Berkeley’s Conceivability Argument, Representationalism, and the Nominalist Dismissal of Metaphysics

The purpose of my paper is to address the notion of experience, that is, the domain of discourse on the relationship of minds to the world. The mainstream vocabulary developed to handle such a relationship relies on representations. I will defend an empiricist standpoint by raising doubts on the heuristic value of this widely shared assumption. In a basic sense, metaphysics is involvement in nonexperiential entity stipulation. My key claim is that representationalism is a typical metaphysical doctrine because posits nonexperiential entities. My starting point is the very succinct argument by Zeno which is reported by Plato at the beginning of Parmenides. I will reconstruct it as a challenge to any kind of pluralist ontology. In the second section, I will give a cursory account of examples of representationalist doctrines. I will argue that representationalism originates from the need of answering Zeno’s challenge. In the third section, I will provide a structured overview of Berkeley’s immaterialism. His doctrine is a package of three logically independent blocks: i. a refusal of representationalism; ii. an ontology of mental states; iii. a nominalist account of universals. As such it addresses traditional issues about minds and the world that involve belief justification, semantic concerns about the content of mental states, and the nature of objects. In the fourth section, I will address Berkeley’s conceivability argument against representations. I will show how it engages with open issues in contemporary debates. In the fifth section, I will supplement Berkeley’s criticism of representations with his views on contents. In the final section, I will summarize why empiricism constitutes an alternative to metaphysics.