Universal and Singular Cognition
Adam Wood (Fordham): Transduction and Singular
Cognition in Thomas Aquinas
Peter King has attempted to show that the medieval scholastics’ inability
to specify adequately a “transducer,” a cognitive mechanism responsible for
translating sense data into intelligible content, led to the eventual collapse
of Aristotelian psychology as a research program. (Peter King, “Scholasticism
and the Philosophy of Mind: The Failure of Aristotelian Psychology,” Scientific Failure, ed. Tamara Horowitz
and Allen I. Janis (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994), 109–38,
available online at http://individual.utoronto.ca/pking/articles/lastcheck/Scholasticism_and_the_Philosophy_of_Mind.pdf.)
He explains why transduction was a problem for medieval Aristotelians, and
surveys the leading candidates for the transducer role. Among them is Thomas
Aquinas’s suggestion that the agent intellect renders sensible phantasms
intelligible by abstracting a form from its individuating conditions. On King’s
reading, since the agent intellect merely removes individuating conditions, and
does not alter sense objects formally in any way, the agent intellect must
operate on sensible species that already contain general, classificatory
features. But this is problematic: not only does it merely push transduction
back a step (how do sensible species acquire such features?), but it also
raises the question why brute animals are incapable of intellectual cognition.
King ultimately decides, therefore, that the agent intellect cannot do the work
of a transducer.
In another essay, King forwards a different criticism of Aquinas’s
cognitive psychology: his inability to explain satisfactorily our knowledge of
singulars.( Peter King, “Thinking About Things: Singular Thought in the Middle
Ages,” Intentionality, Cognition, and
Representation in Medieval Philosophy, ed. Gyula Klima (New York: Fordham
University Press, forthcoming), available online at http://individual.utoronto.ca/pking/articles/Thinking_about_Things.pdf)
According to King’s objection, which he traces back to William de la Mare’s Correctorium fratris Thomae, Aquinas has
once again failed to specify the mechanism(s) responsible for explaining
several important kinds of knowledge we must possess about individual objects.
I aim to argue that King dismisses Aquinas’s views on both transduction
and singular cognition too hastily. Indeed, a careful look at the cognitive
mechanisms and operations Aquinas does
specify, along with certain features of the metaphysics underpinning his
psychology, shows that he is capable of supplying a plausible account of
transduction. Furthermore, once this account is properly understood, it becomes
quite clear why Aquinas’s description of singular cognition, albeit lacking
some of the machinery that King seems to be after, is both intuitive and
attractive.
Andrea Borghini (Holy Cross): Universalism and
the Argument from Indifference
Are the most immediate entities of perception particular or, rather,
universal? Call PP the thesis that those entities are particular and UP the
thesis that they are universal. In this paper, I will present an argument for
UP. Additionally, in the concluding part of the paper, I show how UP offers a
natural way to argue for universalism (the thesis that all denizens of reality
are universal).
The argument in favor of UP elaborates on a version of what Gyula Klima
labeled 'the argument from the indifference of sensory representation' or, for
short, 'the argument from indifference'. (A well-known version of the argument is
due to William Ockham, although he stated it in the attempt to show its
defeasibility.) Here is how the argument goes:
(1)
If the entities of perception are singular, then we ought to be
able – at least in principle – to distinguish between the perceptions of two
distinct singular entities;
(2)
However, we can imagine cases in which we would not be able to
tell whether we are perceiving singular entity a or singular entity b
(where a and b are distinct);
(3)
Therefore, the entities of perception are not singular.
(1) follows from two assumptions. The first, is the following
formulation of the principle of indiscernibility of identicals:
"Necessarily: if a and b are identical, then a and b have the same qualitative, non-relational properties".
Qualitative properties are those that involve no reference to particular
individuals (e.g., Napoleon). Non-relational properties are those that involve
one and only one individual. The exclusion of those properties is required in
that, although they may provide relevant background information for explaining
the perception of a specific entity, they seem not to be involved in defining
that perception. The second assumption is that all qualitative properties are –
at least in principle – knowable.
However, several arguments in favor of (2) have been offered.
Ockham, for example, acknowledged the possibility of there being two singular
entities that are indiscernible when it comes to their qualitative and
non-relational properties. Another reason in support of (2) comes from the
analysis of hallucinatory experiences: in hallucination, we cannot tell whether
we perceive a singular entity or, rather, thin air. (See the recent debate
among Johnston, Martin, and Siegel.) Finally, authors such as David Lewis
famously supported (2), on the ground that intrinsic properties (those
non-relational, qualitative properties that apply independently from context)
are not fully knowable to us (see the discussion of this thesis in Esfeld,
Johnston, Langton, and Lewis).
But to nominalists (such as Ockham and Lewis) this large body of
evidence in favor of (2) was not a sufficient reason to accept UP over PP. They
had another argument in favor of the latter. The most formidable one, indeed,
was put forward by Ockham. It starts with the following Particularity of the
Causal Process Thesis (PCT):
(PCT): Every causal process is particular.
On the basis of PCT, Ockham could argue that perception is the
result of a causal process; causal processes are particular; the beginning and
the end of a particular causal process cannot but be particular; therefore, the
entities of perception are particular.
I question the validity of PCT, on the ground
that it presupposes a partisan conception of causation. Clearly, if causal
processes are singular and real, they will relate singular entities; but I deny
that causation is singular.
I conclude by presenting an Argument from Universal Cognition
(AUC) in favor of universalism: if UP is correct, then we are directly acquainted
with universal entities and particular cognition cannot be accounted for in
terms of acquaintance with particular entities; hence, it is hard to explain
how particular cognition arises; my suspicion (which I will not pursue in this
paper) is that particular cognition derives from a specific conceptual
operation that has no correlate entity in reality: in the world there are
universal entities only.
References
Esfeld,
M., "Do Relations Require Underlying Intrinsic Properties? A Physical
Argument for a Metaphysics of Relations," Metaphysica 4: 5-25
(2003)
Johnston, M., "The Obscure Object of Hallucination", Philosophical
Studies 103: 113–83 (2004)
Johnston,
M., From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defense of Conceptual Analysis,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998
Klima, G., John Buridan,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming
Langton,
R., Kantian Humility. Our Ignorance of Things in Themselves, Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1998
Lewis,
D.K., "Ramseyan Humility," in D. Braddon-Mitchell and R. Nola (eds.),
The Canberra Plan, Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming
Martin,
M. G. F., "The Reality of Appearances", in Sainsbury M. (ed.), Thought
and Ontology, Milano: Franco Angeli, 1997.
Martin,
M. G. F., "Particular Thoughts and Singular Thought", in O’Hear A.
(ed.), Logic, Thought and Language, Cambridge University Press, 2002: :
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Studies 120: 90–112 (2004)
Quine,
W.V.O., "Speaking of Objects," Proceedings and Addresses of the
American Philosophical Association 31: 5-22 (1958)