368 Farm Ln
East Lansing, MI 48823
USA
Professor Keota Fields, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth
Berkeley on Conceiving
Conceiving plays an outsized role in Berkeley’s attack on materialism;; and Berkeley has been criticized for adopting an account of conceiving that, when carefully considered, is either incoherent or unpersuasive. I propose an interpretation on which Berkeley takes conceiving to be psychologically derivative of perceiving. Since for Berkeley perceiving requires richly normative interpretive activity on the part of the perceiver in addition to sensory stimulation, and since conceiving is psychologically derivative of perceiving, conceiving requires similarly normative interpretive activity. I argue that this account overcomes the most forceful objections to Berkeley’s account of conceiving.