Relativity arguments
John Locke (Berkeley's intellectual predecessor) states that we define an object by its primary and secondary qualities. He takes heat as an example of a secondary quality. If you put one hand in a bucket of cold water, and the other hand in a bucket of warm water, then put both hands in a bucket of lukewarm water, one of your hands is going to tell you that the water is cold and the other that the water is hot. Locke says that since two different objects (both your hands) perceive the water to be hot and cold, then the heat is not a quality of the water.
While Locke used this argument to distinguish primary from secondary qualities, Berkeley extends it to cover primary qualities in the same way. For example, he says that size is not a quality of an object because the size of the object depends on the distance between the observer and the object, or the size of the observer. Since an object is a different size to different observers, then size is not a quality of the object. Berkeley rejects shape with a similar argument and then asks: if neither primary qualities nor secondary qualities are of the object, then how can we say that there is anything more than the qualities we observe?
Relativity is the idea that there is no objective, universal truth; it is a state of dependence in which the existence of one independent object is solely dependent on that of another. According to Locke, characteristics of primary qualities are mind-independent, such as shape, size, etc., whereas secondary qualities are mind-dependent, for example, taste and colour. George Berkeley refuted John Locke's belief on primary and secondary qualities because Berkeley believed that "we cannot abstract the primary qualities (e.g shape) from secondary ones (e.g colour)". Berkeley argued that perception is dependent on the distance between the observer and the object, and "thus, we cannot conceive of mechanist material bodies which are extended but not (in themselves) colored". What perceived can be the same type of quality, but completely opposite from each other because of different positions and perceptions, what we perceive can be different even when the same types of things consist of contrary qualities. Secondary qualities aid in people's conception of primary qualities in an object, like how the colour of an object leads people to recognize the object itself. More specifically, the colour red can be perceived in apples, strawberries, and tomatoes, yet we would not know what these might look like without its colour. We would also be unaware of what the colour red looked like if red paint, or any object that has a perceived red colour, failed to exist. From this, we can see that colours cannot exist on their own and can solely represent a group of perceived objects. Therefore, both primary and secondary qualities are mind-dependent: they cannot exist without our minds.
George Berkeley was a philosopher who opposed rationalism and "classical" empiricism. He was a "subjective idealist" or "empirical idealist", who believed that reality is constructed entirely of immaterial, conscious minds and their ideas; everything that exists is somehow dependent on the subject perceiving it, except the subject themselves. He refuted the existence of abstract objects that many other philosophers believed to exist, notably Plato. According to Berkeley, "an abstract object does not exist in space or time and which is therefore entirely non-physical and non-mental"; however, this argument contradicts his relativity argument. If "esse est percipi", (Latin meaning that to exist is to be perceived) is true, then the objects in the relativity argument made by Berkeley can either exist or not. Berkeley believed that only the minds' perceptions and the Spirit that perceives are what exists in reality; what people perceive every day is only the idea of an object's existence, but the objects themselves are not perceived. Berkeley also discussed how, at times, materials cannot be perceived by oneself, and the mind of oneself cannot understand the objects. However, there also exists an "omnipresent, eternal mind" that Berkeley believed to consist of God and the Spirit, both omniscient and all-perceiving. According to Berkeley, God is the entity who controls everything, yet Berkeley also argued that "abstract object[s] do not exist in space or time". In other words, as Warnock argues, Berkeley "had recognized that he could not square with his own talk of spirits, of our minds and of God; for these are perceivers and not among objects of perception. Thus he says, rather weakly and without elucidation, that in addition to our ideas, we also have notions—we know what it means to speak of spirits and their operations."
However, the relativity argument violates the idea of immaterialism. Berkeley's immaterialism argues that "esse est percipi (aut percipere)", which in English is: to be is to be perceived (or to perceive). That is saying only what is perceived or perceived is real, and without our perception or God's nothing can be real. Yet, if the relativity argument, also by Berkeley, argues that the perception of an object depends on the different positions, then this means that what is perceived can either be real or not because the perception does not show that whole picture and the whole picture cannot be perceived. Berkeley also believes that "when one perceives mediately, one perceives one idea by means of perceiving another". By this, it can be elaborated that if the standards of what perceived at first are different, what perceived after that can be different, as well. In the heat perception described above, one hand perceived the water to be hot and the other hand perceived the water to be cold due to relativity. If applying the idea "to be is to be perceived", the water should be both cold and hot because both perceptions are perceived by different hands. However, the water cannot be cold and hot at the same time for it self-contradicts, so this shows that what perceived is not always true because it sometimes can break the law of noncontradiction. In this case, "it would be arbitrary anthropocentrism to claim that humans have special access to the true qualities of objects". The truth for different people can be different, and humans are limited to accessing the absolute truth due to relativity. Summing up, nothing can be absolutely true due to relativity or the two arguments, to be is to be perceived and the relativity argument, do not always work together.
