A Companion to Hobbes. Группа авторов
an entire class of objects, without having to think about each one of them individually. Names go proxy in the act of reasoning for the individuals in the name’s extension. Again borrowing from Sellars, we might call the imposition of the name the establishment of “language-entry” rules for the name (Sellars 1954). Imposition fixes the empirical conditions governing the appropriate use of the name. Knowing how to use a universal name is knowing the perceptual stimulus conditions governing its correct application – the conditions an object must meet to count as having the name predicable of it. In this way, although there is no general mental representation of, say, luminosity, only many memories and sensory experiences of lucid bodies, we grasp the universal name “luminous” because we know it applies to things that appear similar to us in a certain, visual way. The name “luminous” is a symbol that goes proxy for the individual luminous things in the act of reasoning.
Reason, “when wee reckon it amongst the Faculties of the mind,” is nothing other than “Reckoning (that is, Adding and Subtracting) of the Consequences of generall names agreed upon for the marking and signifying of our thoughts” (Hobbes 2012, 64; 1651, 18). As several authors have argued (e.g., Abizadeh 2017; Hull 2006; Pettit 2008; Soles 1996), the imposition of names – categorematic terms – introduces universal representations into the cognitive system. The use of names transforms the human mind from a mere Humean representational system into an “Aristotelian” representational system, in Sellars’ sense (Sellars 1981). “By this imposition of Names,” Hobbes writes, “some of larger, some of stricter signification, we turn the reckoning of the consequences of things imagined in the mind, into a reckoning of the consequences of Appellations” (2012, 52; 1651, 14). In imposing names on things to mark our conceptions and then appending names together into sentences, the discourse of ideas – which consists in “the innumerable acts of thinking about individual things” – is registered in language, “and is reduced to fewer but universal theorems … and this is a most useful economy” (Hobbes 1976, 375).
Hobbes’s example of the geometer recording his discovery about the properties of triangles is a nice illustration. Without the use of names in speech, the geometer can construct a triangle and determine that the interior angles are equivalent to two right angles, but he has to put himself to “new labor” and make a new conjecture every time he wants to know whether any new triangle has this property. This necessarily involves “innumerable acts of thinking” about particular triangles, comparing them and noting their similarities. But with the use of words:
[W]hen he observes that the equality was consequent, not to the length of sides, nor to any particular thing in his triangle [i.e. the one he has constructed]; but onely to this, that the sides were straight, and the angles three; and that that was all, for which he named it Triangle; and will boldly conclude Universally, that such equality of angles is in all triangles whatsoever; and register his invention in these generall terms, Every triangle hath its three angles equall to two right angles. And thus the consequence found in one particular, comes to be registered and remembered, as an Universall rule.
(Hobbes 2012, 54; 1651, 14)
Each mental representation is still a conception – and so particularistic and imagistic – but via the symbolic medium of language, thoughts are “registered and remembered.” However, this “registering” is not a simple one-to-one mapping of a name to a conception. The consequences of thoughts – each of which is just a train of mental particulars – are registered as a universal rule, expressed in the structure of a sentence.
As Hobbes defines truth, it is a semantic property – a property of sentences (or “propositions” as Hobbes calls them):
A true proposition is that, whose predicate contains, or comprehends its subject, or whose predicate is the name of everything, of which the subject is the name; as man is a living creature is therefore a true proposition, because whatsoever is called man, the same is also called living creature; and some man is sick, is true, because sick is the name of some man … these words true, truth, and true proposition, are equivalent to one another; for truth consists in speech, and not the things spoken of.
(EW I.35)
“True” is a metalinguistic predicate (a “name of a name” [Hobbes 2012, 1078; 1651, 372]) and applies to those sentences such that, by the imposition rules governing the names composing the sentence, the extension of the subject term is subsumed or contained within the extension of the predicate term (EW IV.23–4). The truth conditions of a sentence are given by the imposition of the component names – the application conditions that fixed the extensions of the names. Thus, the truth conditions of a sentence can be expressed as a rule of inference concerning the names involved in the sentence, capturing their proper use in cognition: The sentence “man is a living creature” is true if and only if all of the objects in the extension of “man” fall within the extension of “living creature” or, “If x is in the extension of ‘man’, then x is in the extension of ‘living creature’.”
According to Hobbes, a propositional attitude is a relation between a language-using animal and a sentence (2012, 98–100; 1651, 30–1; EW IV.2–8). To judge that a sentence of the form “S is P” is true is to accept that “If x is in the extension ‘S,’ then x is in the extension of ‘P’.” That is, propositional judgments involve grasping the truth conditions of sentences. But this implicitly involves semantic ascent, recognizing metalinguistic information expressed in the structure of the sentence; it is tantamount to acceptance of a rule for linking names to one another in reasoning. In order to grasp the truth conditions of a sentence, one must have an understanding of the imposition rules governing the use of the component names deployed in the sentence. To grasp the truth conditions of “S is P,” one must know how to use “S” and “P” as marks for thought. This, to anticipate the argument of the next section, is just what it is to “understand a name”: “to remember, by means of a name, those things which have to be considered in some matter, and for which the name has been imposed … the name ‘man’ is understood when this word brings to mind not only a human shape, but also its reasoning-capacity” (Hobbes 1976, 52).
The relationship between a language user and the sentences she judges to be true is a kind of causal relation, insofar as names play a functional role in the thought patterns of a language user. A name is a mark and, as a mark, it plays a role in the cognitive activity of the user. It causes the user, who has internalized the rule governing its application, to recall those ideas for which it was set up (Abizadeh 2015). As the buoy causes the sailors to think about the submerged rock when they see the buoy, so a name causes the person who grasps the “imposition” of the name to recall conceptions of the objects on which the name is imposed. A sentence read or heard or “tacitly thought” (EW V.197), causes a person to recall a chain of conceptions, corresponding to the impositions of the names concatenated together into the sentence. This is what Hobbes refers to as “remembering the use of names.” Conceptions are raised upon the hearing or reading of a sentence insofar as there is an associative habit to use a name as a mark for the sake of recalling conceptions. So, when I read the sentence, “red tomatoes are ripe,” the name “red tomato” causes me to think about some tomato and to selectively attend to its color. Then, there is a train of thought that takes me to various memories of ripe tomatoes, with that color. I recall that “ripe tomato” is applied to tomatoes for the sake of this gustatory appearance and judge that the sentence “red tomatoes are ripe tomatoes” is true (cf. EW I.23–4). So, while Archie and I can expect to experience the sensation ripeness from this red tomato on the basis of memory and the associative connections between conceptions, and thereby evince possession of the general concepts of tomatoes and ripeness, only I am able to grasp these concepts through a universal representation, preserved in the sentence I judge to be true. Returning to the case of the geometer, while he can see that two figures are triangles because they resemble one another in respect of having three sides (because he can selectively attend to their shape), with the use of the name “triangle” he is able to make and retain a universal judgment about all triangles, that is, everything within the extension of “triangle”.7