First Dialogue

Definitions:
- Sceptic: one that doubts everything & one who denies the reality of sensible things or professes the
greatest ignorance of them.
- Sensible things: those that are immediately perceived by senses.
o Immediately perceived: direct object of perception they make no inference about anything.

 Key property view: to perceive is to perceive the relevant property.

 They are nothing but so many sensible qualities or combinations of sensible thing.
o Mediately perceived: making inferences.

 When you hear sound, you immediately perceive the sound, but not the cause of the
sound. When you read, you immediately perceive shapes/lines, but not the meaning of the
words (Just because you perceived book about God, does not mean you perceived God).
- Hylas’s realism: to exist is one thing and to be perceived is another. A thing has real existence if it exist
distinct from and without any relation to their being perceived.
Logic:
- Vision and color: recall that all the things we perceive, we perceive immediately. Also, what we
immediately perceive are sensible qualities
- Against Substance: relativity argument and cannot abstract primary qualities from secondary qualities.
Arguments:
- The heat-pain argument:
1. All degrees of heat have the same amount of existence.
Objection: intense heat is nothing but intense pain but it does not mean we should deny that heat in an
inferior degree to exist in such as substance. We can discern (distinguish) those degrees of heat that do
not cause pain
Reply: you agreed that unperceiving being is not capable of experience pain and pleasure. But warmth is
pleasure so warmth can only exist with a mind. This means heat is either pleasure or pain and can only
be perceived by thinking substances so that external bodies are incapable of any degree of heat.
Sub-Objection: warmth is not pleasure but merely an absence of pain. This means when we experience
mild degree of heat or cold, the object has cold in it.
Reply: It is absurd to think that something can be both cold and hot. If one of your hand is cold and the
other is hot, and they are both put into the same vessel of water, the water will be cold to one hand and
hot to the other. This means the water is both cold and hot which is absurd. Since absurd principles are
false, this your view is false.
2. An object has real existence only if it can exist without being or has relation to being perceived.
3. High degree of heat is also a high degree of pain
Objection: pain is something distinct from heat, and the consequence or effect of it
Reply: (1) What you immediately perceived is just one sensation. You do not feel heat and feel pain.
They are both immediately perceived as one basic idea. Heat cannot be distinct from pain.
(2) you cannot experience heat without pleasure or pain. You cannot experience pain or pleasure without
 heat, cold, smells and so on.
4. Pain cannot exist without mind
5. Greatest heat cannot exist without mind (3,4)
6. Greatest heat has no real existence (2,5)
7. Heat cannot exist without mind (1,6)
Objection: it is absurd to think that there is no heat in fire.
Reply: we ought to make same judgements about same cases. When pin pricks your finger, it rend and
divide one’s finger like coal burns your finger. Since the pin itself does not contain the pain, we should
think fire does not contain heat (pain).
Objection: the qualities perceived by us are pain and pleasure, so the heat and sweetness we perceived
are not in fire or sugar but it does not mean that heat and sweetness are not in the fire. We just cannot
perceive them
Reply: we are looking for the nature of sensible things. And sensible things are what we immediately
perceived by senses. Things that are not immediately perceived from senses, we know nothing about
them.
- The relativity argument
1. Suppose one of your hands is hot, the other cold, and they are both put simultaneously into some vessel
of water in an ‘intermediate state’. The water will appear warm to one and cold to the other
2. Bodies occasioning moderate degrees of heat or cold must be concluded to have moderates degrees of
heat and cold in them.
3. Both heat and cold must exist in lukewarm water
4. This is absurd
5. We must reject 2
apply to vision: there are apparent color and real color. Those that changes when walk close. But this
means all colors are apparent color if you use scope or think about small animals. Color blind.