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1. Introduction
This is Berkeley’s Master Argument as formulated in the Dialogues:
… I am content to put the whole upon this issue. If you can conceive it possible for any mixture or combination of qualities, or any sensible object whatever, to exist without the mind, then I will grant it actually to be so.
If it comes to that, the point will soon be decided. What more easy than to conceive a tree or house existing by itself, independent of, and unperceived by any mind whatsoever? I do at this present time conceive them existing after that manner.
How say you, Hylas, can you see a thing which is at the same time unseen?
No, that were a contradiction.
Is it not as great a contradiction to talk of conceiving a thing which is unconceived?
It is.
The tree or house therefore which you think of, is conceived by you.
How should it be otherwise?
And what is conceived, is surely in the mind.
Without question, that which is conceived is in the mind.
How then came you to say, you conceived a house or tree existing independent and out of all minds, whatsoever?
That was I own an oversight […] I may indeed conceive in my own thoughts the idea of a tree, or a house, or a mountain, but this is all. And this is far from proving, that I can conceive them existing out of the minds of all spirits. (Berkeley 1999, 139–40)
Some (e.g., Prior 1955, Gallois 1974) read the above passage (and the related one in the Principles (Berkeley 1999, 33–34) as, roughly, an attempt to show that all sensible things are conceived, and thus within the mind. Others (e.g., Stoneham 2002, Holden 2019) see Berkeley as merely attempting to rebut a materialist objection to his idealism—that mind-independent matter is surely conceivable and thus possible. Whichever of these tacks we take, it is unclear exactly what Berkeley’s argument is.
On some readings of key claims in the Master Argument, Berkeley makes relatively obvious reasoning errors. Thus, we might complain (with Prior 1955) that Berkeley fallaciously conflates the claim that one conceives that there is something...