KANT’S SCANDAL
Kant’s scandal, that idealism is still unrefuted - idealism of the Berkeleyan type, of course - has been somehow forgotten, or replaced by Whitehead’s scandal. Philosophers who boast of some rational disposition and of some interest in science, consider Berkeley’s philosophy utterly passe.
Indeed, philosophers who wish to discredit the Copenhagen school of the interpretation of quantum theory call it Berkeleyan, using the epithet as the one of dirtiest available in the current philosophical dictionary.What has happened to idealism? How is it that it has ceased being a scandal? I have two answers. My first answer is that Kant’s scandal was transformed into Whitehead’s scandal. In other words, nowadays philosophers are preoccupied with the problem of induction and postpone engaging in the problem of idealism because they feel that the solution to the one is the same as to the other; or, that it is the most promising way to arrive at a solution to the other. Solve the problem of induction, they say, vindicate induction, and you will thereby justify physical science, thus imposing on the idealist who is still reasonable the physical world postulated by physical science. Induction, then, may expel idealism.
Alas, the truth is the very obvious obverse. The very preoccupation with induction, the very stress on the need to justify by observation, is what entrenches idealism, as Bishop Berkeley so well argued when he showed that the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, between objective and subjective ones, cannot be vindicated by any induction, so that all experience must be forever subjective.
I shall return to this later. Now I shall take it for granted, and so I shall have to reject the first answer to my question, how come we have lost interest in refuting Berkeleyan idealism. I shall offer now my second answer to this question: idealism has been satisfactorily refuted, and so we need not try to refute it any longer.
My own teacher, Sir Karl Popper, has said, idealism is irrefutable; irrefutability, however, is not a virtue but a vice.
I disagree with both of these statements. But let us accept them for now as true. Let us agree that idealism is not refutable - that is to say, not empirically refutable. Let us also agree that empirical irrefutability is not a virtue but a vice. Hence, idealism is refuted - not empirically but philosophically. Let me elaborate.Berkeley said his doctrine is verified since it is and must remain unrefuted; Popper says it is no good for the very same reason. Either we have here two criteria which are beyond rational debate; in which case we can choose the newer and forget the older. Or, we have the older criterion rejected by rational means and replaced by a better one. If so, and if this rational process leads to the rejection of idealism, we can say that idealism is empirically unrefuted and irrefutable - but philosophically refuted.
I am loath to study public opinion; but when talking to a public one has to develop some idea of what that public knows, thinks, and worries about. I have the distinct impression from the current literature that the reasonable philosophical public of today, in particular philosophers of science, are willing to view idealism as unproblematic by accepting Popper’s idea that its empirical irrefutability is a severe defect (some even say meaninglessness!). Yet they do worry about induction which they view as highly problematic. But if induction leads to idealism, as Berkeley says, then there is a flaw here. Or shall we say a scandal? Frustration, rather. The situation is frustrating indeed; and for good reasons, I think.
II.