (2011). Note that Berkeley makes the same argument in dialogue form here (starts at “How say you, Hylas, can you see a thing which is at the same time unseen?”), so you can check if you find that version more tenable.
[This passage] can be interpreted as making a straightforward howler, arguing that because whenever you think of something it is being thought of and anything being thought of is, ipso facto, ‘in the mind’ then you cannot think of something that is not in the mind. According to Russell, this was a keystone for idealism and it involves a simple mistake.
”Berkeley’s view . . . seems to depend for its plausibility upon confusing the thing apprehended with the act of apprehension. Either of these might be called an ‘idea’; probably either would have been called an idea by Berkeley. The act is undoubtedly in the mind; hence, when we are thinking of the act, we readily assent to the view that ideas must be in the mind. Then, forgetting that this was only true when ideas were taken as acts of apprehension, we transfer the proposition that ‘ideas are in the mind’ to ideas in the other sense, i.e. to the things apprehended by our acts of apprehension. Thus, by an unconscious equivocation, we arrive at the conclusion that whatever we apprehend must be in our minds.” 1912/1967,22
Russell’s criticism is in line with Moore’s famous ‘The Refutation of Idealism’ (1903), where he argues that if one recognizes the act-object distinction within conscious states, one can see that the object is independent of the act. This ‘discovery’, together with the development of a formal logic for relations, was the cornerstone of the rejection of ‘British idealism’. If objects can be conceived of as independent of conscious thought, and if it is consistent to think of them as in actually related to each other, the mentalistic holism that was contemporary idealism is demolished.
That said, I put a lot of weight on Allen Wood’s view as a leading Kant scholar, and revisiting his book Kant, he doesn’t think Kant accepted the master argument (p. 69). David (2015) asserts a link, but it looks tenuous to me.
Kant’s earliest interpreters took him to be saying “trees, oceans, etc. all just exist in your head and have nothing in common with the mysterious ineffable things-in-themselves”, and Kant definitely talks like that a great deal, but he also says a lot that contradicts that view. Wood thinks Kant was just really confused and fuzzy about his own view, and didn’t have a consistent model here (pp. 63-71).
My new pet theory is that Kant was being pulled in one direction by “wanting to make things as subjective as possible so he can claim more epistemic immediacy and therefore more immunity to skeptical arguments”, and in the opposite direction by “not wanting to sound like a crazy person like Berkeley”, so we get inconsistencies.
I don’t know who, if anyone, noted the obvious fallacy in Berkeley’s master argument prior to Russell in 1912, and Russell seems to think the argument was central to idealism’s appeal. Regardless, my new view is: philosophy mainly ended up going down an idealist cul-de-sac because Kant shared Berkeley’s “try to find ways to treat more things as subjective” approach to defeating skepticism. (Possibly without realizing it; Stang (2016) suggests Kant was pretty confused about what Berkeley believed.) Then Kant and Hegel built sufficiently dense, mysterious, and complicated intellectual edifices that it was easy for them to confuse themselves and others, while still being brilliant, innovative, and internally consistent enough to attract a lot of followers.
I don’t know who, if anyone, noted the obvious fallacy in Berkeley’s master argument prior to Russell in 1912
Not even Moore in 1903?
Russell’s criticism is in line with Moore’s famous ‘The Refutation of Idealism’ (1903), where he argues that if one recognizes the act-object distinction within conscious states, one can see that the object is independent of the act.
They’re… similar? I find Russell a lot clearer on this point:
We might state the argument by which they support their view in some such way as this: ‘Whatever can be thought of is an idea in the mind of the person thinking of it; therefore nothing can be thought of except ideas in minds; therefore anything else is inconceivable, and what is inconceivable cannot exist.’
Such an argument, in my opinion, is fallacious; and of course those who advance it do not put it so shortly or so crudely. But whether valid or not, the argument has been very widely advanced in one form or another; and very many philosophers, perhaps a majority, have held that there is nothing real except minds and their ideas.
I find Moore’s way of discussing the issue weirder. Moore is definitely making an argument from ‘a thought’s object is different from the thought itself’ to ‘idealism is false’, but his argument seems to involve weird steps like ‘our experiences don’t have contents’ (rather than the expected ‘the content of our experience is different from its referent’):
What I wish to point out is (1) that we have no reason for supposing that there are such things as mental images at all—for supposing that blue is part of the content of the sensation of blue, and (2) that even if there are mental images, no mental image and no sensation or idea is merely a thing of this kind; that ‘blue’, even if it is part of the content of the image or sensation or idea of blue, is always also related to it in quite another way, and that this other relation, omitted in the traditional analysis, is the only one which makes the sensation of blue a mental fact at all. [...]
To have in your mind ‘knowledge’ of blue, is not to have in your mind a ‘thing’ or ‘image’ of which blue is the content. To be aware of the sensation of blue is not to be aware of a mental image—of a ‘thing’, of which ‘blue’ and some other element are constituent parts in the same sense in which blue and glass are constituents of a blue bead. It is to be aware of an awareness of blue; awareness being used, in both cases, in exactly the same sense. This element, we have seen, is certainly neglected by the ‘content’ theory: that theory entirely fails to express the fact that there is, in the sensation of blue, this unique relation between blue and the other constituent.
Baldwin (2004) confirms that this line of reasoning, plus Moore’s attempt to resist skeptical hypotheses, led Moore in a very confused direction:
But what is the relationship between sense-data [i.e., the thingies we’re directly conscious of] and physical objects? Moore took it that there are three serious candidates to be considered: (i) an indirect realist position, according to which sense-data are non-physical but somehow produced by interactions between physical objects and our senses; (ii) the phenomenalist position, according to which our conception of physical objects is merely one which expresses observed and anticipated uniformities among the sense-data we apprehend; (iii) a direct realist position, according to which sense-data are parts of physical objects — so that, for example, visual sense-data are visible parts of the surfaces of physical objects.
The indirect realist position is that to which he was initially drawn; but he could see that it leaves our beliefs about the physical world exposed to skeptical doubt, since it implies that the observations which constitute evidence for these beliefs concern only the properties of non-physical sense-data, and there is no obvious way for us to obtain further evidence to support a hypothesis about the properties of the physical world and its relationship to our sense-data.
This argument is reminiscent of Berkeley’s critique of Locke, and Moore therefore considered carefully Berkeley’s phenomenalist alternative. Moore’s initial response to this position was that the implied conception of the physical world was just too ‘pickwickian’ to be believable. This may be felt to be too intuitive, like Dr. Johnson’s famous objection to Berkeley; but Moore could also see that there were substantive objections to the phenomenalist position, such as the fact that our normal ways of identifying and anticipating significant uniformities among our sense-data draw on our beliefs about our location in physical space and the state of our physical sense-organs, neither of which are available to the consistent phenomenalist.
So far Moore’s dialectic is familiar. What is unfamiliar is his direct realist position, according to which sense-data are physical. This position avoids the problems so far encountered, but in order to accommodate false appearances Moore has to allow that sense-data may lack the properties which we apprehend them as having. It may be felt that in so far as sense-data are objects at all, this is inevitable; but Moore now needs to provide an account of the apparent properties of sense-data and it is not clear how he can do this without going back on the initial motivation for the sense-datum theory by construing these apparent properties as properties of our experiences. But what in fact turns Moore against this direct realist position is the difficulty he thinks it leads to concerning the treatment of hallucinations. In such cases, Moore holds, any sense-data we apprehend are not parts of a physical object; so direct realism cannot apply to them, and yet there is no reason to hold that they are intrinsically different from the sense-data which we apprehend in normal experience. This last point might well be disputed, and at one point Moore himself considers the possibility of a distinction between ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ sense-data; but once one has introduced sense-data in the first place as the primary objects of experience it is not going to be easy to make a distinction here without assuming more about experience than Moore at any rate would have wanted to concede.
Moore wrote more extensively about perception than about any other topic. In these writings he moves between the three alternatives set out here without coming to any firm conclusion.
What distinguishes neutral monism from its monistic rivals is the claim that the intrinsic nature of ultimate reality is neither mental nor physical. [...] Following a series of critical engagements with neutral monism (see especially Russell 1914a,b), Russell adopted it in Russell 1919 and remained a neutral monist for the rest of his long career: “I am conscious of no major change in my opinions since the adoption of neutral monism” is what he says in an interview from 1964 (Eames 1969: 108). [...]
For an entity to be neutral is to “have neither the hardness and indestructibility of matter, nor the reference to objects which is supposed to characterize the mind” (Russell 1921: 36; cf. 124). Russell never suspected sensations of being material (in this sense). That sensations are mental (in this sense)—that they consist of a mental act of sensing directed at a non-mental object—was, however, a pivotal part of his earlier view. But then his views changed:
“I formerly believed that my own inspection showed me the distinction between a noise [the object] and my hearing of a noise [the act of sensing], and I am now convinced that it shows me no such thing, and never did.” (Russell 1918b: 255)
Also, insofar as Moore and Russell are gesturing at similar issues, Moore’s paper provides some support for the claim that master-argument-ish reasoning was central to the idealism and rested on a simple error that was concealed by motivated reasoning and obfuscatory language, and that no one noticed (or successfully popularized) the error prior to Moore/Russell:
I am suggesting that the Idealist maintains that object and subject are necessarily connected, mainly because he fails to see that they are distinct, that they are two, at all. When he thinks of ‘yellow’ and when he thinks of the ‘sensation of yellow’, he fails to see that there is anything whatever in the latter which is not in the former. [...]
But I am well aware that there are many Idealists who would repel it as an utterly unfounded charge that they fail to distinguish between a sensation or idea and what I will call its object. And there are, I admit, many who not only imply, as we all do, that green is distinct from the sensation of green, but expressly insist upon the distinction as an important part of their system. They would perhaps only assert that the two form an inseparable unity.
But I wish to point out that many, who use this phrase, and who do admit the distinction, are not thereby absolved from the charge that they deny it. For there is a certain doctrine, very prevalent among philosophers nowadays, which by a very simple reduction may be seen to assert that two distinct things both are and are not distinct. A distinction is asserted; but it is also asserted that the things distinguished form an ‘organic unity’. But, forming such a unity, it is held, each would not be what it is apart from its relation to the other. Hence to consider either by itself is to make an illegitimate abstraction.
The recognition that there are ‘organic unities’ and ‘illegitimate abstractions’ in this sense is regarded as one of the chief conquests of modern philosophy. But what is the sense attached to these terms? An abstraction is illegitimate, when and only when we attempt to assert of a part—of something abstracted—that which is true only of the whole to which it belongs: and it may perhaps be useful to point out that this should not be done. But the application actually made of this principle, and what perhaps would be expressly acknowledged as its meaning, is something much the reverse of useful. The principle is used to assert that certain abstractions are in all cases illegitimate; that whenever you try to assert anything whatever of that which is part of an organic whole, what you assert can only be true of the whole. And this principle, so far from being a useful truth, is necessarily false. For if the whole can, nay must, be substituted for the part in all propositions and for all purposes, this can only be because the whole is absolutely identical with the part.
When, therefore, we are told that green and the sensation of green are certainly distinct but yet are not separable, or that it is an illegitimate abstraction to consider the one apart from the other, what these provisos are used to assert is, that though the two things are distinct yet you not only can but must treat them as if they were not. Many philosophers, therefore, when they admit a distinction, yet (following the lead of Hegel) boldly assert their right, in a slightly more obscure form of words, also to deny it. The principle of organic unities, like that of combined analysis and synthesis, is mainly used to defend the practice of holding both of two contradictory propositions, wherever this may seem convenient.
In this, as in other matters, Hegel’s main service to philosophy has consisted in giving a name to and erecting into a principle, a type of fallacy to which experience had shown philosophers, along with the rest of mankind, to be addicted. No wonder that he has followers and admirers. [...]
And at this point I need not conceal my opinion that no philosopher has ever yet succeeded in avoiding this self-contradictory error: that the most striking results both of Idealism and of Agnosticism are only obtained by identifying blue with the sensation of blue: that esse [“existing”] is held to be percipi [“being perceived”], solely because what is experienced is held to be identical with the experience of it. That Berkeley and Mill committed this error will, perhaps, be granted: that modern Idealists make it will, I hope, appear more probable later.
This updates me partway back toward the original claim I made (that Berkeley’s master argument was causally important for the rise of idealism and its 20th-century successors).
Also interesting: “insistence that we be immune to skeptical arguments” and “fascination with the idea of representation/intentionality/‘aboutness’” seems to have led the continental philosophers in similar directions, as in Sartre’s “Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology.” But that intellectual tradition had less realism, instrumentalism, and love-of-science in its DNA, so there was less resistance to sliding toward an “everything is sort of subjective” position.
I’d say: definitely nuanced. Definitely very inconsistent on this point. Not consistently asserting an extreme metaphysical view like “the true, mind-independent world is incomprehensibly different from the world we experience”, though seeming to flirt with this view (or framing?) constantly, to the extent that all his contemporaries did think he had a view at least this weird. Mainly guilty of (a) muddled and poorly-articulated thoughts and (b) approaching epistemology with the wrong goals and methods.
Re “was Berkeley making such an obvious mistake?”, I think this is historians’ majority view, but multiple people have tried to come up with more reasonable versions of the argument; see Gallois (1974) and Downing (2011). Note that Berkeley makes the same argument in dialogue form here (starts at “How say you, Hylas, can you see a thing which is at the same time unseen?”), so you can check if you find that version more tenable.
The Bloomsbury Companion to Berkeley says:
That said, I put a lot of weight on Allen Wood’s view as a leading Kant scholar, and revisiting his book Kant, he doesn’t think Kant accepted the master argument (p. 69). David (2015) asserts a link, but it looks tenuous to me.
Kant’s earliest interpreters took him to be saying “trees, oceans, etc. all just exist in your head and have nothing in common with the mysterious ineffable things-in-themselves”, and Kant definitely talks like that a great deal, but he also says a lot that contradicts that view. Wood thinks Kant was just really confused and fuzzy about his own view, and didn’t have a consistent model here (pp. 63-71).
My new pet theory is that Kant was being pulled in one direction by “wanting to make things as subjective as possible so he can claim more epistemic immediacy and therefore more immunity to skeptical arguments”, and in the opposite direction by “not wanting to sound like a crazy person like Berkeley”, so we get inconsistencies.
I don’t know who, if anyone, noted the obvious fallacy in Berkeley’s master argument prior to Russell in 1912, and Russell seems to think the argument was central to idealism’s appeal. Regardless, my new view is: philosophy mainly ended up going down an idealist cul-de-sac because Kant shared Berkeley’s “try to find ways to treat more things as subjective” approach to defeating skepticism. (Possibly without realizing it; Stang (2016) suggests Kant was pretty confused about what Berkeley believed.) Then Kant and Hegel built sufficiently dense, mysterious, and complicated intellectual edifices that it was easy for them to confuse themselves and others, while still being brilliant, innovative, and internally consistent enough to attract a lot of followers.
Not even Moore in 1903?
Isn’t that the same argument Russell was making?
They’re… similar? I find Russell a lot clearer on this point:
I find Moore’s way of discussing the issue weirder. Moore is definitely making an argument from ‘a thought’s object is different from the thought itself’ to ‘idealism is false’, but his argument seems to involve weird steps like ‘our experiences don’t have contents’ (rather than the expected ‘the content of our experience is different from its referent’):
Baldwin (2004) confirms that this line of reasoning, plus Moore’s attempt to resist skeptical hypotheses, led Moore in a very confused direction:
I should note that Russell was also led in some pretty weird directions by the desire to resist skeptical arguments:
Also, insofar as Moore and Russell are gesturing at similar issues, Moore’s paper provides some support for the claim that master-argument-ish reasoning was central to the idealism and rested on a simple error that was concealed by motivated reasoning and obfuscatory language, and that no one noticed (or successfully popularized) the error prior to Moore/Russell:
This updates me partway back toward the original claim I made (that Berkeley’s master argument was causally important for the rise of idealism and its 20th-century successors).
Also interesting: “insistence that we be immune to skeptical arguments” and “fascination with the idea of representation/intentionality/‘aboutness’” seems to have led the continental philosophers in similar directions, as in Sartre’s “Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology.” But that intellectual tradition had less realism, instrumentalism, and love-of-science in its DNA, so there was less resistance to sliding toward an “everything is sort of subjective” position.
Maybe confused, maybe nuanced, but certainly not backing some clear but extreme view.
I’d say: definitely nuanced. Definitely very inconsistent on this point. Not consistently asserting an extreme metaphysical view like “the true, mind-independent world is incomprehensibly different from the world we experience”, though seeming to flirt with this view (or framing?) constantly, to the extent that all his contemporaries did think he had a view at least this weird. Mainly guilty of (a) muddled and poorly-articulated thoughts and (b) approaching epistemology with the wrong goals and methods.