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ABSTRACT
There is debate over whether the content of an intuitive cognition is determined externally or internally in Ockham’s theory. According to the most common view, which I call the Strong Externalist Interpretation (SE), intuitive content is wholly determined externally. Opposed to SE is the Strong Internalist Interpretation (SI), according to which the content of an intuition is wholly determined by internal features of a cognizer. The aim of this paper is to argue against those interpretations, and to argue for a third kind of interpretation which preserves interpretative advantages of SE and SI without falling into the difficulties that each faces. On this view, intuitive content is complex, and its complexity is analyzed into a mix of internalist and externalist elements.
Acknowledgements
I am especially grateful to Robert Pasnau, who read several versions of this paper and improved them through his comments and suggestions, and to two anonymous referees whose suggestions made this a much better paper. I am also grateful to Dan Kaufman and Mi-Kyoung Lee for encouraging me to publish this paper, and to my colleagues, Spencer Case, Jay Geyer, Anthony Kelley, Caleb Pickard, Joe Wilson, and Alex Zambrano for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper. The earliest ancestor of this paper is a chapter of my MA thesis I wrote at Yonsei University in 2012. I am grateful to Daeho Cho and Hwan Sunwoo for their valuable comments on the thesis and to Jaekyung Lee for supervising the thesis.
Notes
1 See, for example, King, ‘Thinking about Things’; Lagerlund, ‘What Is Singular Thought?’; Normore, ‘Burge, Descartes, and Us’, ‘The Invention of Singular Thought’. Panaccio, Ockham on Concepts’s view, according to which an intuitive cognition qua a singular concept is a rigid deictic, is very similar to SE, but he suggests a more sophisticated externalist interpretation in his later works, for example, Panaccio, ‘Intuition and Causality’, ‘Ockham’s Externalism’. His interpretations will be discussed in detail below.
2 See Brower-Toland, ‘Intuition, Externalism, and Direct Reference in Ockham’.
3 For recent externalist interpretation of intuitive cognition of the latter kind of object, see Schierbaum, ‘Ockham on the Possibility of Self-Knowledge’.
4 In what follows, I will use ‘intuitive cognition’ and ‘intuition’ interchangeably.
5 It is worth mentioning that there has been a great deal of discussion about how to best understand Ockham’s theory of efficient causation. On this issue, see Adams, William Ockham, Chapter 18.
6 In what follows I cite Ockham’s Latin texts from Ockham, Opera Theologica (=OTh) and Ockham, Opera Philosophica (=OPh). I use the following abbreviations for particular volumes: Ord. (= Ordinatio. Scriptum in Librum Primum Sententiarum); Rep. (=Reportatio. Quaestiones in Librum Secundum Sententiarum); Quae. Phys. (=Quaestiones in Libros Physicorum Aristotelis); Quodl. (=Quodlibeta Septem); SL (=Summa Logicae). Where available, I have followed, with only slight revisions, the English translations in Ockham, Ockham: Philosophical Writings and Quodlibetal Questions.
7 An anonymous referee raised a worry about whether it is legitimate to interpret Ockham’s explanation of the intentionality of intuitive cognition in terms of causation as an explanation of the intentionality of intuitive cognition in terms of content, just as I did in the formulation of CDT. As I will argue in Section 4.2, however, given that Ockham also characterizes an intuitive cognition of an external particular as a singular mental concept representing that particular, I think such interpretation is legitimate. For further discussion on this issue, see Panaccio, ‘Conceptual Acts’.
8 Indeed, this is how Brower-Toland, ‘Intuition, Externalism, and Direct Reference in Ockham’ sees causality in Ockham’s theory, when she says ‘while the relation between an intuitive cognition and its object would be an internal one … the obtaining of the relation itself would be determined by intrinsic features of the intuition’ (Brower-Toland, ‘Intuition, Externalism, and Direct Reference in Ockham’, 328).
9 Others have found this distinction useful in a contemporary context. See, for example, Speaks, ‘Transparency, Intentionalism, and the Nature of Perceptual Content’.
10 Given the role of evidentness in Ockham’s epistemology, this means that the judgement ‘John is pale’ is justified by its corresponding intuitive cognition in which a subject intuits John as pale. For more discussion of epistemic role of intuitive cognition and its relation to evidentness, see Boler, ‘Ockham on Evident Cognition’ and Karger, ‘Ockham’s Misunderstood Theory of Intuitive and Abstractive Cognition’.
11 Brower-Toland, ‘Medieval Approaches to Consciousness’ shows that Ockham’s notion of intuitive cognition roughly corresponds to the contemporary notion of perception.
12 I am not claiming here that intuitive content is the only way to explain the case of illusion. What I have argued is that if there is intuitive content, as both proponents of SE and SI hold, then intuitive content must explain the case of illusion by its mismatch with reality. One can take a radically different route which explains the whole nature of illusion without any appeal to the notion of content. Such view is nowadays called ‘Relationalism’ or ‘Naïve Realism’. For useful overview of the debate between naïve realism and the content view, see Nanay, ‘The Representationalism Versus Relationalism Debate’.
13 See, for example, Lagerlund, ‘What Is Singular Thought?’, 234; Normore, ‘Burge, Descartes, and Us’, 4.
14 The non-veridicality of an intuitive cognition of non-existents here should not be understood as an intuitive cognition that causes a false belief. That an intuitive cognition is non-veridical merely means that it fails to match with reality. Thus, just as someone can truly judge that the stick is straight even if the stick looks bent to her since its part is submerged in water, a non-veridical intuition of an object is compatible with a true belief about that object.
15 Two things should be noted. First, the characterization of the content of Isj here is a little imprecise for the reason I will explain below. On my interpretation, the content of Isj should have an empty slot which could have been filled if it had been caused by an actual, particular object. Second, throughout the paper, in describing the content of intuitive cognition, I prescind from the question of whether such content contains so-called higher-order, kind properties like manhood.
16 The Latin text is as follows:
Si dicas quod illa intentio potest immediate causari totaliter a Deo … Respondeo: quaelibet intentio creaturae causata a Deo potest a creatura causari partialiter, licet non causetur de facto. Et ideo per illam intentionem cognoscitur illud singulare a quo determinate causaretur si causaretur a creatura; huiusmodi autem est unum singulare et non aliud.
17 See, for example, Adams, ‘Ockham’s Individualisms’; Brower-Toland, ‘Intuition, Externalism, and Direct Reference in Ockham’; and Freddoso, ‘Ockham’s Theory of Truth Conditions’. Adams, ‘Ockham’s Individualisms’ and Brower-Toland, ‘Intuition, Externalism, and Direct Reference in Ockham’ have pointed out that, in addition to philosophical grounds, Ockham also had theological reasons for restricting his ontology to what is actual.
18 As an anonymous referee pointed out, it should be noted that, although the above passages strongly suggest that possibilia are not included in Ockham’s list of existents, whether Ockham really denied the existence of possibilia has been a controversial issue among his interpreters. Indeed, some interpreters, for example, Adams, ‘Ockham’s Nominalism and Unreal Entities’, William Ockham, Karger, ‘Would Ockham Have Shaved Wyman’s Beard?’, McGrade, ‘Plenty of Nothing’, and Panaccio, ‘Semantics and Mental Language’, have argued that Ockham is committed to the existence of possibilia. They often point out that Ockham’s semantic presented in SL provides evidence for their possibilist interpretation of Ockham’s ontology. For example, when explaining semantic properties of a term such as signification and supposition, Ockham claims that the term ‘yellow’ can supposit and signify not only things that are yellow, but also things that can be yellow, for example, green leaves that will turn yellow later (SL I. 33). However, I am still hesitant to accept the possibilist interpretation for two reasons. First, as Normore, ‘Some Aspects of Ockham’s Logic’ already pointed out, the possibilist interpretation based on Ockham’s semantics must explain that semantic relations like signification and supposition imply the existence of their relata, for example, the fact that ‘yellow’ signifies and supposits for things that can be yellow imply the existence of ‘yellow’ and things that can be yellow. And I have not found a satisfactory explanation of this issue in the possibilist interpretation. Second, even proponents of the possibilist interpretation grant that this interpretation is too strong to be attributed to Ockham. For example, Adams, ‘Ockham’s Individualisms’, who once suggested the possibilist interpretation, later admitted that the existence of possibilia clashes with Ockham’s theological doctrines, and so concluded that Ockham did not choose a definitive position on ontology, rather than saying that he is a possibilist. In conclusion, although I grant that the possibilist interpretation should be taken seriously, I also think that it is at best contentious, and that it would be better to find an interpretation of intuitive content without commitment to possibilia.
19 This passage will be discussed in detail in Section 4.2.
20 For useful contemporary discussion of the gappy content view, see Schellenberg, ‘The Particularity and Phenomenology of Perceptual Experience’ and Tye, ‘The Admissible Contents of Visual Experience’.
21 For example, King, ‘Thinking about Things’ claims that Ockham’s notion of similitude is ‘an empty formula’ (King, ‘Rethinking Representation in the Middle Ages’, 100), while Lagerlund, ‘Singular Terms and Vague Concepts in Late Medieval Mental Language Theory or the Decline and Fall of Mental Language’ maintains that ‘Ockham seems to want to eliminate similitude or at least appeal to a minimal notion of similitude’ (Lagerlund, ‘Singular Terms and Vague Concepts in Late Medieval Mental Language Theory or the Decline and Fall of Mental Language’, 124).
22 See, for example, Brower-Toland, ‘Intuition, Externalism, and Direct Reference in Ockham’; Panaccio, Ockham on Concepts, ‘Intuition and Causality’, ‘Ockham’s Externalism’; and Pasnau, Theories of Cognition in the Later Middle Ages, Chapter 3.
23 See especially Panaccio, Ockham on Concepts, Chapter 7. Calvin Normore, who is one of the most important defenders of SE, later seemed to be persuaded by Panaccio on this point. See Normore, ‘Primitive Intentionality and Reduced Intentionality’.
24 Elsewhere he calls this function ‘perceptual schemata’. See Panaccio, ‘Ockham’s Externalism’, 177.
25 The Latin text is as follows:
quod angelus manifestat alteri cognitionem universalis et non singularis, intelligendum est tantum quod non tantum manifestat sibi cognitionem universalis sed singularis, puta quando per multas intellectiones quarum una terminatur ad tantam longitudinem, alia ad talem figuram, etc., quae sunt propria unius singularis et non alterius.
26 Ockham discusses a similar case in Reportatio, where he claims that assimilation or likeness is not the precise reason for why one thing is intellectively cognized and not another since if there were two equally intense heats, a third heat would assimilate to the one just as much as to the other (Rep. II. qq.12–3; OTh V, 287–88).
27 As is clear from Ockham’s use of the singular pronoun ‘illa’, the case is not two intuitive cognitions, one of which is about Socrates and the other of which is about his paleness, but a single intuitive cognition of Socrates and his paleness.
28 There has been a great deal of discussion about the first point among interpreters. Recently, Panaccio and Piché, ‘Ockham’s Reliabilism and the Intuition of Non-Existents’ have suggested a reliabilist interpretation of Ockham’s epistemology based upon the epistemological implication of intuition of non-existents.