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existence of material objects consists entirely of sense-qualia,
amounts to the claim that all talk about material objects is just highly
indirect talk about sense-qualia . This is the worldview of Berkelian
idealism, pure and simple.
But why should a theory which only a few philosophers have
ever believed, the theory that the only objects whose existence is not
of a highly derived kind are sense-qualia - that sense-qualia are the
furniture of the universe- be more credible than the worldview of
science and common sense?
In sum, Ayer lands himself in the following predicament: either
he must return to subjective idealism or he must face the problem
which has always been the nemesis of causal realism, the problem of
the nature of the link between language and the world. (Even the
nature of the link between language and sense data not immediately
present to the mind is a problem for Ayer's view . Postulating an act
of "primary recognition" is not providing an analysis of this link
at all.)
The materialists to whom Ayer refers have a view on these mat–
ters , but it is not mentioned in this book. (Only their view on the
mind-body problem is discussed , and that view is misrepresented, as
I mentioned .) The contemporary materialist view, for what it is
worth, is that the correspondence between signs and their objects is
established by "causal connection." The difficulty mentioned before
- that there are too many regularities and too many statistical
tendencies for reference to be a matter of just regularities and/ or sta–
tistical tendencies - is met by postulating that causality is more than
a matter of regularities and statistical tendencies . Hume was just
wrong; there are real "causal powers," real "abilities to produce" in
the world, and these notions, these philosophers say, must be taken
as primitive.
This view raises many problems, however, which I am sure
Aye r would have pointed out had this issue been one he discussed .
For one thing, the worldview of materialism is taken from fun–
damental physics - ignoring, however, the pervasive relativity of the
state of a physical system to an "observer" which is characteristic of
modern quantum mechanics. Materialists think of the whole
universe as a "closed" system, described as God might describe it if
He were allowed to know about it clairvoyantly, but not allowed to
interfere with it. The states of the closed system succeed one
another; which state will follow which is determined by a system of
