Berkeley's Argument and the Perspectivist Fallacy

ABSTRACT

Berkeley's argument that material objects do not exist because the notion of an unconceived material object is a contradiction has been misinterpreted. It is actually an argument that it is impossible to refer to any external material object given the requirements for reference on Berkeley's view of representation. I argue that even though contemporary thinkers no longer explicitly accept Berkeley's view of representation, they often use a version of Berkeley's argument, which I call the Perspectivist Fallacy: the argument that representations from particular perspectives cannot be objective, or even refer to external objects at all, simply because they are perspectival. Using Richard Rorty's and Hilary Putnam's arguments as examples, I attempt to show that these arguments do ,in fact, share the same form as Berkeley's and that they fail because they assume, implicitly and without argument in the case of Rorty and Putnam, a view of representation similar to Berkeley's. I argue that these views of representation fallaciously analyze what is essentially a relation or interaction between subject and object as a self-subsistent object in the mind of the subject, a mistake that results in self-defeating views of representation and of objectivity.