This is a reply I wrote in 2017 as part of an interesting discussion with a colleague concerning whether idealism, or anti-materialism, had any place in a naturalistic philosophy of science.
Even without going as far as scepticism surrounding causation or induction, there are plenty of problems if we consider the body of science to merely be a vast collection of perceptions. My main point of interest here – and one which I think has real relevance to data science – is the different between “knowledge” and “understanding”.
But I wouldn’t be too quick to write off Berkeley’s idealism (or anti-materialism, if you will).
The most famous “solution” to Hume’s scepticism comes from Kant (when he was “awoken from his dogmatic slumber” by Hume). Kant’s idea is that we have intrinsic “a priori” faculties that allow us to make sense of all these perceptions – whether this is organisation of sense data into persistence objects, or projecting causation over time. Where this faculty comes from is quite flexible and has entertained philosophers for years – maybe we argue that it’s part of “human nature” or neurology.
The interesting thing is that this is an idealistic concept, and indeed the wave of epistemology and ethics that followed Kant is generally considered to be “German idealism” – as a counter to the “British empiricism” of Hume and Locke! Kant was trying to rescue science (and indeed religion) from what he saw as the corrosive ideas of the sceptics.
So idealism/anti-materialism – as a “monist” solution to the ontological question of “what is there?” (a key concern for epistemology if ever there was one!) can sometimes work for ends we might agree with.
Materialism can also have weird results when taken to extremes. If “material” is the only “substance”, do (for example) numbers have material extension? Or do they not formally exist? If they’re merely useful human concepts, is that not really an idea? Are we back to dualism?
It’s quite possible to imagine a civilisation that are true idealistic monists – the author Borges does just this (in mind-bending style!) in his short story Tlรถn, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, which I would highly recommend.
Of course, idealism did have strange outcomes when played out in history. Hegel was strongly influenced by Kant and became a central figure in German idealism and established the ideas of historical inevitability, and so Marxism and ultimately something like Lyskenoism in the Soviet Union, where empirical ideas of genetics were repressed because they ran counter to idealistic and ideological dialectic materialism.