Berkeleys Water Experiment :: Science Illusions Argument Papers

Berkeley introduces his water experiment in order to demonstrate that in perception the perceiver does not reach the world itself but is confined to a realm of representations or sense data. We will attempt to demonstrate that Berkeley's description of our experience at the end of the water experiment is inauthentic, that it is not so much a description of an experience as a reconstruction of what we would experience if the receptor organs (the left and right hands) were objects existing in a space partes extra partes. Our argument is that there is nothing in our experience of the illusion to suggest that under normal conditions perception does not reach the world itself. Traditionally Empiricists claim that all knowledge and all basic concepts are derived from experience. At the same time they argue that all experience is reducible to private entities, the so-called 'sense data'. Phenomenologists claim that there is nothing in experience itself to suggest that it is reducible to sense data, and that this doctrine is derived from metaphysical prejudices, the so-called 'assumptions of the natural attitude'. They argue that if we could in some way 'bracket' these assumptions and reflect only on our experience of perceiving and on the results of scientific measurements of our perceptual powers, we would discover that perception, rather than presenting us with private entities or 'data', 'opens up' to the world itself. (1) In A New Theory of Vision, Berkeley attempts to show that all experience is reducible to sense data by exploiting two types of argument. At times he exploits a scientific account of perception and of the functioning of the perceptual organs, while at other times he uses the argument from illusions. For example, he argues, that the experience of temperature can be understood with the analogy of the experience of pain, and just as the pain is not 'in the needle', so the warmth I feel is not in the fire. (2) He then argues in a similar vein that visual experience is reducible to collections of colour sensations because light passes into the eye ball and strikes the retina, in much the same way that a sharp object striking the skin produces a sensation of pain, such as a sensation of blue or red. (3) The sensation being the effect of the physical and chemical properties of the world on the sense organs and is as distinct from the world as photographic images are from the objects which cause them.