Graham Oddie Permanent Possibilities of Sensation

Idealism apparently comes in both an extravagant and a more modest form. The extravagant, Berkeleyan brand maintains that objects are nothing more than bunches of occurrent experiences. Recasting this thesis in terms of the totality of facts about objects, the extravagant idealist affirms that all facts are settled by the purely mental facts. If a fact of any sort at all obtains then that fact is settled by the totality of actually obtaining mental facts. This way of putting it suggests a supervenience thesis of some sort – that there can be no difference in the total collection of facts without a difference in the purely mental facts. The problem with extravagant idealism is that it requires extraordinary vigilance on the part of perceivers to preserve all the objects and facts we normally take for granted. With just a finite number of small and lazy minds like ours, unobserved, unthought of things have the lamentable tendency of popping out of existence. What’s just as bad but often glossed over, is that even observed things are largely stripped of their richness and complexity.1 To solve this problem Berkeley invoked an omniobserver, to keep things in their places. Somebody has to keep an eye on things, and God is one possible being with the wherewithal for the task. That’s extravagant. Myriads of lesser gods, say one per quad, would have done the job, but the charge of extravagance would be no less justified. A more modest idealism, one which finds expression in varieties of phenomenalism, attempts to save the noumena without postulating beings for whom we have no independent evidence. Modest idealism does not tell us that things are bunches of occurrent experi-