ABSTRACT
Bishop Berkeley, meet Professor Schrödinger! So one might introduce the two main protagonists, so to speak, of Bruce Gordon’s paper. Not, perhaps, likely companions in real life, even if we overlook the chronological discrepancy. But they are similar at least in their disregard for what G. E. Moore termed the “common-sense view of the world.” Samuel Johnson, notoriously, claimed to have refuted Berkeley by kicking a stone. Judged by the strict epistemological standards that issue from Cartesian-style skepticism, his refutation may have failed, but before the bar of common sense, it is Johnson who prevails. And many proponents of quantum mechanics positively revel in the comeuppance their theory delivers to the everyday view of the world that we normally take for granted. What could be more propitious, then, than to press quantum mechanics into service as a support for subjective idealism?
