My Adaptation of A.E. Taylor’s Argument for Idealism

P1) If X is a real physical object at T1, then X is perceivable at T1.

Prima facie, it seems that the difference between a “real” physical object and an “unreal” physical object is nothing other than the following: a “real” physical object either is, or could be, the perceptum (i.e., object) of a perceptual state, whilst an “unreal” or merely “imaginary” physical object neither is, nor could be, the perceptum of a perceptual state. Indeed, Kant insisted upon this in his critique of the ontological proof. For Kant, the difference between a “real” physical object and its merely “imagined” or “unreal” counterpart, lied in the fact that the “real” physical object—unlike the merely “imaginary” or “unreal” physical object—is, or could be, the perceptum of a perceptual state. Taking a hundred dollars as his example, Kant pointed out that the “real” hundred dollars are, or could be, something felt, touched, and handled; seen, smelled, and tasted; exchanged for a currency of a different type, used for purchasing goods and services in the market, or simply deposited in a bank for future use. The “imaginary” hundred dollars, on the other hand, neither are, nor could be, felt, touched, and handled; seen, smelled, and tasted; exchanged for a currency of a different type, used for purchasing goods and services in the market, or simply deposited in a bank for future use.

With that being said, it is crucial to recognize that to “imagine” something is not to “perceive” what is being “imagined.”  Whenever I “imagine” anything, there is always a distinction between my psychical act of “imagining” and the “imaginatum” which I am “imagining.” My psychical act of “imagining” the “imaginary” hundred dollars is certainly “real” and not “imaginary,” because the psychical act of “imagining” is one with, and enters into, my Experience, it is something that I am actually doing. On the other hand, the “imaginatum” that I am “imagining” (i.e., the “unreal” or “imaginary” hundred dollars”) neither is, nor can be, something that enters into my Experience. If one muddles the distinction between the “imagining” and the “imaginatum,” then one inevitably falls into one of the following two absurdities: (a) they end up committing themselves to the “reality” of griffins, round-squares, and leprechauns because they collapse the “unreal” “imaginatum” into the “real” psychical act of “imagining;” or (b) they end up committing themselves to the “unreality” of psychical acts of “imagining” because they collapse the psychical act of “imagining” into the “unreal” “imaginatum.” For a further defense of this premise, confer the passages from Taylor’s works below.

P2) If X is perceivable at T1, then all of the necessary physical conditions that make X perceivable at T1 are themselves real at T1.

 

P3) If all of the necessary physical conditions that make X perceivable at T1 are themselves real at T1, then all of the necessary physical conditions that make X perceivable at T1 are themselves perceivable at T1.

 

P4) If all of the necessary physical conditions that make X perceivable at T1 are themselves perceivable at T1, then none of the necessary physical conditions that make X perceivable at T1 are themselves imperceptible at T1.

 

P5) If none of the necessary physical conditions that make X perceivable at T1 are themselves imperceptible at T1, then none of the necessary physical conditions that make X perceivable at T1 have the property of “being unperceived at T1.” 

If X has both the property of “being perceivable at T1” and the property of “being unperceived at T1,” that would mean it is possible to perceive X at T1—the time at which X also has the property of being unperceived—but this is a contradiction. Indeed, it is just as contradictory to assert that X, when perceived, is imperceptible. Therefore, if X has the property of “being perceivable at T1,” then X cannot also have the property of “being unperceived at T1.” For a further defense of this premise, confer the passages from Taylor’s works below.

C1) Therefore, if X  is a real physical object at T1, then none of the necessary physical conditions that make X perceivable at T1 have the property of “being unperceived at T1.” [From P1—P5]

 

P6) One of the necessary physical conditions that make X perceivable at T1 is X itself.

 

C2) Therefore, if X is a real physical object at T1, then X  does not have the property of “being unperceived at T1.” [From C1 and P6]

 

P7) If X  does not have the property of “being unperceived at T1,” then X is not unperceived at T1.

 

P8) If X is not unperceived at T1, then X is perceived at T1.

 

C3) Therefore, if X is a real physical object at T1, then X is perceived at T1. [From C2—P8]

“And, as to the principle of the contention that presence in an experience is the very meaning of existence, it is, to my mind at least, as Mr. Bradley says it is to his, so evident that I should find it impossible to meet anyone who disputes it on common ground. Its full force will perhaps be best brought out by our disregarding the special grounds upon which it is supported by Berkeley, some of them only too insecure, and restating it in the form of a challenge. Produce, we may say to the objector, any piece of fact whatever of which you are prepared to maintain the real existence, and I will undertake to show that what makes it real can be nothing but its presence as an inseparable aspect of a sentient experience. What the special fact you choose for the purpose of the experiment may be, whether a physical quality or process, an artistic effect, or a moral excellence, makes no difference to the principle of the argument. For when you have chosen your fact, and made your assertion, “This fact, A, really exists,” we shall invite you to think, as you always can, of a corresponding A which is not real but merely imaginary, and then to say what it is that makes the difference between the real and the imaginary or unreal A. If you will try the experiment, you will always find, as Kant proved in the historical case of the hundred dollars, that the difference does not lie in the addition of a new predicate to those by which the imaginary A is characterized, but always in the actual presence of the real A to a sentient experience, its entrance into some immediately apprehended whole. Even in the case of an A which, for some reason or other, is wholly inaccessible to human perception you cannot really escape from this conclusion. For, suppose you say, “The ice at the South Pole really exists, though it is impossible for a human eye to behold it,” we shall invite you to explain more precisely what you mean by such a statement. You will then find yourself in a dilemma: either you mean that the Polar ice exists with all its qualities, including those which have no meaning at all except in relation to a perceiving organ, precisely as we should see it if we were there, and in that case the ice with all its qualities must presumably be always present, as such, to an experience which is not ours; or you mean that there really exist certain conditions, such that, on the addition of one further condition, the presence of a human spectator, they would yield a perception of the ice. But, not to insist on the point that the reality of a certain object and the reality of some of its conditions are not the same thing, what do you mean by a really existing condition as distinguished from one which is merely imagined to exist? Any answer to this question will show that the appeal to conditions only puts the difficulty back a stage, without in any way affecting the validity of the Berkeleian contention.” (Taylor, Mind and Nature, 58-59) 

“Reality...is truly known to be a connected and self-consistent, or internally coherent, system; can we with equal confidence say anything of the data of which the system is composed? Reflection should convince us that we can at least say as much as this: all the materials or data of reality consist of experience, experience being provisionally taken to mean psychical matter of fact, what is given in immediate feeling. In other words, whatever forms part of presentation, will, or emotion, must in some sense and to some degree possess reality and be a part of the material of which reality, as a systematic whole, is composed; whatever does not include, as part of its nature, this indissoluble relation to immediate feeling, and therefore does not enter into the presentation, will, and emotion, of which psychical life is composed, is not real. The real is experience, and nothing but experience, and experience consists of “psychical matter of fact.” Proof of this proposition can only be given in the same way as of any other ultimate truth, by making a trial of it; if you doubt it you may be challenged to perform the experiment of thinking of anything whatever, no matter what, as real, and then explaining what you mean by its reality. Thus suppose you say “I can think of A as real,” A being anything in the universe; now think, as you always can, of an imaginary or unreal A, and then try to state the difference between the A which is thought of as real and the A which is thought of as merely imaginary. As Kant proved, in the famous case of the real and the imagined hundred dollars, the difference does not lie in any of the qualities or properties of the two A’s; the qualities of the imagined hundred dollars are precisely the same as those of the real sum, only that they are “imaginary.” Like the real dollars, the imagined dollars are thought of as possessing such and such a size, shape, and weight; stamped with such and such an effigy and inscription; containing such and such a proportion of silver to alloy; having such and such a purchasing power in the present condition of the market, and so forth. The only difference is that the real dollars are, or under specified and known conditions may be, the objects of direct perception, while the imaginary ones, because imaginary, cannot be given in direct perception. You cannot see or handle them; you can only imagine yourself doing so. It is in this connection with immediate psychical fact that the reality of the real coins lies. So with any other instance of the same experiment. Show me, we might say, anything which you regard as real,—no matter what it is, a stone wall, an aesthetic effect, a moral virtue,—and I will ask you to think of an unreal and imaginary counterpart of that same thing, and will undertake to prove to you that what makes the difference between the reality and the imagination is always that the real thing is indissolubly connected with the psychical life of a sentient subject, and, as so connected, is psychical matter of fact.” (Taylor, Elements of Metaphysics, 23-24) 

“Two points should be carefully noted if we wish to avoid serious misapprehension. It might be objected, by a disciple of Kant or of Mill, that a thing may be real without ever being given as actual psychical fact in immediate apprehension, so long as its nature is such that it would be psychical fact under known and specified conditions. Many, if not most, of the objects of scientific knowledge, it may be said, are of this kind; they have never entered, possibly never will enter, into the contents of any man’s direct apprehension, yet we rightly call them real, in the sense that they would be apprehended under certain known conditions. Thus I have never seen, and do not expect that any one will ever see, the centre of the earth, or, to take a still stronger case, no one has ever seen his own brain. Yet I call the centre of the earth or my own brain real, in the sense that if I could, without ceasing to live, penetrate to a certain depth below the soil, I should find the centre of the earth; if an opening were made in my skull, and a suitable arrangement of mirrors devised, I should see the reflection of my own brain. A comet may be rushing through unpeopled space entirely unbeheld; yet it does not cease for all that to be real, for if I were there I should see it, and so forth. Hence the Kantian will tell us that reality is constituted by relation to possible experience; the follower of Mill, that it means “a permanent possibility of sensation.” Now, there is, of course, an element of truth in these arguments. It is true that what immediately enters into the course of my own direct perception is but a fragment of the full reality of the universe. It is true, again, that there is much which in its own nature is capable of being perceived by human beings, but will, as far as we can judge, never be perceived, owing to the physical impossibility of placing ourselves under the conditions requisite for perception; there are other things which could only be perceived if some modification could be effected in the structure of our perceptive organs. And it may therefore be quite sufficient for the purposes of some sciences to define these unperceived realities as “possibilities of sensations,” processes which we do not perceive but might perceive under known or knowable conditions. But the definition, it will be seen, is a purely negative one; it takes note of the fact that we do not actually perceive certain things, without telling us anything positive as to their nature. In Metaphysics, where we are concerned to discover the very meaning of reality, we cannot avoid asking whether such a purely negative account of the reality of the greater part of the universe is finally satisfactory. And we can easily see that it is not. For what do we mean when we talk of the “possible”? Not simply “that which is not actual,” for this includes the merely imaginary and the demonstrably impossible. The events of next week, the constitution of Utopia, and the squaring of the circle are all alike in not being actual. Shall we say, then, that the possible differs from the imaginary in being what would, under known conditions, be actual? But again, we may make correct inferences as to what would be actual under conditions suspected, or even known, to be merely imaginary, and no one will maintain that such consequences are realities. If I were at the South Pole I should see the Polar ice, and it is therefore real, you say, though no one actually sees it; but if wishes were horses, beggars would ride, yet you do not say that the riding of beggars is real. Considerations of this kind lead us to modify our first definition of the “possible” which is to be also real. We are driven to say that, in the case of the unperceived real thing, all the conditions of perception except the presence of a percipient with suitable perceptive organs, really exist. Thus the ice at the South Pole really exists, because the only unfulfilled condition for its perception is the presence at the Pole of a being with sense-organs of a certain type. But once more, what do we mean by the distinction between conditions which really exist? We come back once more to our original experiment, and once more, try as we will, we shall find that by the real condition as distinct from the imaginary we can mean nothing but a state of things which is, in the last resort, guaranteed by the evidence of immediate perception. If we take the term “actual” to denote that which is thus indissoluble from immediate apprehension, or is psychical matter of fact, we may sum up our result by saying we have found that the real is also actual, or that there is no reality which is not at the same time an actuality. We shall thus be standing on the same ground as the modern logicians who tell us that there is no possibility outside actual existence, and that statements about the possible, when they have any meaning at all, are always an indirect way of imparting information about actualities. Thus “There really exists ice at the South Pole, though no human eye beholds it,” if it is to mean anything, must mean either that the ice itself, as we should perceive it if we were there, or that certain unknown conditions which, combined with the presence of a human spectator, would yield the perception of the ice, actually exist as part of the contents of an experience which is not our own.” (Taylor, Elements of Metaphysics, 24-26) 

“What our intellect can accept as finally real, we saw, must be indissolubly one with actual experience, and it must be an internally coherent system….When we say that a thing “is” or “has Being,” we seem primarily to mean that it is an object for the knowing consciousness, that it has its place in the system of objects which coherent thought recognizes. When we call the same object “real” or a “reality,” we lay the emphasis rather on the consideration that it is something of which we categorically must take account, whether we like it or not, if some purpose of our own is to get it fulfilment. Thus again the “non-existent” primarily means that which finds no place in the scheme of objects contemplated by consistent scientific thought; the “unreal,” that with which we have not, for any human purpose, to reckon.” (Taylor, Elements of Metaphysics, 50-51) 

“Produce any instance you please, we said to the realist, whom we had not then learned to know by that name, of what you personally regard as reality, and we will undertake to show that it derives its reality for you from the very fact that it is not ultimately separable from the experience of a subject. A thing is real for you, and not merely imaginary, precisely because in some aspect of its character it enters into and affects your own experience. Or, what is the same thing in other words, it is real for you because it affects favourably or otherwise some subjective interest of your own. To be sure, the thing as it enters into your experience, as it affects your own subjective interests, is not the thing as it is in its fullness; it only touches your life through some one of its many sides. And this may lead you to argue that the real thing is the unexperienced “condition” of a modification of your experience. But then we had again to ask what you mean by saying that facts which you do not experience are real as “conditions” of what you do experience. And we saw that the only meaning we could attach to the reality of the “condition” was presence to an experience which transcends your own.” (Taylor, Elements of Metaphysics, 69-70)

“To this general argument we may add two corollaries or supplementary considerations, which, without introducing anything fresh, may help to make its full force more apparent. (1) The argument, as originally presented, was concerned directly with the that of reality, the mere fact of its existence. But we may also state it, if we please, from the side of the what, the nature possessed by the real. You cannot affirm any doctrine about the real existence of anything without at the same time implying a doctrine about its nature. Even if you say “Reality is unknowable,” you are attributing something beyond mere independence of experience to your reality; you are asserting that what is thus independent possesses the further positive quality of transcending cognition. Now what, in logic, must be your ground for attributing this rather than any other quality to your independent reality? It can only be the fact or supposed fact…that our experiences themselves are all found to be self-contradictory. There is no ground for taking the unknowable of Reality to be true unless you mean by it a character which belongs not to something which stands outside all experience, but to experience itself. The same contention applies to any other predicate which the realist affirms as true of his ultimate reality. (2) Again, we may with effect present our argument in a negative form. Try, we may say, to think of the utterly unreal, and see how you will have to conceive it. Can you think of sheer unreality otherwise than as that of which no mind is ever aware, of which no purpose has ever to take account as a condition of its fulfilment? But to think of it thus is to attribute to it, as its definition, precisely that independence in which the realist finds the mark of ultimate reality. And if “independence” constitutes unreality, presence to and union with experience must be what constitutes reality.” (Taylor, Elements of Metaphysics, 70) 

“The question, so interpreted, is indeed only a special case of the more general question, “Is anything what it is known as being, outside the experience in which it is so known?” To answer this question fully would take us much deeper into metaphysical controversy than we can reasonably desire to go in a work of which metaphysics is neither the only nor the principal subject, but we must, at any rate, briefly indicate the conclusions which would naturally follow from the view which has been enunciated in our opening chapter as to the scope and the methods of metaphysics. If our original conception of the metaphysical problem was a correct one, it is clear that metaphysics can never reveal to us any existence entirely beyond or entirely independent of an experience in which it forms an inseparable aspect. As we have indicated already, the whole problem of metaphysics is to construct a description of the world of experience which shall answer to our ideal of “pure” experience—that is, shall contain no single element which cannot be completely described in terms of experienced fact. Just in so far as metaphysics or any other branch of science departs from this ideal, and employs in its theories concepts which cannot be resolved into descriptions of experienced fact, it ceases to be fully and completely true and becomes infected to an unknown degree with errors and false assumptions, which it is the work of scientific progress to remove. Thus, as against certain forms of philosophic Realism, we feel bound to maintain that metaphysics is incapable of ever transcending that reference to actual or possible experience which is involved in every assertion about existence. What is means for us, as for the plain man, what is or what would, under definitely known conditions, be experienced by a consciousness, and wherever we find science and philosophy apparently transcending these limits, and informing us of the existence of objects which, from their nature, cannot as such be contents of any experience, we expect to detect the presence in scientific theory of “symbolic” and unreal concepts.” (Taylor, The Problem of Conduct: A Study in the Phenomenology of Ethics, 448-449) 

“We maintain, then, that taking existence in the full and proper sense of the terms, nothing ever is, outside the concrete experience in which it is an ingredient, what it is within that experience. The utmost reality that can be conceded to any object of experience outside the experience in which it is known, is the reality of certain conditions which, with the addition of the further condition of certain psychological dispositions in the percipient, will yield the experience of the object in question. And by the reality of these “conditions” we must once more mean, unless we are to play fast and loose with words, their presence as an ingredient in some other experience. We cannot too strongly insist that of “existence,” in any full sense of the word, we can form no notion whatever except as forming the content of an experience. As Mr. Bradley puts it, “being” is indissolubly one with “sentience.” That this truth is so frequently denied by realists and misconceived by idealists is probably to be accounted for by the general prevalence of a most unfortunate error in philosophical order. If, instead of treating experience as a kind of knowing, metaphysicians had treated knowing as a kind of experience, it would have been less easy to mistake the mere symbols of inadequate conceptual thought for transcendently real things existing outside of, and independently of, the experience in which they are thought of.” (Taylor, The Problem of Conduct: A Study in the Phenomenology of Ethics, 450)