ABSTRACT

Leibniz claims that Berkeley “wrongly or at least pointlessly rejects abstract ideas”. What he fails to realize, however, is that some of his own core views commit him to essentially the same stance. His belief that this is the best (and thus most harmonious) possible world, which itself stems from his Principle of Sufficient Reason, leads him to infer that mind and body must perfectly represent or ‘express’ one another. In the case of abstract thoughts he admits that this can happen only in virtue of thinking of some image that, being essentially a mental copy of a brain state, expresses (and is expressed by) that state. But here he faces a problem. In order for a thought to be genuinely abstract, its representational content must differ from that of any mental image, since the latter can represent only something particular. In that case, however, an exact correspondence between the accompanying mental image and the brain state would not suffice to establish a perfect harmony between mind and body. Even on Leibniz’s own principles, then, it appears that Berkeley was right to dismiss abstract ideas.

摘要

莱布尼茨声称伯克利“错误地或至少毫无意义地拒绝了抽象的想法”。然而，他没有意识到的是，他自己的一些核心观点使他坚持基本相同的立场。他相信这是最好的（因此也是最和谐的）可能的世界，这本身源于他的充足理由原则，这使他推断思想和身体必须完美地代表或“表达”彼此。在抽象思想的情况下，他承认只有通过思考某种图像才能发生这种情况，该图像本质上是大脑状态的心理副本，表达（并由其表达）该状态。但在这里他面临一个问题。为了使一个思想真正抽象，它的表征内容必须不同于任何心理图像的内容，因为后者只能代表某些特定的东西。然而，在这种情况下，伴随的心理意象和大脑状态之间的精确对应不足以在身心之间建立完美的和谐。即使按照莱布尼茨自己的原则，伯克利似乎也对抽象的想法不屑一顾。