:''See Diodorus Cronus § Master argument for the classical master argument related to the

problem of future contingents Future contingent propositions (or simply, future contingents) are statements about states of affairs in the future that are ''contingent:'' neither necessarily true nor necessarily false. The problem of future contingents seems to have been firs ...

.'' The master argument is

George Berkeley George Berkeley (; 12 March 168514 January 1753) – known as Bishop Berkeley (Bishop of Cloyne of the Anglican Church of Ireland) – was an Anglo-Irish philosopher whose primary achievement was the advancement of a theory he called "immate ...

argument An argument is a statement or group of statements called premises intended to determine the degree of truth or acceptability of another statement called conclusion. Arguments can be studied from three main perspectives: the logical, the dialectic ...

that mind-independent objects do not exist because it is impossible to conceive of them. The argument is against the intuitions that many have and has been widely challenged. The term "Berkeley's master argument" was introduced by Andre Gallois in 1974. His term has firmly become currency of contemporary Berkeley scholarship.

Overview

In order to determine whether it is possible for a tree to exist outside of the mind, we need to be able to think of an unconceived tree. But as soon as we try to think about this tree, we have conceived it. So we have failed and there is no good reason to believe that trees exist outside of the mind.

Criticisms

The master argument has been seen by several prominent philosophers as having a crucial mistake; see criticisms of idealism.

Bertrand Russell Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) was a British mathematician, philosopher, logician, and public intellectual. He had a considerable influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, linguistics, ...

among others believed Berkeley's argument "seems to depend for its plausibility upon confusing the thing apprehended with the act of apprehension":Bertrand Russell, ''The Problems of Philosophy'', pages 22 to 23.

"If we say that the things known must be in the mind, we are either un-duly limiting the mind's power of knowing, or we are uttering a mere tautology. We are uttering a mere tautology if we mean by 'in the mind' the same as by 'before the mind', i.e. if we mean merely being apprehended by the mind. But if we mean this, we shall have to admit that what, in this sense, is in the mind, may nevertheless be not mental. Thus when we realize the nature of knowledge, Berkeley's argument is seen to be wrong in substance as well as in form, and his grounds for supposing that 'idea'-i.e. the objects apprehended-must be mental, are found to have no validity whatever. Hence his grounds in favour of the idealism may be dismissed."

Some claim that Berkeley was not making a master argument at all and that what he was actually trying to show was that the substance 'matter' was actually an abstract concept that passed itself off in peoples' minds as an object of immediate experience. Rather than say that the matter cannot exist, the critics claim, Berkeley is saying that it can only exist as an abstract concept and that this abstract concept was conceptually useless.Philip Pilkington
''Berkeley's 'Master Argument' Doesn't Exist'', Fixing the Economists

References

{{reflist Philosophical arguments George Berkeley