ABSTRACT
George Berkeley claimed not to be offering a theory inconsistent with the beliefs of ordinary people but rather to be giving a careful account of what ordinary people believed. A great many philosophers have found this claim that Berkeley made for his philosophy highly implausible. They would contend that ordinary people believe in an external world, a world of external things, a world of things that are in no sense mental—things such as trees and buildings and snowballs and stars. The hypothetical external things that cause our sensations, however, are in principle unobservable, and whatever properties they have are properties that correspond to nothing in our experience. If our sensations did not “tell” us that there was a world of external objects, they would not tell us that falsely, and there would be no deception.
