 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode? What do you think? Occam on mental language. It's a good thing that I didn't read Mark Twain's essay The Awful German Language before learning German myself, otherwise I probably wouldn't have bothered to try. He laments the German habit of building extremely long compound words like Get er al statz vor Nettin ver samlungen and the use of grammatical case endings. When a German gets his hands on an adjective, he declines it and keeps on declining it until the common sense is all declined out of it. Then there is Twain's criticism of German nouns. As he says, every noun is either masculine, feminine, or neuter, and this has to be learned by heart since the genders seem to have been assigned more or less at random. Twain remarks, Wielhelm, it has gone to the opera. I'm with Twain on this. When I speak German, I can just about bring myself to refer to knife, spoon, and fork as it, he, and she. Whether this is more revealing of German attitudes towards gender or tableware, I've never been sure. But in my mind, I'm thinking of them as it, it, and it. The language of my thought is more sensible, stripped clean of such idiosyncrasies as grammatical gender, case, and umlauts. But is there really such a thing as a language of thought? As an American, do I not just think in English? For that matter, do I really think in language at all? The idea goes far back in the history of philosophy. In his dialogue The Theaetetus, Plato says that thinking is the soul's talking to itself. But it is William of Ockham who offers the first really well worked out theory of mental language and how it relates to spoken and written language. In developing this theory, Ockham takes his cue from Aristotle. At the beginning of his treatise On Interpretation, Aristotle says that, whereas spoken and written signs are different for different people, affections in the soul are the same for all. What he seems to have in mind is this. A German may call something a löfel, or as I call it a spoon, but we both have the same idea in our minds. Ockham would say that the two different spoken expressions, löfel and spoon, are subordinated to one and the same thing, namely a term in mental language. At the level of thought, the German and I are speaking the same language, and if we were telepaths or angels, we could even communicate in this language. In order to communicate in the more usual fashion, the German and I would formulate the same sentence mentally and would then express that sentence differently in speech or in writing. We call German and English natural languages, but according to Ockham it is really mental language that is natural. He distinguishes between two kinds of sign, natural and conventional. In the case of a conventional sign, a deliberate choice has been made which has led to an agreement whereby we use one thing to bring another thing to mind. The sign needn't be a word. Ockham uses the example of a barrel hoop hanging outside a tavern to indicate that wine may be purchased inside. Spoken languages, with the possible exception of onomatopoeias like bang or woof, are obviously conventional in this sense. According to Ockham, the signs of mental language are by contrast natural. They are the same for everyone and can signify things without depending on agreed practices or the voluntary imposition of meaning. One consequence of this is that mental language lacks the sorts of idiosyncrasies I was just talking about. Ockham notes that nouns at the level of thought have no grammatical gender. In this respect, English wins a small victory by being closer to mental language than German, or for that matter, Latin. Even if mental language did involve grammatical gender, you still wouldn't have to refer to a fork in thought as a she because mental language has no pronouns either. In general, mental terms will have only the features that are needed in order to signify or be meaningful. While the gender of a Latin noun may fall away in the language of thought, Ockham holds that its grammatical case would not because its case affects the meaning of a sentence containing the word. The difference between the function of spoon in the spoon is on the table, nominative case, and I admire the spoon's fine polish, genitive case. So that's a small victory for German. But why insist that there is a mental language at all? Again, Aristotle provides an important part of the answer. In his theory of demonstration, he had insisted that true scientific understanding always involves necessary and universal truths. As both a voluntarist and nominalist, Ockham might have been expected simply to dispense with this doctrine. Instead, he insists upon it, and is at pains to work out a way for our knowledge to satisfy Aristotle's constraints. Clearly particular things out in the world, like an individual spoon or harpo marks, cannot be objects of scientific demonstration since these are neither necessary nor universal. Besides, when I do science, I am grasping things that are true. And in a striking departure from the traditional medieval view that truth is a transcendental feature found in all things, Ockham assumes that only statements or sentences can be true. It is not, in other words, spoons that are true, but rather sentences, like, Harpo stole the spoons from the silverware cabinet. In the case of scientific knowledge, the true sentences at stake are conclusions of demonstrative proofs and it is these that are the objects of our thought. It might seem that the sentences whose truth is apprehended in science could be spoken or written ones. Why not just say that an English-speaking biologist has demonstrative understanding of the English sentence, humans are animals, while a German one understands the sentence, Menschen sind Tiere? Ockham insists that only mental sentences can do the job, and for a reason we've already seen, spoken and written language is conventional. So it can hardly offer the sort of fixed target needed for scientific understanding. Just consider the innocuous remark, Your gift was a wonderful surprise. That sentence would not be true if the English word gift shifted from its present meaning and acquired the meaning it has in German, where gift means poison. Mental language, by contrast, consists of natural signs whose signification is unchanging. To all this, one might object that Ockham is wasting his time. In light of his own voluntarism, it cannot be the case that science graphs necessary truths because for Ockham nothing about the created world is necessary. Take the fact that humans are animals. Ockham thinks that God could have chosen not to create humans. In this case, there would be no humans to be animals, so the sentence, humans are animals, would not seem to be necessarily true. Yet Ockham thinks that this sentence does express a general truth which would hold even in a world without humans. In such a human-free world, it would remain true that if there were any humans, they would be animals. He concludes that Aristotle's theory of demonstration can be retained, but only if we assume that the objects of demonstrative scientific knowledge are mental sentences. Ockham's position on this question was controversial in his own time. For one thing, there were realist thinkers like Scodas and Walter Burley who held that the objects of general scientific understanding are common or universal things out in the world. As a nominalist, Ockham of course has no truck with this idea, but his theory was also criticized by a fellow nominalist, Walter Chatton. Chatton was not prepared to admit that when we grasp a truth, we are always apprehending bits of language, mental or otherwise. This does happen occasionally, for instance if I grasp that human is a noun, since in that case I am grasping something about the term human. When I judge that humans are animals, though, I am grasping something about individual humans, not about the term human. That sounds as if it would be quite congenial to Ockham, who, as we saw last time, insists that concepts are mental acts directed towards individual things in the world. Nonetheless, he insists that when we form a judgment, we are judging that something is true and only sentences can be true. As he puts it, one cannot assent to a rock or a cow. Individual things come into the story because the sentences we are judging to be true are themselves about things in the world, namely the things to which the terms in the sentences refer. Of course, this all depends on Ockham's idea that a term in mental language just as much as a spoken word can indeed be a sign that refers to something else, which might strike us as a rather strange idea. What makes one thought the sign of a spoon, another thought the sign of a fork? This is no problem in the case of things like the barrel hoop outside the tavern or the spoken word spoon. These signify wine and spoons, respectively, thanks to agreed conventions about their meaning. But Ockham has already told us that convention plays no role in determining the signification of a mental term. What else might do the job? Two things according to Ockham. First, a mental term is caused by the thing it signifies. It is through encounters with spoons that we got to have the term for spoon in our mental language. Second, and rather mysteriously, the mental term resembles the thing it signifies. Of course, it might resemble some other things too, perhaps the mental term for spoon is also a lot like a ladle, but it resembles spoons more than it resembles anything else. One consequence of this explanation for mental signification is that you cannot have synonyms in mental language. Each mental sign is the sign that it is because it is caused by a certain sort of thing in the world and resembles that sort of thing. There can be only one mental term that is caused by spoons and resembles spoons. By contrast, in conventional languages, there can be more than one word that signify the same thing, not just in two different languages as with löfl and spoon, but also within one and the same language as with the English words gift and present. Assuming these are perfect synonyms, it is one and the same mental term that I express in spoken language by saying gift and by saying present. The reason English has two terms here where mental language has only one is according to Occam just a matter of stylistic ornamentation. In this case, a better explanation, as often with English synonyms, would be that the two words have respectively a Germanic and a Latin etymology, but obviously that would have nothing to do with signs at the level of thought either. A problem arises for Occam's view right about here. Suppose that I meet an amusing man at a party who introduces himself to me as Julius. After the party, I remark to my friend, there was this hilarious fellow at the party who was wisecracking and smoking a big cigar. Actually he reminded me of Groucho Marx. At which point my friend says, you idiot that was Groucho Marx. His real first name is Julius. You should have gotten an autograph. In this case, it seems that I was having two different thoughts, one of Julius from the party, another of Groucho Marx, the movie star. I would even have been willing to make contradictory assertions about them. Until my friend disabuses me, I would believe that I have met Julius from the party while also believing that I have never had the honor of meeting Groucho Marx in person. But Julius just is Groucho Marx. So it seems clear that I have one thought of Groucho and another thought of Julius from the party and that these must be synonymous. Yet Occam insists that there are no synonyms in mental language. It's not clear how he could solve this problem apart from insisting that, in thinking of Groucho and Julius, I am, unbeknownst to myself, actually having one and the same thought, since it is caused by the same person and resembles him more than it resembles anything else. If synonymy is ruled out in the language of thought, what about equivocation, where we have a single term that has more than one meaning? Obviously, this does happen in conventional language. A familiar example in English is that the word bank has a different meaning in the phrases bank account and river bank. German offers more spectacular examples. As Mark Twain writes, in German, Poor little weak thing of only three letters at that. Occam's explanation for synonyms was that two different signs in conventional language might express the same sign in mental language. With equivocation, the reverse happens. One in the same conventional sign, in our example, the word bank, expresses two distinct thoughts. Immediately, then, we may suspect that mental terms cannot be equivocal. After all, there is no further sort of discourse to which mental language is subordinated, so equivocation at the level of mental language could never be resolved by disambiguating at a higher level the way we disambiguated bank by referring to the distinct thoughts of a place to put money and a place for a nice riverside picnic. This is basically Occam's view. He thinks that most equivocation is caused by the vagaries of convention and would disappear in mental language. But there is an exception. As we saw in an earlier episode devoted to terminus logic, there are different ways that a term can refer to, or supposit for, things. When you just refer to a thing normally, like by saying, I dropped my spoon, this is personal supposition. But you can also use the word spoon to refer to the very notion of spoons, like by saying, a spoon is used for eating. This is simple supposition. Or you can make observations about the word spoon as when you say, spoon is a noun. This is material supposition. So here we have another kind of ambiguity. The English word spoon can signify in all three ways, and this sort of ambiguity is one that Occam is prepared to admit in mental language too. In other words, it is one and the same thought of spoon that appears in the mental equivalents of the English sentences, I dropped my spoon, and spoon as a noun. Even though in the first case I am thinking of a real spoon out in the world, personal supposition, but in the second case thinking about the mental term spoon itself, material supposition. So, it's becoming clear that it is no easy matter to say how, exactly, mental language lines up with conventional language. We would like for Occam to go systematically through the features of spoken and written language and tell us which of these features occur in mental language and which don't. Although he does make a few remarks in this direction, it seems that he may not have worked out the theory in full detail. A good example is the connotative term, which is something we mentioned last time. This is a term that refers primarily to one thing and secondarily to another. Our former example was calling Groucho's cigar a Cuban with reference to the island where it was made. Occam has quite a lot to say about connotative terms since they help him to eliminate so much of the clutter from traditional scholastic metaphysics. But scholars have debated whether there ought to be connotative terms in his mental language. Or to take another example, what about syncartic or ematic terms? These are the bits of a sentence that help establish its meaning, but without playing the role of a subject or predicate in a sentence. Thus in the statement, all spoons are metal or wooden, the words all and of are syncartic or ematic. Here the problem isn't whether such terms would appear in mental language at all. Clearly they would, since they affect the signification of the other terms and the meaning of the sentence as a whole. The problem is that it's hard to see how syncartic or ematic terms get into our mental language in the first place. Remember, things in the world cause our thoughts, and there doesn't seem to be anything out there in the world that might cause the thoughts that play a syncantagorimatic role. As Occam scholar Calvin Normore has nicely put it, the world doesn't contain ifs and cans the way it does pots and pans. Early in his career, Occam seems to think that we extract such terms from conventional language, and this sounds fairly plausible. It's from seeing how adults use words like all and if that children learn to think by using such terms. But that would be a remarkable inversion of the normal order of priority between mental and conventional language. Usually, mental language leads the way, and the job of speaking and writing is just to express what has already been thought. Another option would be that syncarticorimatic thinking is just innate. We might be hard-wired to think in terms of it, and, and but. And this would be not a function of the conventional language you speak. Americans would have the same hard-wiring, but express the same thoughts by saying wen, und, and aber. The fact that Occam says less on such matters than he might has led some to argue that we exaggerate its importance in his philosophy. I think it more likely that these are the teething problems that often come along with a theory that is more or less new. I say more or less new because Occam was certainly not the first to associate mental life with language. In addition to the passages in Plato and Aristotle mentioned at the start of this episode, there was the medieval depiction of the human mind as an image of the Trinity. Following Augustine, scholastics like Aquinas and Henry of Ghent propose that the mind forms a word within itself when it understands something, which for them is a reflection of the second person of the Trinity. For Aquinas, such a mental word can be simple or complex, just as spoken language can consist of single words or full sentences. So Occam was not engaging in radical innovation with his theory of mental language. Still, his approach was very different. For him, the crucial issues concern logic and meaning, not a theological approach to the human mind. This is why he paid unprecedented attention to the question whether thought really has all the structures and features we find in conventional language, even if he paid somewhat less attention to that question than we might like. Occam is most famous for his reductive metaphysics, as enshrined in the razor principle. But we've seen in this and the previous episode that many of his innovations had to do with the human mind. These two aspects of his thought are of course not unrelated. Having eliminated everything from the world around him apart from individual substances and qualities, Occam needed to explain how we are able to form true thoughts that seem to be about other things, like relations and universals. For this purpose, he took materials given to him by Scotus and others and devised a sophisticated theory of knowledge and the mind. Pondering this, I formed and assented to the following proposition in mental language, it would be a good idea to have an interview about Occam's philosophy of mind. Luckily for me, the external world agreed to cooperate by making it possible for me to interview Susan Brower Toland, an expert on this very topic. Join me to hear a conversation with her in conventional spoken language next time here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.