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5 Hobbes, Human nature IV-VI, cf. De Corpore XXV.8; I.1-3 (Gaskin,
31-43, cf. 219-221, 185-88) Over Chapters 4-6,
Hobbes extended his mechanical account of the workings of the senses, memory
and imagination to thought and reflection.
He began by observing that, as the motions that constitute our
conceptions reverberate in our brains, sometimes this one and sometimes that
one will spontaneously come to our attention.
This explains the random and incoherent appearance of thoughts in
dreams, but our waking thoughts are generally not random or incoherent. We think that our waking thoughts are
largely within our control — that we deliberately choose what thoughts to
have. If I solve a mathematical
problem or think about what route I will have to take on the way home in
order to do all the shopping I need to do on the way, my conclusions do not
just randomly and fortuitously appear before me. Instead, I make a choice to think about
something and then I pull together the considerations relevant to that problem. If my thoughts are governed by anything, it
is the laws of logic or purposive or practical reasoning. But even our illogical and impractical
deliberations are not purely random, as we might think they would be if they
were merely the product of some chance motion of particles in the brain
induced by mechanical causes. But
Hobbes wanted to explain all deliberation and all logical and practical
reasoning as an effect of mechanism.
He did so in stages, dealing first with the sort of concrete,
imagistic reasoning that we employ when we decide what path to take when we
move or decide where to look for a missing object, then with our reasoning
from cause to effect and effect to cause, and finally with those forms of
reasoning that employ words and mathematical symbols. QUESTIONS ON THE
1. What is the
chief reason why, in our deliberations we most often trace out chains of
cause and effect, rather than proceed from anything to anything?
2. What leads
us to suppose that certain events will occur in the future or that events
that we have not witnessed have occurred in the past?
3. What is a
sign? Note
Human Nature IV.11: Hobbes’s point in this passage is that
while we might be able to conclude from experience that, given certain
antecedent events, certain consequent events will very likely occur (e.g.,
given certain circumstances raised in a court of law, the judge will
pronounce a certain sentence), we cannot conclude that what so occurs is what
ought to occur in the sense of being what is just, or what must be the case
as a consequence of universal or natural laws. In the case of things like assessments of
justice or beauty, we need to consider, not what experience teaches us that
people will tend to say in those circumstance, but what experience teaches us
to be the established conventions for the use of those terms and whether the
normal pronouncements are indeed in sync with those conventions.
4. Did Hobbes
think that we are in control of the course of our thoughts?
5. What is a
mark and what purpose does the creation of marks serve?
6. In what
sense are universal names “indefinite?” Note: “For true and false are things not incident
to beasts because they adhere to propositions and language; nor have they
ratiocination, whereby to multiply one untruth by another.” Hobbes’ pronominal references leapfrog
across this sentence. The first “they”
refers to “true and false.” The second
refers to “beasts.”
7. What remedy
is there for the confusion into which language has fallen by the equivocal
and unthinking use of terms?
8. List the
four things Hobbes identified as being necessary for knowledge. NOTES ON THE a.
Memory,
anticipation, deliberation, and prudence in action. Hobbes claimed that when objects press on
us and communicate motions to our brains, some of these motions are very
strong. This has two effects. First, it causes the motions to travel on
from the brain towards the heart where they constrict or enhance its motion,
thus producing pleasure or pain.
Second, they tend to reverberate for a long time in the brain, and do
so very strongly, which means that they tend to occupy our memories, and
return frequently to our thoughts if we ever do stop thinking of them. Whenever these strong motions are
remembered, they are also remembered along with a memory of the pleasurable
or painful motions of the heart that followed them. A motion that is recalled as pleasurable is
a desire, as Hobbes defined the term, one that is recalled as painful an
aversion. This mechanically explains
why we tend to deliberate about objects that we feel a desire for or an aversion
towards. We tend to deliberate about
those objects that most forcefully and frequently occupy our attention
because they are such strong motions and are therefore persistent and draw
attention (attention just being a strong motion). And because they are such strong motions
they also produce pleasurable or painful effects on the heart, which makes
them be recalled as objects of desire or aversion. Strong motions in the
brain and pleasurable or painful motions of the heart are not the only
motions that are connected in our thoughts. Hobbes also noted that when our
conceptions are originally received from the senses they are never received in
isolation. Instead, they occur in the
midst of surrounding conceptions in space, and before or after other
conceptions over time. The memories of
these conceptions that are left over in the brain are likewise not single and
individual, but linked to memories of the conceptions that surrounded them so
that one cannot be remembered without drawing its neighbours after it in a
sort of chain. This accounts for how
it is that we reason temporally and geographically (Hobbes calls this “ranging”
and “reminiscence”). My present
sensations of a place pull after them the conception of that place’s past
surroundings, the surroundings of those surroundings, and so on out to the
limits of my geographical experience.
The same happens in time, where the experience of my present pulls
after it conceptions of my immediate past, the past of that past, and so
on. This even works in the forward
direction. My experience of the present pulls after it conceptions of things
that have in the past followed things like those I am presently experiencing. (We make a kind of future of the past, as
Hobbes put it.) The conceptual map of
the world and of my past positions at past times in the world locates objects
of desire or aversion, like my lost keys or the bag of milk in the
supermarket, and if I appear to be “reasoning” about how to obtain these
objects it is just that my current sensations of my own position are
constantly pulling an expanding field of conceptions of past and surrounding
positions along with them, and objects of desire appear in these fields. Once
an object of desire or aversion appears, I am naturally led to pursue the
route to obtain or avoid it. Things can also happen
in the reverse direction. Given an
object of desire or aversion to motivate an inquiry, we might either cast
about in our surroundings to attempt to find it (“ranging,” again), or try to
trace a path from where we are now to where we were earlier, until we finally
arrive at our conception of where we were at a time when we last had the
missing object. We use that to
determine where we might encounter the object again (“reminiscence” again),
or consider what means are required to bring it about or prevent it, what
means are requisite to effect those means, and so on. Deliberative action and problem-solving
typically occur in this third way. We
don’t simply choose to think about something.
A desire or aversion produces a conception of the object and that then
leads us to deliberate about how to obtain or avoid it, simply because that
conception pulls a conception of its causes and effects after it, and
attention to those conceptions of causes and effects is deliberation. In somewhat more
detail, Hobbes claimed that when an object has been constantly or regularly
connected with another object in the past it becomes more likely that
whenever a conception of the one occurs, it will be followed by a conception
of the other. (This is because our
brains contain more left-over instances of motions where the two were
connected than instances where the one occurred without the other, so the
chances are greater that they will come to mind in sequence.) The one that regularly precedes
is called the cause whereas the one that regularly follows it is called its
effect, and the act of conceiving the one upon conceiving the other is what
we call “reasoning” from cause to effect or effect to cause. Hobbes noted that this sort of “reasoning”
leads us to populate the world with unperceived objects. Seeing certain
causes occur, we anticipate that their usual effects will soon follow, even
though we do not plan on hanging around to be there when they do. Coming upon certain effects, we suppose
that their causes must have preceded them, even though we were not there to
see them at the time. And having
certain desires or aversions, we think of the causes of those desires or the
means of avoiding those aversions.
Each more remote member of the chain of conceived causes becomes an object
of desire or aversion in its own right until we reach one in our immediate
vicinity and act on it. It may look
like were are deliberating, but really desire and aversion are simply being
mechanically transmitted along a chain of associated conceptions up to a
proximate conception that motivates action. Hobbes observed that
all animals deliberate in this way about what things have tended to precede
the objects of their fear or aversion in the past, and so come to fix on
those precedent objects as things to be obtained or avoided now, in the
present. However, he thought it is a special
characteristic of human beings that they not only deliberate about what
causes are requisite to bring about their ends, but also about what effects
will follow from achieving those ends.
(Perhaps he thought that this requires greater powers of memory,
attention, and imagination than animals are capable of.) He referred to this additional activity as
prudence or foresight. It is what
keeps us from doing such things as achieving our ends through criminal
means. As he colourfully put it, the
crime, the officer, the prison, the judge, and the gallows are connected in
our imaginations. Not surprisingly,
when he turned to write his political philosophy, Hobbes placed some emphasis
on the utility of punishment as a means of deterrence from wrongdoing. Hobbes did not think that we have free will
or, consequently, that we have any ability to simply choose to do the right
thing. Society must be engineered in
such a way as to ensure that people will be caused to do the right thing, and
one way to do that is through instituting systems of reward for correct
behaviour, producing desire, and punishment for misbehaviour, producing
aversion. Regardless of whether
one considers deliberation or prudence, the chain of thought we pursue is
purely mechanical and not rational.
When we think that the best way to start the car is to find the key
and put it in the ignition, we do not do so because we have any insight into
what it is in this action that makes that effect come about. Our thoughts follow in this chain simply
because we have regularly experienced events to follow upon one another in
this way in the past. This past
experience creates a mechanical connection between the thoughts, so that they
follow one another in the imagination in the same sequence that they followed
one another in experience. It is for this reason
that Hobbes was at pains to stress that deliberation and prudence can lead us
astray. Simply because one thing has
frequently been observed after another, it does not follow that the one is
the cause of the other. Nonetheless,
the mechanical way our minds or brains work leads us to employ this fallible
method of inference, and depending on the extent of our experience, our
suppositions are more or less reliable. b.
Language and
universals. The next
task Hobbes set himself was to account for the process of rational
thought. He approached the issue in a
round-about way, by first talking about speech and words in Chapter V. Reasoning is then accounted for in Chapter
VI as an operation performed through the use of words. This is so much the case, in his opinion,
that it led him to maintain that those deaf and mute since birth could have
not very extensive reasoning abilities (Leviathan,
4.9). Speech originates from
the operation of making signs. Signs
in turn are explained by Hobbes’ previous account of deliberation and
inference from effect to cause and cause to effect. Hobbes claimed that when two things have been
constantly or regularly observed to go together, as is the case with causes
and effects, an experience of either one of them can lead us to think of the
other, due to the fact that the motions induced by these two objects in our
minds have been so strongly connected together. In effect, therefore, either object serves
as a sign inducing us to recollect the other. If you think that our
thoughts are not within our own control, and that we cannot remember anything
simply by deciding to do so, but only insofar as some motion occurs in our
brains that pulls the motion corresponding to the thing we want to remember
after it, then you can see that signs would be very useful things. An appropriately placed sign can induce us
to remember something we would otherwise not be able to remember, like a mark
on a map indicating where the treasure is buried. Hobbes illustrated this point with a story
about dogs who bury their bones but then are unable
to find them again because, he claimed, they have nothing to jog their
memories about the place where the bone was buried. More surprisingly, he talked about ewes who don’t miss one or two of their lambs because they have
no signs to remind them of exactly how many lambs they have. Ultimately, we human beings are no better
off than these animals. We cannot remember at will any more than they
can. But we can do something that
makes up in some measure for the defect: we can set up signs at certain
spots, that is, things that we have learned to associate with the things we anticipate
we will need to remember, so that when we go back to those spots, seeing the
signs will cause us to remember. These signs can be
anything: a string around the finger that we tell ourselves is a sign not to
forget to buy more milk; a mark in a tree or a cross in the ground, or an x
on a map that tells us where something is buried; and so on. But the most versatile vehicle we have for
making signs is our voices and our writing.
We make certain noises to stand for certain experiences, and teach these
noises to our children so that when they hear them in the future, they will
be reminded of certain things. We then
scrawl symbols on paper to stand for the noises and teach those symbols to
our children as well. With the use of
spoken and written signs, we can communicate our thoughts to others and put
signs of them down in places where we are sure we will find them again when
we need them. In effect, this gives us
a measure of control over our mental operations. The use of words and
other signs enables us to improve our powers of thought as well as to control
them. This chiefly occurs through the
employment of general words, or, as Hobbes called them, universal names. A
universal name is a name that is used to refer to a whole group of objects
that are observed to be similar to one another in some respect. For example,
whereas “Socrates,” “Plato,” and “Aristotle” are names of particular
individuals, “philosopher” is a name that refers to all three of these
individuals and a number of others as well — individuals who, in this case,
are similar to one another in all sharing the same occupation. As Hobbes saw it, once
we have formed universal names, we can use them to summarize, expand, and
generalize our knowledge. For example,
universal names make it possible to collect many items of knowledge together
in a way that would otherwise exceed the capacities of our powers of
discrimination or memory. An animal,
like the ewe mentioned earlier, could look at a collection of things, like
her lambs, and know that it is large or small. But a human being who knows the universal
names for numbers can know exactly how many lambs the ewe has, can write down
that number as an aid to memory, and then, by later consulting this note,
discover that the ewe has lost one of her lambs (something that she herself,
Hobbes supposed, is in no position to notice unless the number is so small
that the loss makes a significantly different appearance). Indeed, a possession of universal words
allows the person to determine things about the flock simply by performing
calculations on the words. For
example, if the lambs are standing neatly in a square formation, nine lambs
wide, and twelve lambs deep, the person can know without counting them all
individually that there must be 108 lambs in the flock. This knowledge is gained by performing a
calculation just on the words “nine” and “twelve.” Universal names do not
simply allow us to summarize and expand our knowledge in these ways. They also enable us to generalize it. Hobbes gave the example of someone learning
by experience that the interior angles of a particular triangle add up to a
straight line. One way to do this is
to measure all of the angles of the triangle with a protractor and add them
up to see that they equal 180 degrees.
But another way is with a demonstration of the sort described by But the use of
universal terms brings disadvantages as well as advantages. A universal term is a name for a whole
collection of individuals. We are
tempted to think that it is something more: the name of an essence that
exists independently of the particular individuals. This temptation arises because we tend to
think that every distinct name ought to name some distinct thing. So a general name ought to name a general
thing, rather than just many particulars.
Socrates is notorious for having made this assumption. He would ask people about the meaning of
some general term like justice or piety and then complain when they listed a
number of particular acts that are just or pious. He would demand that they identify the one
thing that makes all the just acts just or the pious acts pious. The view that there is some general thing
that all the particulars participate in passed from Socrates on to Plato and
from Plato to Aristotle, eventually emerging as the theories of sensible and
intelligible forms, essences, and real qualities presented by medieval
scholasticism. Hobbes, like most
early modern philosophers, denied the existence of forms, essences and
qualities, and he attributed the mistaken belief in such things to a
misunderstanding of the meaning of general terms. According to Hobbes, all things that exist
are particular, and since it is things that cause our conceptions, they too
must be particular (though they can become obscure and indeterminate as they
fade over time [cf. HN III.7]). Not
only do general things not exist, but it is impossible even to form a general
conception. When we hear a general
term, we always form a conception of some one of the particular objects that
the term names. This is also what we
do when we hear a particular name. The
difference between the two cases is that we appreciate that the general term
could be used to refer to any of a number of other particulars that resemble
the one we are conceiving in certain ways.
For example, hearing the term “philosopher” we may form a conception
of Socrates. This is just what we
would do if we heard the name “Socrates.”
But the difference is that we think that the former name could be
applied to conceptions of a number of other people as well, e.g. Plato or
Aristotle, whereas the latter name is only properly applied to Socrates. Consequently, when we use general terms we
grant our auditors a license to conceive any one of a collection of
individuals, and do not expect that they will conceive of just a certain
individual, as we do when we use a particular name. As Hobbes put it, if you commission a painter
to paint a “man,” you have no cause to complain if you had Socrates in mind
when you said “man” but the painter made a picture of Plato. There are other
problems that arise because of our use of general names. Often different people (or even the same
person at the same time) will end up understanding subtly different things to
be collected under the name. For
instance, some people insist that the name “man” collects all human beings
under it whereas others understand it to refer just to
male human beings. Hobbes gave the
example of the name, “faith,” which could be used to refer to the act of
placing trust in someone to do something, or to the act of assenting to
religious beliefs, or to the act of accepting someone else’s testimony
concerning a miracle or revelation (to mention just a few options). The resulting inadvertent ambiguities in
our use of terms can muddle our reasoning and confuse our discourse. (The fallacy of equivocation, for instance,
arises when someone gives an argument that employs the same general term in
two different ways in two different places, thus making the argument appear
valid when it is not.) Reflecting on this
circumstance, Hobbes remarked that understanding is the capacity to
accurately specify the conceptions that fall under a term, and is even a
capacity we share with animals. (While
animals do not use words or set up signs, some of them understand them, and
all of them are able to understand the signification of certain non-verbal
signs in a general way.) This is a
radical remark. In making it, Hobbes
was distancing himself from the Aristotelian view that the understanding (or
intellect, to use an alternative, Latin name for it) is an essentially
spiritual power, exercised by an immaterial soul that grasps universal forms
or essences apart from all matter.
(According to Book III of Aristotle’s De anima, such a power could only be exercised by an immaterial
or spiritual agent.) c.
Reasoning. With this account of
language established, Hobbes was in a position to go on to account for
reasoning (meaning, here, not practical deliberation as guided by past
experience, as discussed earlier, but a kind of deduction in accord with
logical principles.) In broad outline,
he said that when we reason we first break our experiences down into certain
simple and common elements. These
elements are simple insofar as they cannot be further broken down or
analyzed. They are common in that they
are commonly found in a large number of our experiences. The process of analysis whereby we uncover
them is one akin to subtraction.
Hobbes illustrated it with the example of seeing a person. Close up, this experience is rich and
complex in detail. But imagine you
walk backwards, away from the person.
As you do so, the person’s facial features become indiscriminate so
that, from a distance, all you can say is that there is a person there, but
not who it is. This is a kind of
subtraction. If you go yet further
back, you might not even be able to tell that you are looking at a human
being, but if you see it move, you might at least think it is an animal. More has been subtracted from your
experience. At a yet more remote
distance, all you can tell is that there is something extended and shaped on
the horizon. At this point you are
beginning to arrive at simple, common elements. Hobbes thought that
when we analyze our experience into simple, common elements, we uncover such
things as extension, shape, number, motion, colour, heat, cold, taste, smell,
and sound. All of our definitions
of terms are simply lists of various of these simple,
common elements. For example, we
define a triangle as a three-angled, plane figure. Three is a number, and the numbers are
simple, common elements. Angles are
shapes, and the shapes are simple, common elements. “Plane” means “extended in two dimensions,”
a combination of extension, a simple and common element, dimension, a mode of extension, and two, a number. Figures are collections of line segments
(again a type of shape) joined end to end to enclose a space. So the
definition of a triangle is just a collection of various simple, common
elements related to one another in a certain way. Hobbes thought that
all definitions are like this. He also thought that our definitions are
purely stipulative.
Once we have analyzed our experience into simple, common elements, we
can proceed to put those elements together in any way we please, and assign
any name we please to that combination, as long as we are explicit about what
is included and excluded from the combination, as long as we do not contradict
ourselves, and as long as we do not use the same name to refer to any other
combination of ideas. This poses a
problem. If it is up to each of us to
define universal words as we please, would this not result in a sort of
anarchy, where everyone ends up generating their own private language, and no one can talk to anyone else? Hobbes was not terribly concerned with this
possibility. As long as we carefully
and explicitly define our universal words in terms of simple, common elements
that everyone else can recognize, we will make ourselves understood. Other people may think we are using words
in a non-standard or perverse way, but they will see exactly what we are
saying from our definitions. Hobbes’ position on definition
poses another problem. If we just define terms in any way we please, how can
we be sure that we will not end up building castles in the air, and talking
about things that do not exist?
Hobbes’ answer to this question was to say that each person must judge
from their own experience whether a given definition of a term is useful or
not — that is, whether the term names any combination of simple elements that
they encounter in experience, or would like to bring into existence. But the fact that certain terms may not be
useful or may not refer to anything that we encounter in experience has no
bearing on the legitimacy of our definitions. Usefulness is one thing,
legitimacy another, and as long as the definitions are explicit and
non-contradictory, they are legitimate. Once we have properly
defined our words, we can proceed to form assertions with them, by relating
them to one another. These assertions
can be made in such a way that they are true or false simply in virtue of the
definitions of the terms involved, and independently of any reference to what
actually exists in the world. For
example, when I say that gold is malleable, what I say is true as long as
everything that is signified by the name of the subject (gold) is included
among the things that are named by the predicate (malleable). And this would be the case even if there
were no gold existing anywhere in the world.
What makes the sentence true is that the definition of the universal
name, gold, falls within the scope of the definition of the universal name,
malleable. This is why Hobbes said
that truth has nothing to do with the things that may or may not exist in the
world, but has rather to do with the sentences or affirmations we construct when
we string names together. What makes a
sentence true is the definitions of the words involved in that sentence, not
the objects it talks about. It was accordingly
very important for Hobbes that universal names be carefully defined, and that
this be done at the outset of a science, as it is
done in geometry. As noted before, the
definitions can be stipulative and arbitrary and
the worst that will happen is that the science might not end up talking about
anything that actually exists in the world.
Whether the science talks about anything that exists is something that
each individual will have to determine from their own experience. But the definitions must at all costs refer
to simple conceptions we have obtained from experience and they must explicitly
lay out what simple conceptions are included and what are excluded from the
meaning of the term. Once terms have been
carefully defined, it should be possible for us to proceed to gain knowledge
simply by thinking about what is contained in the definitions of the
terms. As Hobbes put it in Leviathan, we can “turn the reckoning
of the consequences of the things imagined in the mind into a reckoning of
the consequences of appellations.”
Otherwise put, we can turn prudential knowledge of what effects follow
from what causes in past experience into scientific knowledge of what
conclusions follow given what definitions of terms. A major change in the
operations of the mind occurs when this happens. As long as we are confined to “reckoning of
the consequences of the things imagined in the mind,” we are limited to
thinking of what objects have been connected with what other objects in our
past experience. This is a type of
“reckoning” that is intrinsically prone to error, because things that have
been observed to be connected or to happen after one another in a certain
sequence in the past may not always continue to do so in the future. But when we group kinds of things together
under universal names, and then carefully define those names and start to
“reckon” just with what follows from the definitions of those names, then we
reach conclusions that are necessarily true and universally valid. The type of
“reckoning” we engage in here is described in more detail in De corpore
as involving addition or subtraction, which Hobbes conceived to be something
that does not just happen in mathematics, but in our formulations of the
definitions of words (where we add more into or take more out of the
definition), our formulations of propositions (propositions have a subject
and a predicate, and in propositions we predicate more or less of a subject,
adding what we assert and subtracting what we deny), and our arguments and
demonstrations (where we demonstrate that something further must be asserted
or denied of a subject based on what has previously been asserted or
denied). As in arithmetic so here the
rules we follow when calculating our results are truth-generating and
truth-preserving, so that the only way we can arrive at false conclusions is
if, through human frailty, we make an error in observing the rules (as we
sometimes add up sums incorrectly). In principle, we
should be able to do this sort of “reckoning” about causes and effects as
well. This would occur when we have
studied the cause and the effect so thoroughly, and understood the simple
natures that go into their definitions so well, that we are able to calculate
in advance how and when the effect will follow from the cause. When we reason about causes and effects in
this way, our reasoning constitutes science or, as Hobbes also called it,
philosophical knowledge. Unlike
experiential knowledge, this reasoning is not “a posteriori”
or after the fact (we do not have to first see what effects follow from what
causes and then generalize from this experience), but “a priori” or knowable
in advance. From a proper analysis of
the cause we should be able to deduce what its effect will be even in advance
of seeing it happen, and likewise from a proper analysis of the effect. By philosophy is understood
the knowledge acquired by reasoning from the manner of the generation of
anything to the properties, or from the properties to some possible way of
generation of the same, to the end to be able to produce, as far as matter
and human force permit, such effects as human life requires. ... By this
definition it is evident that we are not to account as any part of it that
original knowledge called experience, in which consists prudence, because it
is not attained by reasoning, but found as well in brute beasts as in man,
and is but a memory of successions of events in times past, in which the
omission of every little circumstance altering the effect frustrates the
expectation of the most prudent; whereas nothing is produced by reasoning
correctly, but general, eternal, and immutable truth. [Leviathan
4.46.1-2, cf. De corpore
1.2] Despite the fact that
he maintained that all conceptions originate from experience, Hobbes was no
empiricist, therefore. He preferred
knowledge that has been deduced in advance or “a priori” from stipulative definitions to knowledge obtained after the
fact, by induction from past experience.
This is something that calls for further comment. Hobbes’
Empirism. At the outset of Leviathan, Hobbes declared, “there is no conception in [our
minds] [that] has not at first, totally, or by parts, been begotten upon the
organs of sense” (Leviathan
I.i.2). It is important to understand
the implications of this claim. Hobbes
was saying that all our conceptions originate from sense experience, not that
all of our knowledge is based on induction from sense experience. In other words, Hobbes was making a
psychological claim about how our conceptions arise rather than an
epistemological claim about what makes a proposition count as knowledge. The view that all our thoughts arise from
experience is called empirism. It needs to be
carefully distinguished from the view that all our knowledge is based on
induction from sense experience, which is called empiricism. Hobbes believed that
induction from experience, or “prudence” as he called it, is not the only
form of knowledge. We are also able to
analyze our experience to isolate certain simple, universal elements. And
while our representations of these elements might originate from experience,
they are just so much raw material that we can proceed to work with as we
please in constructing stipulative definitions for
terms. Once we have laid out a number
of definitions, we may proceed purely deductively, as is done in geometry, to
derive a number of propositions that are necessarily true in virtue of the
laws of logic. Like many mechanists,
Hobbes was much fonder of trying to obtain knowledge by deduction from the
supposedly first principles of the mechanical philosophy than by induction
from experience. It is in fact his
antecedent commitment to a mechanist account of everything in nature,
including human nature, that motivated Hobbes’ empirism. The
machine of the mind can only be set in motion by impacts from objects hitting
it from without. What it does must
therefore be due to the motions it has received. ESSAY QUESTIONS AND RESEARCH PROJECTS
1. Explain in
detail how Hobbes could have taken the chain of thought involved in
“ranging,” “reminiscence,” “expectation,” “conjecture,” and “prudence” to be
produced by purely mechanical operations.
Setting aside all contemporary knowledge of the workings of the brain
and central nervous system and judging just from the perspective of the time,
is this enterprise successful, or do you see difficulties with explaining
these mental phenomena purely by appeal to motions occurring in the brain and
heart?
2. Can the
enterprise of explaining the sequence of our thoughts as a consequence of
purely mechanical operations be extended to account for our use of language
and for scientific “reckoning” involving names, or is there something about
language and scientific reasoning that resists reduction to the consequences
of colliding motions in the brain?
Does Hobbes’ project of giving a mechanical account of the workings of
the mind break down when it gets to these operations?
3. Consider,
by reference to Leviathan IV-V and De corpore
VI.11-19 whether Hobbes’ rejection of universals is consistent with his views
on simple natures. Are simple natures
a kind of universal?
1. Simple
natures figure importantly in the philosophies of Bacon, Hobbes, and the
early Descartes (in his Rules for the
direction of the mind). Attempt a
history of the development and employment of this notion by philosophers in
the early modern period. |