 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... A Close Shave, Occam's Nominalism William of Occam devoted the last two decades of his life to defending the Franciscan ideal of absolute poverty, and the first part of his career was also about making do with less. In the works he wrote before his fateful trip to Avignon, he wrote about a wide range of issues in theology, logic, and metaphysics. And the metaphysics he defended was deliberately impoverished. He sought to eliminate the unnecessary entities postulated by other scholastics, especially Duns Scotus. Occam's very name is synonymous with this endeavour. Even people who know nothing about medieval philosophy will probably be familiar with Occam's razor, by which people usually mean that we should not provide complex explanations when simpler ones will do. Occam himself formulates the principle in several ways. For instance, plurality is not to be posited without necessity. If you think about it, crediting this to Occam as if it were a brilliant innovation is a bit odd. It's not as if philosophers before his time had revelled in deliberately postulating as many entities as possible for no good reason. Admittedly, some thinkers, like the late antique Neoplatonists, seem to have had a taste for the Baroque, but even they were at pains to give arguments for each entity they introduced into their systems. As for Occam's contemporaries, they would readily have agreed with him that it is bad philosophical policy to posit superfluous principles or beings. In fact, John of Reading, an opponent of Occam and follower of Duns Scotus's teachings, called this guideline Scotus's Rule. So anyone who tells you that Occam was the first to praise the virtues of metaphysical simplicity with his razor principle is telling a barefaced lie. Yet Occam deserves his reputation. His expert metaphysical trimming showed contemporaries the austere countenance of nominalism. Scotus's signature move was the drawing of subtle distinctions to show that there are more things than might meet the eye. Thus the individual substance is revealed on closer inspection to consist of a common nature contracted by a particularizing singularity, the so-called axiety. Occam's signature move is the reverse, show how to get equally good results with fewer metaphysical assumptions. It's important to bear this in mind. For the most part, he is indeed after the same results as his realist opponents. For instance, Occam is not out to unmask universal generalizations as mere illusions. Like other scholastics, he embraces the Aristotelian principle that science establishes universal truths. His point is that we can account for such truths without postulating any universal things or common natures. The world is made up of individuals and nothing else. In fact, Occam even thinks that he can get by with a reduced number of individuals. Medieval scholastics cut their teeth on Aristotle's introductory logical treatise The Categories. They standardly assumed that there are individual entities that fall under all ten of the categories named by Aristotle. There would be not only individual substances, like Groucho Marx, but also individual qualities like the black of his mustache, individual quantities like the length of his cigar, individual places like his location in Fredonia, individual actions like the waggling of his eyebrows, individual relations like his being Harpo's brother, and so on. Occam's masterpiece, the Summa Logikae, devotes great effort to demolishing this picture. For him, the world consists of nothing but substances and their qualities. Those of us who didn't cut our teeth on Aristotle might instead say things and their properties. Of course, we talk as if there were quantities, actions, places, relations, and so on, but we can always translate such talk into statements about substances and qualities. Not to be outdone by Scotus, Occam introduces a distinction of his own to show how this can be done. He contrasts absolute and connotative names. An absolute name signifies something directly and unproblematically. Occam's example is that animal refers to all animals. A connotative name, by contrast, refers to two things, one directly and one indirectly. His example is white, which refers primarily to a thing that has whiteness in it, and secondarily to the whiteness in the thing. In English, a better example might be calling Groucho's cigar a Cuban because it comes from Cuba. Though you name it after a relation it bears to its country of origin, you are still just talking about a substance, namely the cigar. Occam's strategy, then, is to show that expressions in all ten categories, apart from substance and quality, are connotative terms. When we speak of a cigar as long, it may seem that there must be a real length in the cigar. This would be an individual that falls under the category of quantity. But in fact, Occam says, speaking of quantity just means that the parts of a substance are at a certain distance from one another. It would be a hassle to go around saying things like, one end of Groucho's cigar is so distant from the other end that he'll need all day to smoke it. So we save time by using the connotative term long to refer to the disposition of its parts. This is a nice illustration of the razor principle at work. Occam hasn't argued here that it is absurd to posit a really existing length in the cigar. He's just showed us that we don't need to. Length is superfluous, so we eliminate it from our metaphysical inventory of the world. Having said that, Occam does also give arguments against accepting individuals in the categories apart from substance and quality. Take the category of relation. He does apply the razor strategy here, explaining how we can get by without relations. Because that thinking of the wonderful mirror scene from Duck Soup, we say that Groucho and Harpo look quite similar. Occam would say that we don't need to postulate a relation of similarity here, we can just say they both have qualities of the same type. But he also gives an argument against the very coherence of existing relations. If the relation of brotherhood between Groucho and Harpo were a real thing, then it stands to reason that God and His omnipotence could create this relation without creating Groucho and Harpo. Their relation of brotherhood would then exist in the absence of the brothers, which is clearly absurd. Actually, Occam concedes that we do need really existing relations for certain theological purposes, notably to account for the Trinity. But within the natural order, we can do without them. An interesting example, by the way, of a medieval philosopher refusing to tailor his general metaphysics to fit Christian doctrine. With these arguments, Occam has shaved away most of the individuals recognized in previous scholastic metaphysics. But when we call him a nominalist, it's really because of his mission to remove universals from the face of the earth. Occam considered a belief in universals to be a crass mistake, in fact, as he puts it, the worst error in philosophy. If there were a universal humanity in all four Marx brothers, for instance, then it would have to be in more than one place at the same time. Also, it would be impossible for God completely to destroy Groucho Marx, not just because of his immortal place in the history of cinema, but because when God tried to annihilate Groucho, the part of Groucho that is universal humanity would have to survive. Thus, Occam proclaims his agreement with Avicenna, who had insisted that natures are universal only in the mind. Now, Scodas claimed to agree with Avicenna too. Characteristically, he drew a distinction between the universal humanity, which is indeed in our minds, and the common nature that is shared by all humans and is contracted to be individual in each of them. Occam is not impressed. He thinks Scodas's proposal boils down to saying that one and the same thing can be both common and individual, which is absurd. But Occam's realist opponents had good reasons for their view. One of the most important had to do with knowledge. There do seem to be features shared in common by all humans, and when we have knowledge of these features, our understanding is not directed at any particular human. When I think that humans are rational, I am not thinking that Groucho is rational, that Chico is rational, or, least of all, that Harpo is rational. I am thinking that rationality belongs to human nature itself. Again, it is not Occam's mission to deny the possibility of such knowledge. Instead, he shows that it is unnecessary to postulate real universals or common natures to explain the universal knowledge we do genuinely have. He recalls another distinction from Scodas between two kinds of cognition, two ways of grasping things. On the one hand there is intuitive cognition, which is the sort involved when you grasp a particular thing, as when seeing a particular human, like Groucho. On the other hand, there is abstractive cognition, which as its name implies, requires abstracting away from any particular human to a general idea of humanity. For the realists, abstractive cognition is what allows us to have knowledge of the common features of things. When you grasp humanity as a general idea, you do so by having what was standardly called an intelligible species, a representation in the mind of humanity as such. This should remind us of Roger Bacon and his use of species to explain vision and other forms of sensation. There too, we were said to grasp things through the possession of a species that represents to us the things we are seeing. Intelligible species perform the same role at the level of universal thought. When you consider human nature in itself, you are enabled to do so by having the intelligible species of humanity in your mind, just like you would be able to see a human by having a visual species in your eye. Intelligible species were regularly invoked in scholastic epistemology by Aquinas, Scotus, and others. Now, despite retaining the contrast between intuitive and abstractive cognition, Occam is going to reject this whole picture. For starters, he dispenses with the idea that we need to have a species of whatever we understand. Like his fellow Franciscan Peter Olivey, Occam worries that the use of such species would obstruct our direct access to the things we know. Even when I do something like remember seeing Groucho yesterday, I am not somehow using a mental picture of Groucho, I'm thinking directly of Groucho. Furthermore, if I needed to use a representative image or species to think about something, how could I ever be sure that the image accurately represented the thing I want to think about? But what happens when we are thinking of humans in general, rather than of Groucho in particular? Scotus had argued that we need to have an intelligible species in the mind in order to do this. Otherwise, we would have only our remembered images of individual humans and could only think about Groucho, Chico, Harpo, and so on, never universally, about human nature as such. Occam, of course, disagrees. Postulating such a species is superfluous and so violates the razor principle. In fact, all cognition involves grasping particulars. When you engage in abstractive cognition, in other words when you think at a universal level, you are simply thinking indifferently of all the individual humans. This actually seems pretty plausible. If I say the Marx brothers are hilarious, I am not postulating some common nature, we could call it Marxism if that name weren't already taken, and saying that it is part and parcel of this nature to be hilarious. I just mean that each of the Marx brothers, taken singly, is hilarious. Well, maybe not Zeppo. Just so, when I entertain the familiar example of a true proposition in Aristotelian science, human is rational, I am just thinking that each particular human is capable of reason. Occam is cautioning us not to be misled by the surface grammar of the statement into thinking that there is such a thing as humanity which has a special relationship with rationality. Rather, there are just particular humans. Since he develops his theory against the background of terminus logic, Occam puts the point by insisting that the word human, in a sentence like human is rational, just stands in for, or supposits for, individual humans. In fact, it stands in for all individual humans, past, present, and future. This brings us to another difference between intuitive and abstractive cognition. Suppose I see that Groucho is shooting an elephant in his pajamas. How it got in his pajamas, I'll never know. Here I am having an intuitive cognition, which among other things involves judging that Groucho exists. But abstractive cognition is entirely silent on the question of existence. Thinking about the nature of humans doesn't involve judging that there are any humans, though of course you wouldn't be in a position to think about human nature if you had never had any direct acquaintance with a really existing human. To put the same point in Occam's terms, abstractive cognition depends on first having had some relevant intuitive cognitions. One reason that there is such a close connection between intuitive cognition and existence is that each intuition is the intuition that it is simply because it is caused by a given thing out in the world. Seeing Groucho counts as an intuition of Groucho because it was caused by him. Well, that's usually the case. Occam does recognize deviant cases of intuition that are not caused by existing things. For one thing, he suggests that we could be directly aware that something does not exist, a thesis heavily criticized by several later scholastics. For another thing, always mindful of God's untrammeled omnipotence, it occurs to Occam that God could give someone intuitive cognition of something that is not really present. He could make you see Groucho Marx in front of you right now, even though Groucho has been dead for decades, a miracle I personally would be very excited to experience. This however is the exception that proves the rule, since the cognition you have in such a case is miraculously the same as the one you would have if Groucho were in front of you, that is, the one that would be caused by the real Groucho. In the more normal situation of course, it is through encounters with real individual things that we build up our store of general concepts. Having experienced particular humans, I construct for myself a general notion of humanity. Occam's views about the status of these general concepts developed over the course of his career. To understand his earlier view, we need to look at one last bit of scholastic terminology, which unfortunately is rather confusing for a speaker of modern English. The Scholastics referred to things that have real existence out in the world as being subjective, and things represented in the mind as objective, so pretty much the reverse of how we would use these terms. Way back when we looked at Anselm, we saw a nice anticipation of this distinction. To warm us up for his ontological argument, he asked us to compare the idea of a painting in the artist's mind with the same painting existing in reality. In the later Scholastic terminology, the idea in the artist's mind would be the painting as objectively existent, whereas the real painting would exist subjectively. While the painting might exist in both ways, some things have only objective existence in the mind and no subjective or real existence. For Occam, these unreal things would include universals, since there is no common or universal nature of humanity out in the world. In his early works, he expresses this with the notion of a fictum, or in plural, ficta. The ficta are mental constructs or representations which we generate for ourselves after encountering things in the world. The mistake of Scotus and others was to think that common natures are real things, whereas in fact they are unreal ficta. Of course, the idea of something that exists in a way but without being real is rather strange. If Occam was willing to postulate such items early on, it was because he thought that they were absolutely needed to explain the way that we reason. After all, I must be thinking about something when I think that humans are rational. Since I am not thinking about any particular humans, I must be thinking about my concept of humans, which is one of these ficta. But Occam was about to be shaved with his own razor. Another Scholastic thinker, a fellow student named Walter Chatton, convinced Occam that the ficta are superfluous. We can do without them by saying that the act of cognition itself serves as the concept. And you can see why Occam was willing to be convinced by Chatton's proposal. His early theory of cognition involved three kinds of entities, mentally constructed concepts or ficta, the things in the world that prompted us to form these concepts, and acts of cognition. With Chatton's help, Occam now gets this down to just two items, things in the world and mental acts. Even better, the item that has been eliminated is the one that looked rather fishy, metaphysically speaking, with this odd status of being objectively existent but unreal. The acts, by contrast, are like a vegetarian meal at a seafood restaurant, not fishy at all. They are just individual qualities belonging to a mind. And as we know, Occam is happy to admit the real existence of individual qualities. The question is whether it makes sense to say that concepts are just mental acts. For the later Occam, the answer is an emphatic yes. Mental acts signify and resemble things in the world, just like ficta were supposed to do in the earlier theory. So mental acts can be brought together to form the propositions studied in logic. But this may seem to present him with a difficulty. How can logic, which analyzes the relations between bits of language like terms and propositions, apply to these so far rather mysterious mental acts? Very nicely, as it turns out. Logic is directly relevant to the realm of the mental, according to Occam, because for him, thought itself is linguistic. Why did he think this, and what would it even mean to imagine a mental language? Do we really think in words, phrases, sentences, or even whole syllogisms? I believe I'll sentence you to two weeks of waiting before you find out, in the next episode of The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.