Copyright © 1996 R.J. Kilcullen
This tape deals with Ockham's treatment of the problem of universals. To follow this lecture you will need a printout of William of Ockham, Ordinatio, I, dist. 2, q. 6, and William of Ockham, Philosophical Writings, ed. P. Boehner (Edinburgh: Nelson, 1957), pp. 41-45.
Refresh your memory on earlier discussions of universals: Boethius, Abelard, Scotus
It is not accurate to say that the problem of universals is to explain how one word or concept, e.g. man or the concept of man, can be predicated of many individuals - 'Socrates is a man', 'Plato is a man', and so on. In that example it is in fact not one word that is predicated but two: 'Socrates is a man', that's one, 'Plato is a man', that's two. The problem of universals, whatever it is, arises already with words and concepts: we regard several instances of 'man' as the one word or concept, and ask how that one word or concept can be predicated of many things. The prior question is, how can we regard the different instances as the one word? Modern philosophers, following C.S. Peirce, distinguish between 'type' and 'token' - when we say that these several instances are the same word we mean the same type-word, and the several instances are its several tokens. The problem is, then, (1) why can the numberless words and concepts be classed as tokens of a much smaller number of types, and (2) how the many men can be classed as individuals of the same species. This is the same problem in two analogous instances.
Plato's answer is that whenever there are many classed as somehow one, there is one thing, numerically one thing, in which they all share. Scotus's answer is that they do not share numerically one thing, but there is a less-than-numerically one nature common to them all. Ockham's answer is simply that there are many things that resemble one another more or less closely - very closely if the class is a species, less closely if it is a genus. He says this of species and genera of things; I think he would say it too of word and concept types and tokens, if the question had occurred to him. There is nothing in which all the individuals share, there is no reality common to them; they are many that are like one another. There is in the individuals nothing common, or even incompletely or inchoately universal. There are only particulars. A universal is also a particular, on Ockham's account. If we distinguish type and token we must interpret this as meaning that each token-word or concept, each instance of the word or concept, is a particular thing, just as particular as Socrates or Plato. What makes it a universal is that it is (in Aristotle's phrase) 'apt to be predicated of many. 'Apt to be' indicates perhaps that it need not actually be predicated of many. ('Apt' here means 'fit' or 'suited', not just 'likely to be'.) Perhaps he should say that every universal-token is suitable for predication of any one of many. When I utter a token of the word 'man', for example, it is suitable for predicating of Socrates or Plato or whoever - I can say 'Socrates is a man', or I can say 'Plato is a man' - though in fact I may not predicate it of any man, and if I do it can only be of one man. Any one of the closely resembling tokens of the type 'man' can be predicated of any one of the closely resembling individuals of the species man.
Each token, as I said, is a particular thing, just as particular as Socrates or Plato. Ockham hesitated over the question what sort of particular thing a concept is. At first he said it was a mental picture, which was apt to be predicated of many because it resembled each of them. (This sounds rather like Locke's theory of abstract ideas.) Later one of his Franciscan colleagues, Walter Chatton, persuaded him that the concept was the intellectual act of thinking of the thing. An intellectual act is of course an episodic thing, if 'thing' is the right word, not a long-term item among the contents of the mind. The intellectual-act theory fits a token better than a type: when I think again of a man a few moments later, or an instant later, it is another intellectual act. On the picture theory the universal resembled the things it could be predicated of, by picturing them. On an intellectual-act theory it does not seem (prima facie at least) that the universal-tokens will resemble the individuals. It is like the relationship between a barber's pole and the barber's shop, or (to use a medieval example Ockham uses), between the barrel hoop put outside a house to indicate that it is a pub, and the pub thus advertised. Still, if we ask how the intellectual acts that represent men differ from the intellectual acts that represent houses, Ockham might have to say that these acts resemble and differ from one another by what they are thoughts of, and perhaps that does reintroduce some content like the mental picture.
Anyway, a universal is a particular thing of some kind predicable of any one of many resembling individual things. This definition suits things like barrel hoops and things like written signs on paper or other surfaces, or sounds uttered into the air, or concepts (whether they are mental pictures or intellectual acts): but concepts are unlike the others in being natural signs. A barrel hoop, written inscription, or sound, signifies only by convention, by a voluntary act of imposition ('Let a barrel hoop stand for a pub' - or perhaps a convention gradually growing up out of many voluntary acts done by many people). A concept signifies naturally, i.e. not voluntarily, and not by convention. If this were not so conventions could not arise. Unless we have universal concepts spontaneously we can't institute signs.
On Ockham's account of univerals there is nothing in the universe except particulars. Universality is a relationship between particulars, such that some particulars resemble other particulars, and some particulars stand as signs for others. Whatever mystery there was in the problem of universals is now located in resemblance and in signification. (We will look at his account of similarity and other relations in Ockham's theory of relations.)
Let's look at some of the texts, first the translation I distributed of Ockham, Ordinatio I, dist. 2, q. 6. First, note the wording of the question: whether the universal is really outside the soul etc. Ockham interprets Scotus's position as meaning that the common nature is universal. Scotus himself quotes Avicenna: that the nature of horseness is of itself neither universal nor particular. However, Scotus does suggest that the common nature is 'inchoately' universal, and speaks of the universal proper as being completive ('achievedly', to coin a word) universal. ('Inchoate' means just beginning, incipient - the common nature is on the way to being universal, but is not yet universal.) At any rate Scotus's theory is that the common nature is part of the individual, and that the common nature is only denominatively singular - i.e. singular not of itself but by virtue of its real union with the individuating entity. Ockham's target is any suggestion that there is in the singular thing anything that is in any sense not singular. In paragraphs 3 ff Ockham gives an accurate account of Scotus's theory. But skip over this, most of which you know from reading Scotus himself, and go to Ockham's criticisms of Scotus's theory, beginning at paragraph 24.
Read paragraph 24. Ockham rejects Scotus's formal distinction, which implies realities that are not things - for Ockham every realitas is a res. Let me remind you: Scotus distinguished between various kinds of distinction. There is the real distinction, between res and res, thing and thing, understood as (at least potentially) separately existing things. There is the distinction of reason, a distinction of two concepts of a thing that does not have in itself any corresponding non-identity. And in addition, according to Scotus, there is the formal distinction, between realities that are inseparable parts of the same res or thing, parts that cannot exist separately even by miracle; yet their formal concepts are different - not just because our mind introduces a difference that isn't there in the thing, but because the nature of one of these realities is not the nature of the other. Other medieval authors spoke of a distinction of reason with a foundation in the thing. Like Scotus, they were suggesting a distinction intermediate between the distinction between separate things and a fictional distinction imposed by human thought-processes: the formal distinction, or the distinction of reason with a foundation in the thing, is not a mere fiction.
Ockham rejects these intermediate kinds of distinctions. He discusses distinctions in earlier questions of the 'distinction' from which our present question comes, Ord. I, dist. 2, q. 1-3. (Incidentally 'Distinction' in such references means a distinct part, a section.) Ockham argues that there are in the universe only two kinds of beings: (1) things, res, which do actually exist separately, or are capable of existing separately, at least by miracle - they may not ever exist separately in the course of nature, but if God could create or annihilate one without the other they are distinct things. 'Things' here means not only substances but also some (but not all) accidents: according to Catholic theology God works a miracle in the mass by substituting Christ for the bread and wine but leaving the accidents (the appearances) of bread and wine without the substance of bread and wine - so some accidents can exist separately from their substance at least by miracle, so they count as things. Between things capable of separate existence there is a real distinction, a distinctio realis between res and res ('real' comes from res, thing). The only other kind of being in Ockham's ontology is, (2), the being of reason, i.e. being in the mind, the concept. Between concepts there are distinctions of reason. A distinction of reason is between concept and concept. The only other kind of distinction, besides the real distinction (between thing and thing) and the distinction of reason (between concept and concept), is the distinction between thing and concept. This third kind has no name; it is clearly not the formal distinction or the distinction of reason with a foundation in reality - for these there is no room in Ockham's theory. He means to rule them out.
Earlier in this distinction he is concerned with God's attributes, such as wisdom, justice, mercy, etc. All medieval thinkers, like the neo-Platonists before them, held that God is absolutely simple. So what sort of distinction is there between God's mercy and his justice? Not a real distinction, since these attributes are in God inseparable. According to Scotus the distinction is a formal distinction. According to Ockham it is a distinction of reason, that is, a distinction between concepts: our concept of God's mercy is not the same as our concept of God's justice, but the reality that these concepts stand for is absolutely the same. Ockham agreed with Scotus that these concepts are univocal for God and creatures: because mercy and justice can be separate in human beings we have two distinct concepts. But there is no sort of corresponding distinction in God. Notice that for Ockham different concepts can stand for the one thing without there being any corresponding difference in the make-up of the thing, whereas for Scotus if the applicable concepts are different (have different definitions) then there must be correspondingly different aspects or formalities in the thing.
To return to paragraph 24: here Ockham repeats briefly the main argument he had developed in the earlier questions against the formal distinction. If a quasi-real distinction between inseparable formalities is admitted, then there will be no way of establishing any fuller real distinction. No real distinction will be any more than formal, or (vice versa) every formal distinction will be as real as any distinction ever is. The second sentence of paragraph 24 presents Ockham's own position on distinctions - there are only those three kinds, and the formal distinction must therefore be a real distinction. Note the qualification 'in creatures': although he denies that God's attributes are formally distinct, he concedes that there is a formal distinction, just as Scotus held, between God's essence and the three divine persons in the Christian doctrine of the trinity - Father, Son and Holy Spirit. But this has to be believed, he thinks, because of the exigencies of Christian doctrine; where the Bible and the authority of the Church do not compel it, no such formal distinction is to be postulated. The conclusion drawn in paragraph 24, third sentence, 'a nature that is in any way distinguished from the individual is nothing but a being of reason', is not meant as a reduction to absurdity; it is Ockham's own position. A concept is a being of reason. The nature, as distinct from the many individuals who share it, is for Ockham precisely a concept. The nature that is identical with the individual is a thing, namely that individual. Socrates' nature qua thing is Socrates. Many men are many real humanities; the humanity they all share is the concept of man that can stand for any of them, or (in the plural, men) for several of them.
Note the premiss: 'if the nature and the contracting difference are not in every way the same, therefore something can truly be affirmed of one and denied of the other'. In general, if X is not in every way identical with Y, then there is some true conjunction of the form 'X is p, and Y is not p'. This is a principle first put forward by Plato, in Republic, 436a-441c, in his argument that the soul has parts. Compare Leibniz's principle of the 'identity of indiscernibles' - if every statement true of X is true also of Y, then X and Y are identical.
Notice the last sentence of the paragraph. Scotus might say that Ockham overlooks the point that real distinction is proved by separability: unless X can exist without Y's existing, or vice versa, X and Y cannot be distinct really; but if some other statement (other than a statement of existence or non-existence) is true of one and not of the other, they are distinct formally. Ockham would reply that all contradictories are equally contradictory: if 'X exists', 'Y does not exist', is strong enough to prove that X and Y are distinct things, then 'X has such and such a predicate', 'Y does not have that predicate', whatever the predicate, will also prove that X and Y are distinct things.
Read the next four paragraphs, 25-28. That should be clear enough. Note Ockham's view that what has to be said about the divine trinity should not be imported into philosophy. I don't doubt that Ockham believed the doctrine of the trinity, but comments like these in another author might be taken as attempts to undermine the doctrine by insinuating that it is nonsense philosophically.
Now read paragraphs 29 and 30. In the first sentence of 29, 'determination' means any modifier or qualifying phrase, such as 'of itself'. So the minor premiss of the quoted syllogism, 'the nature is not proper', is according to Scotus not true; but it becomes true if we insert the appropriate modifier: 'the nature is not of itself proper'. Ockham's reply is that the consistent insertion or deletion of such modifiers, however it changes the truth-values of the propositions, makes no difference to the validity of the argument, so the syllogism of paragraph 26 is valid.
Read paragraphs 31-32, with the explanatory footnotes.
A number of other arguments follow, each with objections ('If it is said') and replies. Ockham obviously thinks that part of constructing a case is to test its arguments by objections. Skip over to paragraph 53, and read paragraphs 53-55. Notice that Ockham says that when Socrates and Plato are together, there are two humanities, taking humanity not as a concept but as a reality. Each of these numerically distinct humanities is distinct through or by itself, not by something else added to it.
Up to paragraph 75 Ockham argues against Scotus's theory. Then, at 76, he objects to certain statements Scotus makes in presenting his theory. All of this is officially 'dialectical', i.e. part of the preliminary discussion of the question; Ockham himself is not officially committed to it - but in fact we can pretty safely attribute it all to him. Now go to paragraph 85, the beginning of his formal or official answer to the question. The first word, 'therefore', endorses the objections made earlier.
Read paragraph 85. He says 'I persuade' rather than 'I prove' presumably because he thinks that this point is really self-evident, too fundamental to be provable from anything more basic. Read paragraphs 86-89. Ockham rejects the notion that the common nature becomes universal in the intellect by having something added to it or removed. He rejects earlier theories of abstraction, according to which the mind extracts some thing from the external thing, or from some 'species' coming to it from the external thing, and makes that into a concept, e.g. by 'disengaging' the universal from the particularising material or individuating entity. Ockham models the production of a universal on the production of a word: the mind naturally (or 'spontaneously' or 'involuntarily'), by some process opaque to us, produces concepts which are signs standing for things outside the mind.
Now read paragraph 90, and compare it with paragraph 11. Read the explanations in the footnotes. The next sentence after the footnotes, beginning 'If it be taken in the first way', perhaps needs comment. If 'the nature of man' stands for the thing outside the soul, then there are as many humanities as there are men. So there is no inconsistency between the statements, 'The nature of man is of itself this man', meaning, 'Socrates' human nature is of itself Socrates', and 'the nature of man is of itself that man', meaning 'Plato's human nature is of itself Plato'. 'Of itself' means simply not by or through something else, and Socrates' humanity is not Socrates through anything. 'The nature of man' has a 'general' sound that the corresponding Latin, natura hominis, does not have: Latin normally does not have a definite or indefinite article, so 'the nature of man' and 'a nature of man' are in Latin not normally distinguished. In English the omission of any article before a word like 'man' almost invites its capitalisation as a grand abstraction, but not so in Latin. So Ockham is saying that there is no inconsistency between 'natura hominis is this man' and 'natura hominis is that man', when 'nature' stands for any one of the many individuals. The sophism at the end of the paragraph is of course ambiguous. If you take it to mean: 'If any man's ass runs, every man's ass runs', the statement is false. If you take it to mean 'If any man's ass runs then that same man's ass runs', it is true. Similarly if you take 'Whatever the nature of man is in is this man' to mean 'Whatever this particular real instance of the nature of man is in is this man', it is true; if you take it to mean 'Whatever any instance of the nature of man is in is this man', it is false.
Read paragraphs 91 and 92, and compare paragraph 12.
Now go to paragraph 112, and read paragraphs 112 and 113, with paragraph 20. On the phrase 'destroying determination' see the footnote to paragraph 31. Ockham rejects the claim that if each singular is singular through itself and there are no common natures, only concepts, then concepts will be arbitrary: they are not arbitrary because men resemble one another more closely than any of them resembles an ass. The doctrine that each singular is singular through itself does not mean that there are not greater and less degrees of resemblance among singulars. Read paragraphs 114 and 115. We may say that Plato and Socrates agree in being human, or that they resemble one another in certain respects, but Ockham says that these locutions can't be taken literally. Read paragraph 116.
Now go to paragraph 133, and read it with paragraph 23. Socrates and Plato agree in species and are distinguished numerically by the same things, namely by Socrates and Plato. Similarly Socrates and the ass agree in being animal and are distinguished as asinine and human by the same things, namely by Socrates and by the ass. That is, these various statements can be made simply because individuals are like and unlike. Socrates by being what he is is like Plato, and is also like the ass (as an animal) and also unlike (as a man). If you want to say 'in some respects' this is all right, as long as you don't think that a respect is something additional to Socrates, Plato and the ass. Later we will come to Ockham's treatment of relations, which complements his account of universals - likeness and unlikeness are relations, and in Ockham's view (disagreeing again with Scotus) a relation is not a reality additional to the things related. Here in paragraph 133 Ockham argues that if you want to postulate another thing in which or by which they agree or differ, then you will be drawn into an infinite regress. If you postulate an extra thing by which Socrates agrees with Plato, and another extra thing by which he differs from the ass, then these two extra things themselves agree with one another, e.g. in being entities of some sort, and differ from one another, e.g. in causing in Socrates respectively similarity and difference, so there will be two more extra things through which those extra things agree and differ, and so on ad infinitum. Now read paragraphs 134-137.
So according to Ockham there are things outside the mind and there are concepts. The things are individual all the way through, in all their constituent parts (if any), not individuated by something else but individual through themselves. These things are in various degrees like one another, and also unlike, apart from any act of the human mind - we don't invent likeness and unlikeness, it would be there even if human beings did not exist. Our minds form concepts (not out of anything supplied from outside the mind), which are signs, and can stand for things outside the mind. When many things closely resemble one another, the one concept is apt to be predicated of any of them, and this concept is a species; when they resemble one another less closely the concept that stands for any of them will be a genus. Aristotle's categories are thus concepts (not realities) forming a hierarchy based on the likeness and unlikeness of individual things. The doctrine of categories is not about natures, but about concepts standing for individuals that are in various ways alike and unlike.
Let's look at another text, in which Ockham discusses concepts. This is from his Ordinatio, I, dist. 2, q. 8, translated in William of Ockham, Philosophical Writings, ed. Boehner, pp. 41-45. In this text Ockham presents two possible theories of what a concept is. Read from pp. 41 to two-thirds down p. 43. Comment. In the second sentence the phrase 'that exists in a subject [of inherence]' translates the Latin habens esse subiectivum, more literally, 'that has subjective being'; and 'has being only as a thought object' translates habet esse obiectivum, 'has objective being'. The contrast between subjective and objective being is easily misunderstood. In modern philosophy subjective means 'coloured by the character, prejudices etc. of the knowing subject', and objective means 'really there in the object'. In medieval terminology subjective means 'really there in some subject out there in the world' - e.g. a Julius Caesar shape in a block of marble, the block being the subject in which, 'subjectively', the Julius Caesar shape exists as an accident. By 'objective' they meant 'in the mind as object known': so when I think about the statue of Julius Caesar, it was said that this object, the statue, exists 'objectively', i.e. exists as object of thought, in my mind.
This first theory, then, is that a universal, i.e. a concept predicable of many, does not have subjective being at all, not even as a modification of me. You might think that my mind was like the marble and the concept like the shape representing Julius Caesar, and then the concept, like the shape, would have subjective being as an accident of my substance, just as the statue shape has subjective being in the marble. Something like this is another theory, examined below. But on this present theory the concept has no subjective being whatever, either outside the mind or in the mind, but has only objective being, the being of an object thought about. The text goes on to say that the concept is like a mental picture. More literally, the Latin says that it is quoddam fictum, something made. The intellect forms in the mind a thing similar to the object known. The trouble with the translation 'picture' is that it suggests that the concept is a visual likeness, whereas Ockham says more generally that it is something similar. The essential points in this theory are (1) that there is some sort of similarity between thing and concept, and (2) that the concept itself has no subjective being whatever, but is just an object of thought. Notice the argument on p. 42. If the concept had subjective being in the mind, the contrast between being in the mind and being in reality would be obliterated; this is just what the theory to be looked at below will do - it treats the mind as part of the world.
On p. 43, the phrases 'in the manner of being that a thought-object has', and 'in the manner of being proper to a subject', are translations of objective being and subjective being.
Now read the other theory, pp. 43-5. In the first paragraph 'exists in the soul as a subject' might be translated more literally 'exist subjectively and really in the soul'. Ockham here does not commit himself to this second theory; he merely says that of all the theories that attribute to the concept some sort of subjective being in the soul, the most probable is the theory that the concept has the being of an intellectual act. But elsewhere Ockham does commit himself to this theory. See Ph. Boehner, Collected Articles on Ockham, pp. 169-174. On p. 44 note that the intellection is by its very nature capable of standing for a thing known: according to Ockham vocal words and written inscriptions and other things such as the hoop outside a pub have meaning by convention, but the concept has meaning by nature. Much of what Ockham says in this second section would apply under the first theory also.
This is all we will read of Ockham on universals. Is Ockham a nominalist, as he is traditionally said to be? In his own time the term nominalism was not in use for current theories of universals. It referred to one of the positions taken up by Peter Abelard and others in Abelard's time, some of whom said that a universal was a word. A generation or so after Ockham's time the word was being used to apply to positions like his, and he has been called a nominalist ever since. (On the history of these words see Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages, p. 793, notes 40, 41.) Another term in use in the later 14th century was 'terminist', and perhaps this is a better label. Ockham did not in fact say that universals are words, in the sense of spoken sounds, but it is his position that universals are terms, i.e. subjects or predicates of propositions, spoken or thought; and of course in his view the thought universal is more fundamental. A modern term sometimes used is 'conceptualism', the doctrine that universals are concepts, and this is his position. In the middle ages the opposite position was called realism, meaning the doctrine that universals are real. The most extreme realist in this sense was Plato, whose Ideas or Forms are real things, more real than the things that imitate them. In this sense theories like those of Duns Scotus could be called realistic, since Scotus ascribes reality to the common nature, which is inchoately or incompletely universal. Ockham rejects realism in all its forms. However in modern philosophy a realist is someone who holds that human thought truly grasps reality, more or less as it really is; and the opposite is scepticism. To say that Ockham rejects realism seems to make him a sceptic, which he wasn't. Hence a phrase used by Philotheus Boehner for Ockham's position, 'realistic conceptualism', realistic in the modern sense of the word. (See Boehner Collected Articles, pp. 156-163). It seems to me that (whatever we call his doctrine) the important thing to keep in view is that according to Ockham universals reflect likenesses and unlikenesses among things, patterns of similarity and dissimilarity which are really and in the modern sense objectively there: not in the sense that the pattern is something there in addition to the things, but in the sense that it is true, and would be true even if no mind existed, that some things are alike and other things are different. It may be true that the ranking of similarities and differences as more or less important has something, perhaps everything, to do with human interests; but two-legged animals resemble other two-legged animals in being two-legged, and four-legged animals resemble one another in being four legged, whether or not the number of legs is of importance to anyone in the universe. Ockham would not say that none of our concepts reflect specifically human interests, only that at least some of our concepts reflect the way the world is whatever interests anyone may have, and in this sense he is a realist in the modern sense of the term.
This is the end of tape 8.
See also Ockham on Relations; Scotus and Ockham on Free Will
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