Spring 2009

PHP 5785
Platonic Atomism and
Moore’s Refutation of Idealism
© K. Ludwig

1. Historical background
1.1 Kant
1.2 Absolute Idealism
2. Platonic Atomism
3. Moore’s “Refutation of Idealism”

1. Historical background

The analytic tradition in England begins with the rejection of the British and German idealist
tradition by G. E. Moore (1873 - 1958) and Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970) at Cambridge at the
beginning of the 20th century. (In the same period, at Oxford, Cook Wilson argued influentially
against the idealists.) In their early philosophical development, both Moore and Russell went
through idealist periods, heavily influenced by the dominant figure of F. H. Bradley (1846-1924)
and to a lesser extent by John McTaggart (1866-1925). Bradley was probably the best known and
most influential British philosopher in the decade of the 1890s. His metaphysical magnum opus
Appearance and Reality, which espoused a monistic absolute idealism, was published in 1893.
The British idealist tradition superseded British empiricism from the 1860s (with the publication
of J. H. Stirling’s Secret of Hegel (1865)) to the end of the century; it looked back for inspiration
to Hegel and, through Hegel, to Kant. Moore was the first to rebel, and was the catalyst for
Russell’s own rejection of idealism.1 To understand what Moore and Russell were reacting to, it
is necessary to rehearse briefly and in very broad outline the development of the idealist position
up to the end of the 19th century. Painting this background in broad strokes is necessary for two
reasons: first, any attempt at detail would take far too much time, and, second, I am not really
competent to fill in the details. So here I only sketch the main outlines of the position-just
enough to indicate what the position was and by what main stages it was arrived at.

1.1 Kant

Let us begin with a brief review of Kant’s rejection of empiricism, one of the two schools he
divides the philosophers of the modern period into, the other being, of course, rationalism. The
major rationalists of the modern period are Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, and the major
empiricists Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. This taxonomy of the period is one that we owe to Kant
himself, who thought of himself as in a certain way bringing the two traditions into harmony,
showing the right place of both experience and reason in our knowledge of the world. The
rationalists were said to emphasize the importance of pure reason as a source of knowledge, and
the empiricists to emphasize the importance of experience as a source of knowledge. There is a

1
“Moore led the way, but I followed closely in his footsteps,” My Philosophical Development (London: George
Allen & Unwin 1959), p. 54.
 Spring 2009

secondary emphasis in empiricist thought that plays an important role in understanding the
development of the idealist tradition, and one that plays a major role in Kant’s thinking, which is
that experience is not only a source of knowledge, but is the source of what ideas and concepts
we have, i.e., the origin of the conceptual framework which we bring to bear on the world around
us when we think about it. This was a confusion in empiricist thought, perhaps most evident in
Locke, which was helped along by the use of a single word, ‘idea’, to cover a multiplicity of
different sorts of mental states, and in particular both what we would call images or experiences
and what we would call concepts. At least one strain in Kant is a rejection of this picture, and the
insistence that no experience whatsoever would be possible without our already being able to
deploy various sorts of concepts antecedently to any experience. Now, Kant employed this
legitimate insight to try to respond to the skeptical problems which philosophy seems left with
by the rigorous working out of empiricist principles, both skepticism about the existence of a
spatial world and skepticism about our knowledge of any facts which we are not presently in a
position to observe, i.e., skepticism about induction. In particular, rather than see concepts as
dependent on experience, he turned this empiricist picture on its head and insisted that not only
were some concepts prior to experience, but their correct application in experience was required
for us to have any experience at all.

To appreciate the special force of Kant’s response, it is helpful to review the strategy of his
response to Hume, and his treatment of space and time, before considering the treatment of
judgment.

Kant argued that Hume’s skepticism about induction and the external world were entirely correct
given Hume’s assumption that whatever is a priori is analytic (a notion Kant applied to
judgments and explained as being true because the concept of the subject contained that of the
predicate, e.g., ‘all bodies are extended’), and that whatever is synthetic is a posteriori. Against
induction, Hume argued that all inference from the observed to the unobserved rested on
generalizations that covered more than actually observed events. These generalizations therefore
don’t follow from what we actually observe. Further, their falsity is conceivable; they are
therefore neither analytic nor a priori. We are therefore justified in inferring them only if we
have reason to think, generally speaking, that nature is uniform. But this is a generalization of
the same sort as those we ordinarily traffic in (what’s unobserved is like what’s observed, the
future resembles the past). Its negation is conceivable, so it is neither a priori nor analytic. And
to infer it from what we have observed requires that we are already justified in believing it, since
no inference from the observed to the unobserved is justified unless the principle of the
uniformity of nature is.

Kant agrees that the principle of the uniformity of nature is conceivably false, and so is not
analytic, and also that it could never be established a posteriori. However, Kant argues that
Hume overlooked the possibility of knowledge that is both synthetic and a priori. Kant’s strategy
in responding to Hume was to argue that although we cannot establish that the principle of the
uniformity of nature is analytic, since its negation is conceivable, we can establish it as an a
priori (in a certain sense) synthetic truth, and so establish that it applies universally and
necessarily within experience. This same sort of strategy Kant employed also in responding to
skepticism about the external world.
 Spring 2009

Kant was convinced that there were a priori synthetic truths because he was convinced that
mathematics and geometry were both a priori and synthetic. (Though in this he was mistaken.)
That set the problem of explaining how such synthetic a priori knowledge is possible. It is only
possible, Kant argues, if we have a guarantee prior to any experience that all experience will
conform to certain general principles, a guarantee that is not to be located in the concepts
involved, but in facts about what could be a possible experience for us because of the nature of
our psychology (or, on a stronger reading, for any possibility psychology).

How then, in particular, is a priori knowledge of mathematics and geometry possible? It is

possible because (i) time is the form (not content), Kant says, of all inner sense (experience of
ourselves in time), and experience of things in time forms the foundation for counting, and (ii)
space is the form (not content) of all outer sense (of things other than ourselves in time), and this
forms the basis for the a priori status of geometry. These forms of experience are imposed on the
given in experience, that which is prior to the activity of our minds in forming from it an
experience or appearance of which we can be aware. (One can think of this as roughly
analogous to putting on rose tinted glasses. The world then appears rose tinted, but this is not a
reflection of how the world is, but how it is received, a “form” imposed on experience by the
apparatus by which we receive it.) While talk of the form of inner and outer sense being imposed
on the given in experience is put as if it were a description of a temporal process, it is clear that it
must be interpreted rather as a remark about levels of analysis, in some sense, of actual full-
blown representational experience, not a description of a series of temporally separated episodes
in a temporally extended process. Thus, space and time are not features of things in themselves,
things independent of our cognizing, but rather a way of ordering the given in experience in
order for it be experienced by us. There is no gap, and cannot be a gap, then, between our
experiences and things in space and time, and we can be sure that our experiences of things in
space are genuine because what we find there is what we put there, and it would make no sense
to attribute it to something beyond the phenomenal world. Likewise for time. Since every outer
experience is also an inner experience, i.e., involves an experience of the self, everything
perceived in space is also perceived in time.

The same basic move is repeated when we get to judgments, which involve bringing experience
under concepts. Although Kant discusses first the requirements the faculty of sensibility imposes
on experience and then those imposed by the faculty of understanding, he thinks both are
required for genuinely self-conscious experiences. So even experience of things in space and
time requires the application of understanding to experience. Like the faculty of sensibility, the
faculty of understanding has a structure independently of what experience it is applied to. This is
given by the basic concepts that it deploys in any experience. These Kant called the categories.
Our employing the categories in experience, i.e., bringing experience under the categories in
judgment, imposes an order on the experience so that it may be something about which we can
form a judgment. In this lies the source of Kant’s response to Hume’s skepticism about
induction. For, in particular, in order for experience to be the possible object of a judgment, it
must be brought, Kant argues, under the concept of causation. This requires it to have a certain
coherence that guarantees that all experienced events fall under universal causal laws. This then
provides, the account goes, an a priori synthetic guarantee that causal laws govern all events we
can form judgments about. (This is a priori in the sense of being grounded in something
independent of the actual content of experience, namely, the structure of the understanding and
 Spring 2009

sensibility: an important question about Kant’s system in turn is what the status is of the claim
that our understanding and sensibility has this structure: is it analytic and a priori, or synthetic,
and if synthetic, then synthetic a posteriori, or synthetic a priori?) Importantly, that all events
we can form judgments about fall under causal laws does not guarantee that it is obvious what
the causal laws are, only that there is an order in experience which admits explanation in terms of
general laws. This is in effect to provide an a priori, though synthetic, ground for Hume’s
principle of the uniformity of nature.

Prescinding from the details (I omit any criticism of this story), we get a picture that might be
described in the following way: the world of things in space and time is the world of
appearances. This is the phenomenal world. We have an a priori guarantee (one that is grounded
in facts that are independent of the contents of experience) that there is a world of things in space
and that objects in that world, if capable of being judged at all, fall under certain basic concepts.
The guarantee is provided by the fact that we impose these facts on our experience as a condition
for our having experiences at all (or experiences of which we can be aware, which perhaps
comes to the same thing) and experiences that can be brought under concepts. Reality, the only
reality we care about—not things in themselves, the noumenal world—is, so to speak, created by
us, and our knowledge of it is direct, and unmediated. Thus, no gap opens up between the world
we wish to have knowledge of and us because that world is the product of our own intellectual
activity.

1.2 Absolute Idealism.

We get to something like the view that Moore and Russell were reacting against by taking this
starting point and working it through two major changes. The first is to get rid of the world of
things in themselves. The ground for this is that if our concepts are genuinely constrained to
apply only to appearances, then we have no right to talk about a world of things in themselves,
for we have no concepts with which to think about them. Thus, the very idea is incoherent, and
we are left with the only reality being the world of appearances. The second move is meant to
preserve something of common sense in the face of the obvious objection that this makes a
public world which we all in some sense share in, and which is independent of us,
incomprehensible. (One virtue of Kant’s noumenal world is that it does provide a public world to
coordinate the private worlds of different minds with respect to.) The solution (a solution
Berkeley recognized in his different idealist system as necessary) is to postulate some spirit or
mind that sustains the common sense world which persists when no finite being perceives it. Let
us call this, whatever it is, the world spirit (or ‘the absolute’—hence the label ‘absolute
idealism’), and suppose it an intelligent agent, for still what is must be the product of the activity
of a mind. The world spirit must be immanent, within the world, or identical to it, not external to
it, since the world is the product of its intellectual activity. Our own minds must in some sense be
understood only in relation to the intellectual activity of the world spirit. (The parallels with
Spinoza are striking, of course, and get more so.) There we have a sensible caricature of the
position adopted under the influence of Hegel by the 19th century British idealist. Let us note
about it that it holds that
 Spring 2009

(A) All reality is created by the operations of the mind, and the objects of thought and experience
have no existence independently of the minds that apprehend them, and should be conceived of
as constituted by the activities of such minds.

In addition to this doctrine, which we can see developing by way of a rejection of Kant’s
noumenal world, the British Idealists also held a doctrine that we can call holism. This was a
rejection of the idea that the world was analyzable into separable components. In the context of
idealism, the form this took was that the world was not to be conceived of as a world of thought
on the one hand, populated by Platonic entities, nor a world of sense on the other, but rather that
thought and sense were of one and the same world. This led in the work of T. H. Green (1836-
1882) to a rejection of the universal/particular distinction, and finally in Bradley to the rejection
ultimately of the idea of relations. Reality was to be conceived of as an “organic” whole, no
“part” of which could be separated out from the whole and be accurately conceived on its own.
To analyze, or separate out, one aspect of reality from the rest was inevitably to distort it.
Ultimately, in Bradley, this leads to the idea that reality is ineffable, since it is not possible for
the human mind to grasp it as a whole, nor for human thought to so much as be capable of
framing to itself an adequate conception of it. It is this view that is the source of the infamous
doctrine of internal relations. The term itself does not actually receive that much attention in
Bradley, but was treated as central by his later critics in the analytic tradition. An internal
relation between two things is a relation which both have to stand in in order for either to be the
thing it is; in other words, it is an essential relation for the things that stand in it. This is one
expression of the idea that reality is graspable only as a whole, since if there are only internal
relations, no object can be truly grasped independently of its relations to other objects. If we add
that all objects are related to all others, then we get the result that reality is graspable adequately
only as a single whole. (Here, again, we find a Spinozistic and Leibnizian aspect to British
Idealism.) Thus, we add to our doctrine above the following,

(B) All objects of thought or sense are to be conceived of as on a par, i.e., as being of the same
kind.

(C) Reality is a single, unified, “organic” whole, no part of which can be grasped independently
of the whole within which it is embedded.

(D) The only relations are internal relations, i.e., the only relations objects stand in are relations
that are essential for them to be the objects they are. (Ultimately, all relations are unreal, and
reducible to monadic properties; this is a corollary of Bradley’s monism.)

(E) Consequently, it is impossible to analyze reality; if the aim of philosophy is to limn the
ultimate nature of reality, then analysis cannot be the aim of philosophy.

Keep in mind that this is a collage of views, rather than the presentation of the view of single
idealist philosopher.2 But for our purposes a collage is appropriate, since Moore and Russell’s
attacks on idealism were meant to sweep away not this or that particular idealist’s views, but the

2
For example, McTaggart, who was also an idealist, rejected Bradley’s monism in favor of a pluralism of spirits
constituting the world, called ‘Personal Idealism’.
 Spring 2009

whole movement, and they seldom distinguish in their attacks very nicely between the different
philosophers whose views they are collectively attacking.

2. Platonic Atomism.

Before discussing Moore’s famous paper “The Refutation of Idealism” in detail, it will be useful
to provide an overview of the position which Moore developed in reaction to idealism, and
which so strongly influenced Russell from about 1898 through the early years of the next
century.

It is important to note that Platonic Atomism, the position Moore developed, although opposed to
Absolute Idealism, was conceived of as being in the same business. Both were answers to the
question, which was taken by both Moore and Russell, and the idealists, to be the fundamental
question of philosophy, “What is the ultimate nature of reality?” They differ not in their aim, but
only in their answers. This is of interest in our project in part because we will see in the later
development of analytic philosophy a reaction against this conception of the nature of
philosophy.

Both of the terms in the label “Platonic Atomism,” which I use following Peter Hylton, contrast
with elements of Absolute Idealism. The position that Moore developed is characterized by two
main tenets. The first is that the objects of thought and experiences are not mind-dependent. The
second is that the objects of thought and experience have a structure, are composed of items,
which can appear in different combinations in the objects of different thoughts or experiences,
and which enter into only external relations among themselves. Both of these features deserve
further comment.

Mind-independence. We will see in our discussion of the argument of the “Refutation of

Idealism” in part how Moore arrives at this position. This aspect of Platonic Atomism, the
‘Platonic’ part, obviously contrasts with the ‘Idealism’ of Absolute Idealism. The objects of
thought are not constituted by the activity of the mind on this view, but are wholly and absolutely
independent of the activity of the mind. The mind is conceived on this view as having a passive
relation to the objects of thought, to be in reception of them only. Importantly, on this view, our
epistemic relation to the objects of thought was not thought to be problematic. Rather, we were
directly acquainted with the objects of thought and experience; there were no intermediaries
between them and us. This forces the view that all objects of thought or experience, no matter
what experience, are equally real. Indeed, in Moore’s early view, he shared with the later British
idealists the view that the objects of thought and experience were not to be distinguished from
one another (he says so explicitly in “Refutation of Idealism” (Philosophical Studies, p.7) as
noted below), and that they were all of a kind, namely, the objects of all thought and experience
were simply concepts. (Moore argues, though obscurely, for this first in his “The Nature of
Judgment” (1898), in which he attacks the monism of Absolute Idealism). This in turn requires a
distinction between being, or reality, on the one hand, and existence, on the other, in order to
make sense of thoughts such as the thought that Pegasus does not exist. Thus, the early Moore
and Russell held for a time a view like Meinong’s according to which some things have being
but don’t exist. Russell broke with this view early, and adopted for a time a Neo-Fregean view,
before arriving at his mature position in “On Denoting” with his famous the theory of
 Spring 2009

descriptions. Keeping this early view in mind sheds light also on the motivations for the view
that Russell develops, as we will see, in “Knowledge by Description and Knowledge by
Acquaintance,” where Russell relies on the principle that we are directly acquainted with every
constituent of a thought.

If all objects are on a par, how do we deal with truth and falsehood? Moore, characteristically,
held that truth is a simple and unanalyzable property of propositions. Note that this constitutes a
rejection of the correspondence theory, which has usually been associated with the early analytic
tradition; in fact, the correspondence theory was not part of the earliest phase of analytic
philosopher. It was Russell who first rejected the view that truth is a simple property of
propositions, and this gave rise to his multiple relation theory of judgment, which we’ll return to
(see his 1910 “On the Nature of Truth and Falsehood”).

Atomism. The atomism of Platonic Atomism is derived, as we will see, from the same source as
its mind-independence—the analysis of consciousness as a relation, and the rejection of the
coherence of the idea of an internal relation. Its salient features are that the simples that are the
objects of thought are the ultimate elements of all reality, that they are independent of one
another (none involve internal relations to the others), and that reality consists of the simples
together with their (external) relations to one another. Thus, the correct grasp of reality requires
knowing the simples together with their arrangements with one another. It follows from this that
analysis is the essential method of philosophy. In this way, we see that the rise of analytic
philosophy conceived of as a way of doing philosophy was originally tied directly to the conflict
between two radically different metaphysical systems. While analytic philosophy has long since
abandoned, certainly as a tradition, this early metaphysical position of Moore’s, it is interesting
to see that the method which is characteristic of it was originally motivated in part by a
background metaphysical picture of the nature of reality, which was itself a reaction to a picture
which if correct would have precluded the possibility of analysis as a method for discovering
truth. Analysis as a method was later to receive a different justification with the linguistic turn in
philosophy, itself motivated in part by Logical Atomism, which was Russell and Wittgenstein’s
later development of Platonic Atomism.

The large features of Platonic Atomism largely dictated the direction of research in the
subsequent decades in the early analytic tradition. The two principal problems Platonic Atomism
raised were those of the natures of the objects of sensory experience on the one hand, which led
to the development of sense data theory, and the natures of the objects of propositional thoughts,
such as beliefs, i.e., the natures of propositions. Moore took up principally the former task,
Russell the latter.

3. Moore’s “Refutation of Idealism”

Moore’s aim in “The Refutation of Idealism” was not to show that idealism is false, the view, as
he puts it initially, that the world is spiritual in the sense that it is conscious and capable of the
higher intellectual functions of which human beings are capable, but rather to show that no good
argument has ever been offered for this thesis. It turns out that Moore’s argumentative aims are
even more circumscribed than he at first lets on, however, for he does not argue for some key
assumptions in his ‘refutation’. He asserts, without, he says, attempting to prove, that all idealist
 Spring 2009

arguments have relied on the assumption that to be is to be perceived (esse is percipi). And then
he says that he does not intend to show directly that this is false, but rather simply that the
reasons that idealists have thought to support it do not. And he does not offer, it turns out, to
show that the reasons that idealists have given for believing that esse is percipi are the reasons
that he alleges. So in supposing that Moore actually succeeds in demolishing his opponents, we
must, as far as anything Moore says in the essay goes, take a lot of what he says about their
position on faith. It is nonetheless true that sociologically the effect of Moore’s essay in England
was to destroy the idealist position. This did not take place overnight, but the beginning of the
end can be dated to the publication of this essay in Mind in 1903.

Moore begins his attack on the thesis that esse is percipi by explaining what he takes the position
that he is attacking to be. The phrase ‘esse est percipi’ of course is due to Berkeley. Moore’s real
target is not Berkeley, but rather the absolute idealists in the British tradition at the end of the
19th century. Moore apparently regarded this principle as one to which all of them were
committed, whatever further differences there might be between their positions, and Moore also
apparently thought that they all arrived at this assumption by the same, flawed route. (Perhaps
you will think his procedure excessively mechanical and tedious, but if you try to spell out a
thesis your understanding of which you take for granted, the procedure often yields unexpected
fruits: you find you didn’t understand it so well after all.)

An important thing to note about Moore’s discussion of ‘percipi’ is that he says that he intends it
to cover not just sensations, but also thought, or any sort of conscious state. Why is that
important? It is important because while the argument he gives toward the end of the paper is
given in terms of an example involving sensations, he intends the results to be general. Thus, his
conclusion is not just that in sensation there are objects we are directly aware of which exist
independently of us, but that in all thought there are objects of the thought we are directly aware
of, even where these thoughts are about purely abstract matters. We see clearly the influence of
this doctrine on Russell in “Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description.” And it
is also by this route, as I noted above, that Moore arrives at the view in his early work that the
objects of thought and experience are not to be distinguished, that we have direct access to the
object of every thought and of every experience, and thereby access to a reality of the same kind.

There is an odd thing about Moore’s identifying the assumption he will attack as ‘esse is
percipi’. That is that this is sometimes taken simply to be identical to idealism, not an
assumption of it. And in the case of Berkeley, it just is his position. Moore treats it as an
assumption of idealism because he has in mind the stronger claim that reality is spiritual. He
claims that the argument for the position that reality is spiritual3 goes through the claim that to
be is to perceive (esse is percipere), and that an assumption in every absolute idealist’s argument
for that claim is in turn that to be is to be perceived (esse is percipi).

When Moore turns to discussing the use of ‘is’ in ‘esse is percipi’, he distinguishes three
different interpretations. The first holds that ‘esse’ and ‘percipi’ are the same in meaning, and
this he holds would be trivial and so uninteresting, a mere fact about words: the thesis that being
is being. The second holds that esse is percipi is analytic, though ‘esse’ and ‘percipi’ are not

3
For some illustrative quotations, Bradley says in Appearance and Reality, “There is but one Reality, and its being
consists in experience” (p. 455), and, again, “Everything is experience, and also experience is one” (p. 457).
 Spring 2009

synonymous, and where Moore means by this that ‘esse’ is to be analyzed as ‘X and percipi’ for
some substitution for ‘X’ that does not itself entail being perceived. This Moore says is also
trivial and uninteresting, not a substantive thesis. What we want to know is whether if something
is X it is perceived. Finally, Moore claims that the only option left for the idealists is to claim that
esse is percipi is a synthetic necessary truth (there is an organic unity linking esse and percipi, he
says).

We can remark about this that Moore appears to have overlooked an option, that is, that ‘esse is
percipi’ is analytic, although not because ‘esse’ is to be analyzed as ‘X and percipi’ but because
of some deep connection between being and being perceived. Just as ‘to be a number is to have a
successor’ or ‘to be extended is to be spatially located’ is analytic, but not because on analysis it
is of the form ‘to be an X and to have a successor is to have a successor’ or ‘to be an X and to be
spatially located is to be spatially located’, so it may be that ‘to be is to be perceived’ is analytic
though not of the form ‘to be X and to be perceived is to be perceived’.4 Having remarked this,
though, we can note that it would not seem to make much difference to Moore’s later argument if
we made the change. (This way of putting it shows the lingering affect of his training in the
Kantian tradition, which did not regard analytic knowledge as ampliative, and also of the
underlying metaphysics of Platonic Atomism being developed.)

Moore’s argument from this point becomes intricate: the idealists, he says, usually take esse is
percipi to require support (Moore says that if it is asserted as self-evident, all he can say is that it
does not seem so to him), and introduce in support of it the following thesis (or perhaps identify
it with the following thesis):

(1) if x is experienced, then x is necessarily experienced,

i.e., nothing experienced could occur unexperienced, or, in Moore’s paraphrase,

(2) “the object of experience is inconceivable apart from the subject.”

These are distinct claims from the literal claim that to be is to be perceived because this last is a
material claim, and (1) and (2) have modal force. (1) and (2), and (2) in particular, Moore says,
are contradictory. What are his grounds? The idealists, he suggests, endorse (2) because they fail
to see the distinctness of experience and object ( at this point in the article this is actually a
forward looking remark, since Moore does not explain or back it up until his discussion of the
sensations of blue and green). The contradiction apparently lies in their also holding that the two
are distinct. But this evidently is not the same thing as proving a contradiction from (2).

4
For example, consider the claim that 5 is a number, and suppose we define ‘is a number’ as ‘is zero or is a
successor of a number’. Let us write ‘is the successor of x’ as ‘x+1’. We define numerals as follows: ‘1’=‘0+1’, ‘2’
= ‘1+1’, ‘3’ = ‘2+1’, ‘4’ = ‘3+1’, ‘5’ = ‘4+1’, etc. Then ‘5 is a number’ becomes ‘4+1 is zero or is a successor of a
number’. A proof of this is available from the definitions of ‘is a number’ and ‘5’, so that ‘5 is a number’ is analytic,
but it is clear that the form of the proposition is not ‘the x such that x is X and x is a number is a number’. Another
interesting example involves the relation of a determinable to its determinates. It seems plausible to say that ‘Red is
a color’ is analytic, but being colored is not a component of being red, but rather a general category in which it falls
and of which it is a determinate mode.
 Spring 2009

There ensues a short discussion of the idealist thesis that all relations are internal relations. The
doctrine of internal relations holds that all relations, and all properties, a thing has, it has
essentially. The absolute idealists adopted this view roughly as a requirement on the world being
rationally intelligible (a Spinozistic view). Moore entertains the idea that the idealists might
respond to the claim that they are involved in contradiction by holding that an experience and its
object were distinct and yet still one because their relations to one another are internal relations,
and so they form a system whose parts cannot be thought separate. Moore claims, plausibly, that
this is an instance of wanting to have your cake and eat it too: if we admit two things, even as
inseparable parts of one whole, we still admit two things, and a third if we count the whole. If the
whole were treated as substitutable everywhere for the part and vice versa, then by the identity of
indiscernibles, they would be one, and not two. Whether we can in fact even conceive of a
genuine relation being essential to a particular (excepting perhaps ‘is identical with’) is a difficult
question, and one on which I think one can still find a divided opinion. My own view, and I think
the view of Russell, is that we cannot once we understand the logical structure of our language
(again, barring identity). Thus, it will not do to say that after all there is only one thing, if we
want to say there are two inseparably bound together as parts of a distinct whole. There follows
one of my favorite passages in Moore’s work:

The principle of organic unities, like that of combined analysis and synthesis, is mainly
used to defend the practice of holding both of two contradictory propositions, wherever
this may seem convenient. In this, as in other matters, Hegel’s main service to philosophy
has consisted in giving a name to and erecting into a principle, a type of fallacy to which
experience had shown philosophers, along with the rest of mankind, to be addicted. No
wonder that he has followers and admirers. (Philosophical Studies, p. 16)

Still, while there may be something wrong with saying there are two distinct things and there are
not, it is not clear what argument Moore has advanced against internal relations as such, which
would be all that would be needed to assert (2). (See Moore’s later “External and Internal
Relations” in his Philosophical Studies.)

I think that what is really driving Moore’s objection to the idealist position only emerges after
this point, when he turns to identify a belief without which he asserts the idealists would not
suppose that an experience and its object were inseparable. This is Moore’s real diagnosis of the
idealists’ position, and, once we see what is going on here, we can see why Moore thinks that (1)
and (2) are necessarily false.

Moore suggests that idealists believe that esse is percipi only because they believe that, to take
an example, the sensation of blue and blue are the same thing (cf. the remark above about the
idealists not distinguishing the object of experience from the experience). This, he believes, is
simply a confusion. He attributes the mistake the idealists make to a kind of phenomenological
failure; when they consider what is going on when they are conscious, they fail to see or attend
to the consciousness in addition to its object, and so, though dimly recognizing there is both the
blue and the consciousness, not seeing or noticing the consciousness in experience, they assert
they are distinct but one. Moore sets out to show that there is absolutely no reason to believe this
by asking us to contrast the sensation of blue with the sensation of green. In each sensation we
can distinguish a common element, which we can call consciousness. And in each we can
 Spring 2009

distinguish something different, which we can call the object of the sensation—blue, in the case
of the sensation of blue, and green, in the case of the sensation of green. Now, Moore asserts, to
say that blue is identical with the sensation of blue must be contradictory, because there are only
two analyses of what the sensation of blue is. (a) It is the consciousness alone. (b) It is the
consciousness plus blue. If the former, then it is not blue, and if the latter, since a part cannot be
identical with the whole, it is not blue. (And here we see the rejection of internal relations above,
as possible refuge for an idealist from the consequences of this objection, doing some work.)

This is, of course, a puzzling argument. There are two things going on here. First, Moore is
taking the ‘of’ in ‘sensation of blue’ to express a relation. If it expresses a relation, then there
have to be two things, the sensation, and the thing it is related to, its object, which is apparently
blue. The second thing going on here is a consequence of the first: he treats ‘blue’ as denoting an
object. Moore’s treatment of ‘of’ here as a signifying a two term relation is the key to
understanding what is going on in this article and also to understanding the genesis of sense data
theory and the realism about the objects of judgments which was characteristic of the early
Moore and Russell.

Moore goes on to try to diagnose the idealist reasoning. This is also characteristic of Moore, as is
his starting point in our common sense conception of the world. Moore takes a strange
philosophical view and notes that it conflicts with our common sense understanding. Then he
asks by what chain of reasoning someone could have (or did) come to believe that. If he can
show that the chain of reasoning is flawed, then common sense wins by default.

The idealists, Moore says, are led to suppose that there is no object in addition to the sensation
through one of two confusions (I am of course cleaning up Moore’s discussion here), both of
which involve the role of ‘of’ in ‘sensation of blue’. The idealists treat ‘of’ in ‘sensation of blue’
as if it were either the ‘is’ of identity or the ‘is’ of predication ((1) and (2) above can be seen as
expressions of this) . On the one hand, if we treat it as the ‘is’ of identity, then we run into the
difficulty, Moore claims, of being unable to say what is in common between the sensation of
blue and of green. The sensation at least has the feature of consciousness, i.e., is conscious, but
this not the same as blue, so the sensation cannot be identical with blue. On the other hand, if we
treat it as the ‘is’ of predication, then we suppose that the sensation of blue is itself blue in the
same sense in which a flower is blue. This is what the discussion of the content of the flower and
the sensation is about in Moore’s article. Now, Moore’s response to this is basically that it may
be that the sensation of blue is itself blue, but that there is a sense we can give to the ‘content of
the sensation of blue’ which implies that there is at least something else which exists besides the
sensation. That is the object of the consciousness. For when we are conscious of our own
consciousness, it is evident that we stand in a relation to something. For if we allow the
conscious of its object in this case, the sensation of blue, say, to collapse into its object, we no
longer have a distinction between being conscious of our consciousness and the consciousness
itself. And if there is a relation in this case (consciousness of consciousness), there must be two
things that are related, two relata. Since the sensation of blue is itself a consciousness, and so an
awareness, it too must be a relation between two items. So even if the sensation of blue is itself
blue, and so has content in that sense, it also can be said to have content in another sense,
namely, that it relates us to a thing which is not identical either to us or to the sensation itself. Of
course, this is just to treat the ‘of’ of ‘sensation of blue’ as expressing a relation of awareness
 Spring 2009

between the sensor and an object, that is, Moore treats ‘x has a sensation of blue’ as meaning ‘x
is aware of y’.

Moore thinks that once we see that it is a mistake to take ‘of’ in ‘sensation of blue’ to be either a
relation of identity or, as it were, part of the predicate ‘of-blue’ we will cease to think that there
is any reason at all to suppose that esse is percipi. Moore notes that strictly speaking it could still
be the case that esse is percipi, and that the objects to which our awarenesses relate us do not
exist except when we are aware of them, but he thinks that once we realize that these objects are
separate from the awarenesses, we will see that there is no reason why they could not exist
separately, and so no reason to think that they are in any way dependent on our awareness of
them.

Moore’s argument in “Refutation of Idealism” is a strange mixture of clarity and confusion,

insight and obtuseness. It is also extremely philosophical, both in the sorts of errors that it
criticizes and the character of the criticism, and, unwittingly, in the sorts of errors it falls into
itself. The error Moore falls into is in a way the same error that he accuses the idealist of falling
into, that is, mistaking the grammatical role of ‘of’ in ‘sensation of blue’. It does not express a
relation. The term ‘sensation’ is a generic term for a type of mental state or event. The work of
‘of blue’ is to tell us what particular type of sensation it is. To put this another way, let me
introduce the terminology of determinables and determinates. A determinable is a property that
comes in a variety of particular sorts. The paradigm of a determinable is being colored. Anything
that is colored is one particular color, but can be any of an indefinitely large number of colors.
The particular definite colors a thing can be are the determinate properties relative to the
property of being colored. In the same way, being a sensation is a determinable relative to being
a sensation of x. Every sensation is a particular kind of sensation; what we plug in for ‘x’ tells
what kind the particular sensation is. (After reading Moore, one can understand why the later
Wittgenstein came to believe that all philosophical problems were the result of
misunderstandings of the logical grammar of language.)

This mistake of Moore’s is the fountainhead both of the realist view of the objects of judgments,
a view still represented in contemporary philosophy, and of that strange tradition of theorizing
about sense data which lasted into the mid- to late 1950s. Although Moore does not use the term
‘sense data’ in this article, he makes the essential move to introduce them, namely, to treat
consciousness as a relation between us and other things. From this it follows that whenever we
are conscious, we are aware of something other than ourselves, and of something different from
the awareness itself. What we are aware of is what is denoted by what follows the ‘of’ in
expressions like ‘sensation of heat’, ‘experience as of a brown cow’, etc., though these turn out
not to be always what those words in other contexts denote.

It is important to note that sense data in the sense we get from Moore's discussion here are mind-
independent entities—at least modally, that is, it is possible for whatever we are directly aware
of in sense to exist independently of minds. This informs Russell's view of sense data as well, as
we will see in "On the Relation of Sense-data to Physics."

Moore claims in the last few pages of his article that the recognition that this type of awareness is
the same as the kind of awareness we have of our awarenesses themselves shows why skepticism
 Spring 2009

about things other than ourselves can succeed only at the cost of skepticism about our own
minds. This is an inspired move. (This is why Moore did not feel the same need the idealists and
Kant did to treat what we think and experience as constituted by the activity of our own minds in
order to secure the possibility of knowledge of it.) But it turns out that whatever we are related to
in this way cannot, after all, be the objects of the common-sense world, since it is impossible to
suffer an illusion when having a sensation of blue, or an experience as of a brown cow. Thus, if
we treat these objects as separate from ourselves, we cannot treat them as physical objects, like
cows, since we can suffer a kind of error about physical objects we cannot about whatever are
the immediate objects of our awarnesses, and so these objects must be another kind of object:
since they are what we are immediately aware of in sensory experience, we can call them ‘sense
data’. Moore recognized quickly that the position at the end of "The Refutation of Idealism" was
unsatisfactory, as we see in his 1905 "On the Nature and Reality of Objects of Perception." The
introduction of sense data ushered in a host of questions: what are they? where do they exist?
what is their relation to physical objects? what is their role in our knowledge and perception of
the physical world? how do we know them? Thus was born a research program that exercised
some of the best philosophical minds of Anglo-American philosophy for 50 years.