Lauren Slater brings together Berkeley’s doctrine of signs with Descartes’ thoughts on signification, language-use, and the relation between the mind, body, and sensations. She argues for thinking that by holding up Berkeley and Descartes’ accounts of sign-usage alongside one another, new insights into both thinkers’ views on how the mind and the world are connected via sensation can be revealed. The chapter begins by noting Berkeley’s objection to what he characterises as Descartes’ ‘geometric’…
Read moreLauren Slater brings together Berkeley’s doctrine of signs with Descartes’ thoughts on signification, language-use, and the relation between the mind, body, and sensations. She argues for thinking that by holding up Berkeley and Descartes’ accounts of sign-usage alongside one another, new insights into both thinkers’ views on how the mind and the world are connected via sensation can be revealed. The chapter begins by noting Berkeley’s objection to what he characterises as Descartes’ ‘geometric’ model of perception in NTV. However, over the course of this chapter, Slater demonstrates that Berkeley’s own position is not as far from Descartes’ own view as he might think and argues that while Berkeley may have gone further in arguing that the natural world is literally a language spoken to us by God, Descartes also seems to develop a theory in which God instantiates a semantic relation between our sensations and what they mean.
