On mentoring. A response to Katarina Mihaljević

Professional philosophy has a reputation for protecting harassers in their midst. Although John Searle’s assaults are said to have been known since 2004, it was only this year that he has finally been sanctioned, a bit. Fostering such perpetrators not only speaks of an enormous sexism in the institutions in question, it also affects the normal or desirable relations between faculty members and students. Thus, it is not surprising that many public discussions about “the profession” revolve around the problematic aspects such as the effects of power imbalance. So much so that one might almost forget that faculty-student relations are not only poisonous but might even provide some remedies, also against the problematic culture in our discipline. Katarina Mihaljević argues that mentorship is crucial in education and even in combatting sexism. At the same time she points out that the precise nature of mentorship remains unclear: often neither students nor faculty members seem to have a clear idea of what to expect. In what follows, I would like to reflect on mentorship and its elusive nature.

During my years as a graduate student, mentorship wasn’t part of the educational programme. I just asked two of my professors for guidance and was very lucky in that they responded in an encouraging manner and supported me greatly and continuously. In my faculty at Groningen, mentoring forms a clear part of the graduate education. But that does of course not determine the nature of mentoring. According to one of many definitions, mentoring is a “process for the informal transmission of knowledge, social capital, and the psychosocial support perceived by the recipient as relevant to work, career, or professional development …” While at least some of us are trained to impart knowledge, it’s harder to get clear on what it means to transmit social capital and to lend support. A “code of conduct”, as Katarina envisions it, might provide a framework, but it can’t get to the heart of the matter, simply because questions of social capital and support are highly personal. In this sense, it is no surprise that the “rights and duties” remain and perhaps even have to remain vague. Nevertheless, there are a few elements that form a recurrent part of the conversations I have with students. In what follows, I’d like to list those that I find crucial:

Contextualising (content): No matter whether I am formally determined to be someone’s mentor or just happen to discuss a paper, I often begin by trying to figure out what the goals of students are. Why, for instance, does she want to write a certain paper? Is it related to a continuous set of interests or just falling out of the actual course work? Answers to this question help me understanding the philosophical drive of the student and, in turn, enable me to show a particular research question in its relation to wider issues inside and outside philosophy. My hope is that a particular piece of work makes sense to the student in a wider scope.
Contextualising (career): Where do you want to go with this piece of work? That is often my next question. Sometimes I receive an incredulous stare, but the point is to relate the actual work to wider life goals. Does someone see themselves as an academic or outside the university? And what difference might the work on a particular topic make? Sometimes people burn for a topic; others might wish to foster certain skills or just challenge themselves. – The idea is not to tailor the essay accordingly, but rather to get a sense of what matters to the student and whether I can say anything helpful at this point. If this goes well, the best outcome is some sort of confident projection of the student’s goals into the future. Ideally, the student seriously begins to see herself in a certain professional context or environment.
Understanding uncertainties: Obviously, this projection is not an attempt to fix the future. It’s about seeing obstacles and paths around them. To make this work, I try to connect to my own experiences as a student. This not in order to end up saying something like “do it my way”, but in order to understand: How would I have felt with such goals? How would I have felt about telling them to my supervisor? It helps me seeing the courage and worries involved in this projection. In some moments, I can then honestly say “oh, that would have worried me”, or “I would have loved to do something like that” or “faced with this, I wanted to do x, but never dared to.” Let’s face it: most worries are about performing well and how to get there. But in the background there is a larger story about belonging to a community. The crucial point, for me at least, is not to come up with recipes but to remind myself and others that it is part of the game to have worries or uncertainties. Mirroring that this is normal might help, and also put things into a balanced picture in line with other parts of life.
Advising: The forgoing items are mainly elements that figure in listening, “active listening”, still involving some talking on my part. Where does the advice come in? Ideally, students give themselves much advice while responding to questions. Most things suggest themselves when people unpack their ideas. One can steer this by asking things like “Have you asked yourself this?”, “Have you heard about that [book, conference, person]?”, “If you do x, you might run into the following problem.” – The idea is to encourage students to articulate their ideas in the strongest possible ways, to make them see objections, and show them the context in which they can be placed. This has a scholarly and a social dimension. Over and above the discussion of ideas, I find it crucial to impart an understanding of the network of people and institutions involved. Ideally, students feel encouraged to approach people whose ideas they find interesting, be it during talks, at conferences, summer schools or via mail. If students begin see themselves as a real part of the conversation I have reached one of the crucial goals in mentoring.
Limits: What I find equally crucial is to point out the limits of this process. Ultimately, I can’t do or help much. I cannot make promises that go far beyond the words spoken in such meetings. Of course, one can and should act on students’ behalf, be it putting them in touch with colleagues or relevant authorities, write a reference or help settle administrative processes. But that’s about it.

All of these steps are fairly elusive because they depend on the personalities of the people involved. This means that the crucial outcomes (or limits) of mentoring ultimately depend on the mutual trust that people have. That’s why students should feel free to turn away from a given mentor and turn to someone else if they wish. Personally, I always found it helpful to talk regularly to two people: one person who is more involved in the topics I care about; another person who might be more efficient when it comes to settling formal or even career-related issues.

Countering sexism, then, as Katarina envisions it, is ultimately an issue of fostering trust, confidence, and empowering ways of dealing with uncertainties. It should go without saying that this can only flourish in a climate in which perpetrators of any kind do not enjoy any protection. That is true of individual people and institutions as well as the wider discipline. But there is also a lot of sexism below the threshold of harassment. While good mentoring might be part of a remedy against this, mentoring is always related to a certain status quo. If mentoring is a form of guidance for going along with that status quo, it would involve strategies of coping with forms of sexism. It is here that I see the limits of mere mentoring. Countering sexism cannot mean gaslighting people into living with it.

How is the Western philosophical canon sexist?*

My daughter Hannah clearly begins to realise that she is a female person. Half a year ago she turned two, and by now she has been pointing out that certain people are men and women for quite a while. At the moment she is using these concepts quite playfully: so while she might at one time say that she is a “girl” (certainly not a baby!), at other times she’ll also claim that she is a “good boy”. I don’t know what goes into the mastery of these concepts, but a fresh look at some canonical philosophers like Aristotle, Albert the Great and Hegel made me worry. So far, I mostly tended to think of condescending remarks about women as inconsistencies or aberrations that might be ‘typical of the time or context’. But what if they are not mere inconsistencies? What if they are part and parcel of their philosophical theories?

As is well known, Aristotle conceived of women as defective males. Calling something defective, has normative and teleological implications. Accordingly, the generation of women is not seen as the best or intended outcome. In other words, it seems that if natural processes always were to run perfectly, there wouldn’t be any women. This idea plays out in number of ways, but the upshot is that women count as performing less well in everything that matters in our lives. Moreover, these defects are related to metaphysical notions. Women are seen as connected to the material, while only men are truly capable to indulge in the life of the mind. If you know a little bit about Western philosophy, you’ll probably know that the mind or intellect is pervasively construed as superior to the material. Now if your theory also tells you that women are more bound to the material (and to things related to matter, such as emotion etc) than the intellectual, your theory implies that women are inferior to men. In this context, the idea of women as defective males might sound straightforward. But is sexism restricted to such contexts? I doubt it. As Christia Mercer puts it in an intriguing article: “It is almost impossible to exaggerate the influence these ancient ideas had on the history of Western thought.”

Not surprisingly, then, there was and is a lively debate among feminist historians of philosophy as to whether the Aristotelian notions of matter and form are inherently related to the notions of female and male respectively. Thus, the question is whether the concepts of matter and form depend on the concepts of being female and male. If yes, Aristotelian hylomorphism would be inherently or intrinsically sexist. And what if not? Would Aristotle’s philosophy be absolved? – While this question seems important, I think it is too strongly put and might distract us from the issue at hand. The notion of an inherent relation strikes me as a red herring. As I see it, the relation between materiality and being female cannot be shown to be an inherent one, unless you have a very special metaphysical theory. But that doesn’t mean that the concepts are not intimately related in the actual historical theories. In other words, Aristotelian metaphysics is still sexist through and through, even if matter is not identified as inherently female.

As I said in the beginning, it might be tempting to just push the sexism aside as an inconsistent aberration. Corrected by contemporary insights, you might say that Aristotelian philosophy is great as long as you ignore some factual errors about women. Yet, I doubt we can separate the sexism that easily from Aristotelianism or other philosophies. I began to realise this when considering Albert the Great’s defense of the Aristotelian view of women. Albert the Great and other Aristotelian thinkers clearly defend the idea of women as defective males. What is striking is that they continue to maintain the idea even in the light of fairly obvious objections. One such objection is this: If women are defective males, then every women born is to be seen as going against the perfection of natural processes. If this is correct, then why are there so many women in the first place? As Evelina Miteva pointed out in a recent paper (at the IMC 2019), Albert explains the abundance of women by claiming that the generation of nobler and more complex beings (= men) requires the concurrence of many external conditions. In other words, the more perfect the intended product, the more can go wrong in the production. And since natural processes are often obstructed by a lack of required conditions, we can explain that so many women are born, even if their generation goes against natural design. Put simply, the reason that there are so many women is that so many things go wrong. If this is correct, then one might say that Albert is adamant to maintain the sexist ideas in Aristotle’s philosophy and show why they are consistent. Put more drastically, Aristotelianism can be defended by rendering women as subhuman.

While Albert the Great’s defence of Aristotelianism is clearly sexist, not everyone who endorses Aristotle can be justly taken as explicitly endorsing sexist beliefs. But sexism has not to be explicitly endorsed in order to gain ground. This is what makes sexism and other ideologies structural. Given the prominence of Aristotle, the sexist ideology might be sufficiently served already by not renouncing the doctrine of the defective male. The point is this: A canonical doctrine retains its sexist impact as long as the sexist elements are not explicitly excluded. Arguably, this kind of implicit sexism might be said to be even more pervasive. Basically, it resides in the conjunction of two claims: (1) that the intellect is more dignified than the material and (2) that women are more tied to the material (or emotional etc.) than to the intellectual realm. I honestly wonder when these claims have been explicitly challenged or renounced for the first time.

If it is true that these claims largely went unchallenged, then much of the history of Western philosophy coincides with a history of sexism. Arguably, this does not mean that all Western philosophers are sexists. Firstly, the positions of the philosophers I alluded to (and others) can be said to be much more subtle, and not reducible to the claims I ascribed to them. Secondly, some philosophers, when pressed, might expressly have rejected or do reject sexist beliefs. What can we say in the light of these facts? The point is perhaps not so much that all these philosophers endorse sexist beliefs. The point is rather that they continue to endorse ideas that come out of sexist convictions. As Crispin Sartwell recently claimed, the history of Western philosophy might even be seen as justifying white supremacy. While I am quite hesitant about a number of Sartwell’s historical claims, I still think his piece suggests an important lesson.** If one accepts the general line of argument in his piece, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the philosophers in question are all white supremacists. It just means that they build on ideas that might have served and can continue to serve as a pertinent justification. But even if they aren’t supremacists, this doesn’t mean that the justifying function of their ideas can be cast aside as a mere inconsistency (at least not without scrutiny).

Analogously, one might argue that not all Western philosophers are sexist. But this doesn’t mean that our canon is off the hook by declaring that the sexist parts can simply be cancelled out. Certain ideas continue to justify sexist assumptions, even if no one expressly were to endorse sexist ideas. Once you notice how authors such as Albert twist and turn the ideas to justify the sexism of Aristotle, you can’t unsee the connections that hold these ideas together. If we don’t expose and disown these connections, we continue to carry these assumptions along as canonical. Saying that they are merely inconsistent outliers (that can be ignored while the rest of the theory might be retained) just seems to ingrain them more deeply. – Why? – Because then the justifying connections between sexist and other claims remain unchallenged and continue to pervade our canon.

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* Earlier, the post was called “Is the Western philosophical canon sexist?” Désirée Weber convinced me to change the title to its current form.

** Addendum: Speaking as a historian of philosophy, I find Sartwell’s piece wanting. Why do I find it interesting? I think it makes (but partly also exemplifies) crucial points about the use and abuse of ideas, and more generally I’m wondering whether there are limits to what we can do with an idea. — Currently, much of the so-called Enlightenment ideas are used on a newly populated battlefield: On the one hand, there are whig ‘historians’ like S. Pinker who argue that the Enlightenment is all about progress. On the other hand, there is someone like Sartwell making the contrary claim. – Professional historians like to discard both appropriations, for good reasons. But the appropriations won’t go away. On the contrary, they are very powerful. –– Moreover, I also think we should be careful when assessing a piece of “public philosophy” by means of regular academic standards. Sartwell explicitly acknowledges the limits and polemical nature of his piece.

Custom or climate? Trying to contextualise Hume’s account of group mentality

What is it that determines humans in their opinions and emotions? Hume distinguishes between two kinds of causes: (1) physical causes such as the air and climate; (2) moral causes such as custom and education. In his essay On National Characters (1748), Hume clearly opts for the latter:

“If we run over the globe, or revolve the annals of history, we shall discover every where signs of a sympathy or contagion of manners, none of the influence of air or climate.”

What is so special about Hume’s answer? – In my book on Socialising Minds, the first draft of which I am currently revising, I argue that Hume’s rejection of physical causes as determinants of human mentalities is owing to Hume’s intersubjective understanding of the mind. Much of what we think and feel depends on other surrounding minds and not simply on a shared physical environment. However, in trying to come to grips with Hume’s account I noticed that his reply should be read as part of an intricate debate about the causes of the mentality of groups. In what follows, I’d like to raise a few questions about the intriguing context of the debate that I think Hume is participating in.

How, then, should we contextualise what Hume is saying? – As might seem obvious, Hume distinguishes two positions in line either with physical or moral causes. Readers of his Treatise will recognise his opting for sympathy and thus moral causes as an endorsement of his theory of sympathy. But what is he rejecting? As I already noted earlier, he rejects the so-called climate theory. The climate theory explains the character of people by reference to the climate and physical conditions of a certain region. Deriving from Hippocratic origins, this theory was used to explain racial and national differences with regard to politics in ancient, medieval and early modern times. In the middle ages, the climate theory was increasingly linked to the Galenic theory of humoral complexion. Thus, the physical causes that are supposed to shape our characters or temperaments can be married with hereditary lines of explanation. Thus, northern Europeans and women counted as phlegmatic, jews and heretics counted as melancholic.

Now why does Hume reject this theory? On the face of it, Hume’s choice of explanation seems to run counter to his distinction between naturally superior and inferior races (see Eric Schliesser’s pertinent post). I can’t go into this now, but the climate theory seems to have way more resources for racist distinctions than an account based on education and sympathy.

Now whose version of climate theory is Hume rejecting? An immediate contemporary target might even have been Montesquieu who had tried to explain almost all social aspects through climate in his L’Esprit des lois, which came out in 1748, thus in the same year as Hume’s essay. However, Hume seems to appeal to a much earlier discussion for his rejection. Referring to Strabo’s Geographica (23 AD), Hume writes:

“Strabo, lib. ii. Rejects, in a great measure, the influence of climates upon men. All is custom and education, says he. It is not from nature, that the Athenians are learned, the Lacedemonians ignorant, and the Thebans too, who are still nearer neighbours to the former. Even the difference of animals, he adds, depends not on climate.”

Hume clearly sides with Strabo in declaring that custom and education are the crucial factors shaping our mentalities. In fact, one might say that Hume, paraphrasing Strabo, sums up his own philosophy in a nutshell. Strabo is quoted about 25 times and forms an important source for many of Hume’s historical considerations. What Hume’s Treatise brought to the table is a refined understanding of the transmission of custom through the mechanism of sympathy. But it is interesting to see that the perhaps central elements that, according to Hume, shape our whole mental lives, i.e. custom and education, are introduced in opposition to the climate theory.

What this leads me to is not an answer but a bunch of questions: What were Hume’s reasons for rejecting the climate theory, while contemporaries still embraced it? What version of the theory did he have in mind? And why did he, unlike Montesquieu, see it in opposition to custom? – At least the first of these questions might be answered with reference to Hume’s observation that people can display mentalities in stark contrast to what the climate and other physical conditions would have us predict. In his History, Hume writes:

“Even at the end of the sixteenth century, when every christian nation was cultivating with ardour every civil art of life, that island, lying in a temperate climate, enjoying a fertile soil, accessible in its situation, possessed of innumerable harbours, was still, notwithstanding these advantages, inhabited by a people, whose customs and manners approached nearer those of savages than of barbarians.”

Framing employment in higher education, and father’s day

If you work in (higher) education, you will know some version of the following paradox: It takes the ‘best’ candidates to educate people for a life in which there is no time for education. – What I mean is that, while we pretend to apply meritocratic principles in hiring (of researchers and instructors), there is not even a glimpse of such pretence when it comes to the education of our children. If we were to apply such principles, we would probably expect parents (or others who take care of children) to invest at least some amount of time in the education of their children. But in fact we expect people to disguise time spent with or for their children. So much so that one might say: your children live in competition with your CV. – There are many problems when it comes to issues of care and employment, but in what follows I’d like to focus especially on the role of time and timing.

A few days ago I read a timely blog post over at the Philosophers’ Cocoon: “Taking time off work / the market for motherhood?”. The crucial question asked is whether and, if yes, how to explain “the gap” in productivity. Go and read the post along with the comments (on this blog they tend to be worth reading, too) first.

For what it’s worth, let me begin with my own more practical piece of advice. If a gap is visible, I would tend to address it in the letter and say that a certain amount of time was spent on childcare. Why? I’m inclined to think of cover letters in terms of providing committee members with arguments in one’s favour. If someone says, “look, since his PhD, this candidate has written three rather than two papers”, someone else can reply with “yes, but this difference can be explained by the time spent on childcare”. Yet, this advice might not be sufficient. If candidates are really compared like that, people might not sufficiently care about explanations. All I would hope for is that providing arguments or explanations for gaps should at least not hurt your chances.

However, this does not counter the structural disadvantages for women and mothers in our institutions. You might object that there are now many measures against such disadvantages. While this might be true, it also leads to problematic assumptions. Successful women now often face the suspicion of being mere beneficiaries of affirmative action. This could entail that awards or other successes for women might be assessed as less significant by their peers. (Paradoxically, this could increase the prestige of awards for male peers since they count as harder to get in a climate of suspicion.) But the problems start before any committee member ever sets eyes on an application. What strikes me as crucial is the idea that childcare is construed as a gap. Let me mention just three points:

Construing childcare as a gap incentivises treating it as a waste of time (for the stakeholders). But this approach ignores that employees in higher education are representatives of educational values. Treating childcare and, by extension, education as a waste of time undermines the grounds that justify efforts in education in the first place.
You would expect that work in higher education requires certain skills, some of which are actually trained by taking care of children. Attentiveness, constant interpretational efforts, openness to failure, patience, time management, dealing with rejection, you name it. While I’m not saying that parents are necessarily better teachers or researchers, it’s outright strange to play off one activity against the other.
At least in the field of philosophy, most work products are intrinsically tied to the producer. It’s not like you could have hired Davidson to write the work published by Anscombe. Unlike in certain examination practices, our texts are not crafted such that someone’s work could be replaced anyone else. So all the prestige and quantification cannot stand in for what they are taken to indicate. Thus, comparing products listed on a CV is of limited value when you want to assess someone’s work.

That said, the positive sides of parenthood are often seen and even acknowledged. At least some fathers get a lot of credit. Strangely, this credit is rarely extended to mothers, even less so in questions of employment conditions. Ultimately, the situation reminds me of the cartoon of a sinking boat: the people on the side that is still up and out of the water shout in relief that they are lucky not to be on the side that sank. Yet, educating children is a joint responsibility of our society. If we leave vital care work to others, it’s more than cynical to claim that they didn’t keep up to speed with those who didn’t do any of the care work. Comparing CVs obscures joint responsibilities, incentivising competition where solidarity is due. Such competition sanctions (potential) mothers in particular when excluding them from jobs in higher education or the secure spots on what might turn out to be the Titanic.

Experiencing humility: hope for public debate?

When I was young (yes, stop snickering), when I was young I was often amazed at people’s knowledge. Most people had opinions about everything. The government issued a statement about a new policy and my father or one of my uncles already knew that the policy wouldn’t work. This admiration didn’t stop during my adolescence: I remember listening in awe when friends saw through all the motives and consequences of political decisions. How did they figure it all out? – Well, they probably didn’t. Or not much of it. I don’t want to sound condescending but most of us probably don’t understand the implications of political decisions all that well. Yet, judging by the readiness and vehemence of our contributions to public debate, most of us do at least give the impression of relative expertise. If this is correct, there is a disproportion between actual understanding and confidence in our opinions. In what follows, I’d like to suggest that amending this disproportion might hold the key to improving public debate.

According to Kees van den Bos and other social scientists,* this disproportion is one of the crucial factors leading to polarisation in public debate. However, the inverse also seems to be true: if people are asked to explain how certain policies work and experience that they understand these policies less well than they thought, they are likely to exhibit more moderation in their views of these policies. Fernbach et al. (2013) write:

“Across three studies, we found that people have unjustified confidence in their understanding of policies. Attempting to generate a mechanistic explanation under-mines this illusion of understanding and leads people to endorse more moderate positions. Mechanistic explanation generation also influences political behavior, making people less likely to donate to relevant advocacy groups. These moderation effects on judgment and decision making do not occur when people are asked to enumerate reasons for their position. We propose that generating mechanistic explanations leads people to endorse more moderate positions by forcing them to confront their ignorance. In contrast, reasons can draw on values, hearsay, and general principles that do not require much knowledge.”

So while I might become increasingly stubborn if you ask me to give reasons for p, I might become more moderate if you ask me to explain how p works. According to the researchers, this is the case because in the latter scenario I am humbled by experiencing the limits of my knowledge. I guess it won’t be too much to ask you to imagine examples. Asking how certain policies of, say, traffic regulation or migration work in practice might even lead politicians themselves to moderation.

What precisely is it that leads to moderation? My hunch is that the effect is produced by experiencing humility. This means that it is vital that the subject in question experiences their lack of knowledge. It is probably no good if I am told that I lack knowledge. (In fact, I believe that this might instil resentment.) The point is that I realise my lack in my own attempt at an explanation. So what I would like to emphasise is that the moderating effect is probably owing to experiencing this lack rather than merely knowing about this lack. Of course, I know that I don’t know how precisely certain policies work. But it’s still quite another thing to experience this ignorance in attempting to explain such policies. In other words, the Socratic attitude alone doesn’t help.

If this effect persists, this finding might indeed help ameliorating conversations and debates. Instead of telling people that they are wrong or asking for reasons, we might simply ask how the proposed idea works. This requires of course humility on part of all interlocutors. A good start might be debates in philosophy.

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* I am grateful to Hendrik Siebe, Diego Castro and Leopold Hess for conversations about this work online and offline.

Diversifying scholarship. Or how the paper model kills history

Once upon a time a BA student handed in a proposal for a paper on Hume’s account of substance. The student proposed to show that Hume’s account was wrong, and that Aristotle’s account was superior to Hume’s. If memory serves, I talked the student out of this idea and suggested that he build his paper around an analysis of a brief passage in Hume’s Treatise. – The proposal was problematic for several reasons. But what I want to write about is not the student or his proposal. Rather I want to zoom in on our way of approaching historical texts (in philosophy). The anecdote about the proposal can help to show what the problem is. As I see it, the standard journal article has severe repercussions on the way we teach and practise scholarship in the history of philosophy. It narrows our way of reading texts and counters attempts at diversification of the canon. If we want to overcome these repercussions, it will help to reinstate other forms of writing, especially the form of the commentary.

So what’s wrong with journal articles? Let me begin by saying that there is nothing wrong with articles themselves. The problem is that articles are the decisive and almost only form of disseminating scholarship. The typical structure of a paper is governed by two elements: the claim, and arguments for that claim. So a historian typically articulates a claim about a text (or more often about claims in the secondary literature about a text) and provides arguments for embracing that claim. This way we produce a lot of fine scholarship and discussion. But if we make it the leading format, a number of things fall through the cracks.

An immediate consequence is that that the historical text has the status of evidence for the claim. So the focus is not on the historical material but the claim of the historian. If we teach students to write papers of this sort, we teach them to focus on their claims rather than on the material. You can see this in the student’s approach to Hume: the point was to evaluate Hume’s account. Rather than figuring out what was going on in Hume’s text and what it might be responding to, the focus is on making a claim about what is the supposed doctrine. The latter approach immediately abstracts away from the text and thus from the material of discussion. What’s wrong with that? Of course, such an abstract approach is fine if you’re already immersed in an on-going discussion or perhaps even a tradition of discussions about the text. In that case you’re mainly engaging with the secondary literature. But this abstract approach does not work for beginners. Why? Arguably, the text itself sets constraints that have to observed if the discussion is to make sense. What are these constraints? I’m not saying they are fixed once and for all. Quite the contrary! But they have to be established in relation to the text. So before you can say anything about substance in Hume, you have to see where and how the term is used and whether it makes sense to evaluate it in relation to Aristotle. (My hunch is that, in Treatise 1.1.6.1-2, Hume rejects the Aristotelian idea of substance altogether; thus saying that Aristotle’s notion is superior is like saying that apples are superior to bananas). The upshot is: before you can digest the secondary literature, you have to understand how the textual constraints are established that guide the discussions in the secondary literature.

What we might forget, then, if we teach on the basis of secondary literature, is how these constraints were established in the long tradition of textual scholarship. When we open an edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, we see the text through the lens of thick layers of scholarship. When we say that certain passages are “dark”, “difficult” or “important”, we don’t just speak our mind. Rather we echo many generations of diligent scholarship. We might hear that a certain passage is tricky before we even open the book. But rather than having students parrot that Kant writes “difficult prose”, we should teach them to find their way through that prose. That requires engagement with the text: line by line, word by word, translation by mistranslation. Let’s call this mode of reading linear reading as opposed to abstract reading. It is one thing to say what “synthetic apperception” is. It’s quite another thing to figure out how Kant moves from one sentence to the next. The close and often despair-inducing attention to the details of the text are necessary for establishing an interpretation. Of course, it is fine to resort to guidance, but we have to see the often tenuous connection between the text and the interpretation, let a lone the claim about a text. In other words, we have to see how abstract reading emerges from linear reading.

My point is not that we shouldn’t read (or teach what’s in the) secondary literature. My point is that secondary literature or abstract reading is based on a linear engagement with the text that is obscured by the paper model. The paper model suggests that you read a bit and then make a fairly abstract claim (about the text or, more often, about an interpretation of the text). But the paper model obscures hundreds of years or at least decennia of linear reading. What students have to learn (and what perhaps even we, as teachers, need to remind ourselves of) is how one sentence leads to the next. Only then does the abstract reading presented in the secondary literature become visible for what it is: as an outcome of a particular linear reading.

But how can we teach linear reading? My suggestion is quite simple: Rather than essay writing, students in the history of philosophy should begin by learning to write commentaries to texts. As I argued earlier, there is a fair amount of philosophical genres beyond the paper model. At least part of our education should consist in being confronted with a piece of text (no more than half a page) and learning to comment on that piece, perhaps translating it first, going through it line by line, pointing out claims as well as obscurities and raising questions that point to desirable explanations. This way, students will learn to approach the texts independently. While it might be easy to parrot that “Hegel is difficult to read”, it takes courage to say that a concrete piece of text is difficult to understand. In the latter case, the remark is not a judgment but the starting point of an analysis that might allow for a first tentative explanation (e.g. of why the difficulty arises).

Ultimately, my hope is that this approach, i.e. the linear commentary to concrete pieces of text, will lead (back) to a diversification of scholarship. Of course, it’s nice to read, for instance, the next paper on Hume claiming that he is an idealist or whatever. But it would help if that scholarship would (again) be complemented by commentaries to the texts. Nota bene: such scholarship is available even today. But we don’t teach it very much.

Apart from learning how to read linearly and closely, such training is the precondition of what is often called the diversification of the canon. If we really want to expand the boundaries of the canon, the paper model will restrain us (too much) in what we find acceptable. Before we even open a page of Kant, our lens is shaped through layers of linear reading. But when we open the books of authors that are still fairly new to us, we have hardly any traditions of reading to fall back on. If we start writing the typical papers in advance of establishing constraints through careful linear reading, we are prone to just carry over the claims and habits familiar from familiar scholarship. I’m not saying that this is bound to happen, but diligent textual commentaries would provide a firmer grasp of the texts on their own terms. In this sense, diversification of the canon requires diversification of scholarship.

An ethics of climate change?

Imagine that you watch someone putting down a substance on all the playgrounds in your neighbourhood. You are then reliably informed that the substance is poisonous and that it has been put down on all playgrounds.

What would you do? Would you keep quiet about it? – Perhaps you should. Even if you see some children die, you don’t know for sure whether it’s really the poison that is lethal, do you?*

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* Some comments:

— Faced with the question of anthropogenic climate change, most far-right parties I know endorse a variant of this argument. Are there any other options? Probably: (a) Some mainstream parties in Germany worry most about the issue that the guy putting down the poison might be out of a job if we cause a fuss. (b) Other parties campaign for building new playgrounds. (c) A further option is to ask the producers of poison for the best strategy. (d) Oh, and another commonly favoured move is to dismiss protests of children as ignorant. Did I miss something?

— If you’ve read this far, why not sign this petition by Martin Kusch (Vienna): “Philosophers for Future”?

— While I think that dismissing findings of climate sciences or other concerns about climate change is immoral, I also see that ‘spreading the word‘ is rather difficult. Meehan Crist writes: “On a rapidly warming planet, one function of climate writing is to get the word out—to spark and help shape public discourse in the midst of ongoing and accelerating catastrophe. We are already too late to prevent some degree of unprecedented change. We know it’s going to be bad, but human activity today could still make the future worse. So it’s true both that we are too late and that there is no time to be lost. Yet if we get the framing of this story wrong—if we see the issue as a matter of individual consumer choice, for example, or choose a purely emotional rather than an explicitly political framing—we risk missing the point altogether.”

Social syllogizing. William of Ockham, John Lutterell, Walter Chatton and Adam Wodeham on the division of epistemic labour*

In my last post, I suggested that Ockham’s account of language and concepts might be founded on the thesis of a “division of linguistic labour”. In what follows, I would like to say more about this thesis by showing how it figures in the debate over the demonstrability of articles of faith. Far from being a debate of merely theological interest, I believe that the thesis is put to work as founding the idea of a division of epistemic labour, even between the living wayfarers (viatores) and those considered happy in heaven (beati). [If you are mainly interested in Ockham’s account of the division of epistemic labour, you can jump straight to section 2 of this post.]

When Ockham’s pupil Adam Wodeham delivered his Commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences around 1330 in Norwich, Ockham had already been excommunicated. But this didn’t stop Wodeham from defending and elaborating Ockham’s doctrines. Like many of his contemporaries, he particularly dealt with questions concerning the relation between theology and the Aristotelian notion of science. One of these questions was whether articles of faith such as ‘God is three and one’ can be scientifically demonstrated. Wodeham’s answer to this question might sound quite peculiar: Instead of a clear ‘yes’ or ‘no’, he replies that it is possible in principle to demonstrate such creditive propositions, but not by means that are available to wayfarers, i.e. human beings in this life. Yet they are demonstrable through sentences formed by one who is blessed in heaven. So, in order for this solution to work, we have to imagine a syllogism that contains the premises of a blessed one in heaven and the conclusion of a wayfarer in this earthly life. In this sense, the epistemic labour is shared even across domains as different as heaven and earth …

Wodeham provides intriguing arguments to defend this thesis, which was originally proposed by Ockham. But what is at stake here? To be sure, it’s one of the big themes: the relation between faith and reason. The question of the demonstrability of creditive propositions aims at the epistemological status of theology. Quoting Augustine, already Peter Lombard warned theologians against endorsing the truths of faith on the grounds of ecclesiastical authorities alone. If theologians do not wish to be utterly defenceless against hair-splitting logicians, they had better come up with some reasonable arguments as well. But how was the gap between natural reason and faith to be bridged? From the mid 13^th century onwards, Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics – a book that clearly did not consider matters of catholic faith – was the leading source on scientific knowledge. If the traditional talk of ‘truths of faith’ is to be taken seriously and that is taken literally, then we require a general answer to the question of what it means for such a ‘truth’ to be true and demonstrable. Yet, if articles of faith were as evident as principles of science, then faith would have to belong to the realm of naturally accessible human knowledge. And since the knowledge of both realms would be equally evident, the difference between the wayfarer’s faith and the beatific vision of a blessed one would be lost. If, however, articles of faith belong to the realm of heavenly knowledge only, then it is incongruous to call theology a science.

I think that Ockham’s solution to this dilemma gave a new meaning to the debate, in the sense that it is rooted in the conviction that knowledge – no matter whether it’s heavenly or earthly – has a general form: it is subject to general criteria of rationality. This form or structure is for Ockham psychologically real in that knowledge is generally given in the structure of a mental language, which means (to a first approximation) that the concepts we have in our minds are structured in ways significantly similar to the sentences we utter. Thus, the difference between a wayfarer (viator) and a blessed one (beatus) is not that they have different types of lower and higher knowledge (or rationality), the difference is simply that they are in different epistemic situations. But for Ockham’s solution to work, it is not enough that there is a common structure of knowledge. We also have to take the different epistemic situations of different knowers into account. Thus, the idea of a common rationality requires a division of epistemic labour. Let’s now look at the debate.

Lutterell’s critique

Ockham’s teaching in Oxford and London provoked many criticisms. Already John Lutterell (Chancellor of Oxford University till 1322) was deeply concerned about Ockham’s doctrines: Ockham held that we do not know things but mental sentences whose terms stand for things. Mental terms, in turn, are caused by cognizing things. This doctrine tries to acknowledge the fact that an assent or dissent does not aim at things but at propositions: we don’t say, for instance, ‘the stone is true’, but ‘the mental sentence’, whose subject-term stands for a stone, ‘is true’. To have knowledge, then, is to have a certain mental attitude towards a proposition. Lutterell, however, concluded: “This is dangerous, because it eliminates all real science and faith.” (Libellus contra Ockham, art. 30)

Now since, on Ockham’s account, forming an evident judgement requires epistemic access to the things the proposition refers to, Ockham indeed denied that theology is, strictly speaking, a science and he denied that articles of faith can be demonstrated in this life, although they could be demonstrated in principle by means of premises formed by someone who has epistemic access to God, namely a blessed one. Lutterell, however, won’t have that. One of his main arguments against Ockham’s position is that the blessed would not form a proposition at all. On his account – and in accordance with many medieval theologians resorting to Augustine – the blessed one has a sort of vision which enables him or her to form a single and simple unstructured concept (Libellus contra Ockham, art. 4), whereas humans in this life attain simplicity only in complex ways, that is they do not attain real simplicity at all.

An helpful illustration of the difference between complex and simple thought is the difference between writing a text on your word-processor and looking at the photocopy or pdf of a text: With the word-processor you can alter the text you’re writing, you can copy words or phrases and put them elsewhere and so on; by looking at the photocopy you get the whole text at once, but there’s no way of altering the text or transporting bits of it elsewhere.

Simplicity is a feature of divine perfection and is therefore traditionally held to be a property of the beatific cognition: since, unlike complexity which is often associated with materiality, spatial and temporal order, simplicity precludes falsity or error. Seeing God, then, precludes the formation of complex concepts or any kind of discursive thinking. On Lutterell’s account, the knowledge of the blessed is shaped with regard to the object of knowledge and is thus simple, whereas the wayfarer has to form complex propositions about God, hence reaching the simple only through complex means.

Lutterell’s defence of theology as a science is largely owing to Aquinas, who held that we can justly claim that our complex conclusions about the divine are true, so long as we believe in the principles of the higher and simple knowledge of the blessed ones. But Ockham didn’t buy this argument, maintaining that we cannot know conclusions unless we evidently know the premises.

Ockham’s position

Ockham’s own position is quite different. On my reading (see here and here for details), his point is that this way of talking and dividing knowledge is generally ill-formed. So his arguments amount to saying: I grant that these articles of faith aren’t demonstrable in this life, since otherwise they wouldn’t be articles of faith, and there would be no difference between this life and beatific vision. I also grant that we have to construe articles of faith as being demonstrable in principle, since otherwise our faith would aim at nothing. But if we want to say that our sentences could be demonstrable through the premises of the blessed, we first have to grant that our and their knowledge is compatible. And since our knowledge is structured, we had better assume that their knowledge is structured as well, otherwise it wouldn’t be compatible with ours.

But how can Ockham reasonably hold that articles of faith are demonstrable in principle? A scientifically demonstrable conclusion requires that the proposition is (1) necessary, that it is (2) deducible from necessary and evident propositions in a syllogistic discourse and that it is (3) doubtful (otherwise it would be self-evident, and therefore not demonstrable from other propositions). Now, the blessed one can form the required evident propositions, but the trouble is, the blessed one couldn’t form a doubtful proposition, since it would be – presumably – immediately evident to him or her, and thus independent of any argument or any other proposition.

To fulfill the criteria of demonstration it is required that we are in a position to form a doubtful proposition which the blessed one could access in principle. Ockham argues that this requirement is met, if there is someone who can doubt the proposition or if the blessed one was once in a position to doubt the proposition, which in turn requires that the sentence structures are preserved.

As I see it, Ockham’s reply combines two lines of argument: On the one hand, he insists that the structure of thought is the same for all. On the other hand, he argues that the dubitability is provided once there is someone (else) in a position to doubt (see In I Sent, d. 3, q. 4; OTh II, 440-441). It is with this move that Ockham makes the case for a division of epistemic labour. Properties of thought do not have to be fulfilled by every individual thinker. Rather it suffices if someone can fulfil them. In the given case, demonstrability even requires that thinkers are (or have) been in different epistemic situations.

Chatton’s critique

Ockham’s idea is, then, that the very same proposition is doubted or believed by the wayfarer and evidently known by the blessed one. So it is possible that someone, let’s call her Martha, reads a theological treatise and stumbles upon the sentence ‘God is three and one’. Martha thinks hard, but neither can she infer this sentence from any principles she knows, nor did she have any experience with any entity that is at once three and one. We may say that she simply entertains the sentence in her mind, without judging its truth or falsity. But then she thinks even harder and realises the overt contradiction in the ascription of something being three and one at once. Now Martha, not familiar with the many logical twists and turns of trinitarian debates, concludes that it may be impossible for something to be three and one at once and doubts the sentence. Now, she may have a conversation with the author of the theological treatise in question and find him rather learned and trustworthy, so that she eventually casts aside her doubts and believes that after all there might be one entity that is very special just because it is beyond contradictions in terms. We might say then that she believes the sentence on certain premises. Now, let’s assume that Martha dies and is entitled to beatific vision. She might then, as it were, remember the sentence and evidently judge that it is necessarily true.

Although one might argue that this judgement is not a demonstration, because the kind of sentences she can form on the grounds of immediate experience are self-evident and not dubitable, we can reply with Ockham that it is indeed a demonstration because the blessed one’s newly acquired sentences are the very premises from which she infers the truth of the very sentence she formerly believed. Sentences and its parts are transportable. They can recur in different contexts, even in heaven. But Ockham pushes the point even further: it is sufficient that someone can doubt the proposition in question. Presumably, the blessed ones cannot doubt articles of faith. Therefore, it is vital that some wayfarers in this life have doubts, and thus enable the division of epistemic labour.

On Lutterell’s account, this cannot be true, because the blessed one doesn’t entertain propositions in his or her mind, so the parts of former propositions could not be transported into the newly formed simple cognition. But Ockham encountered smarter opponents than Lutterell. To be sure, it’s perfectly possible to grant that the blessed one can think discursively, and still deny that wayfarer and blessed one can entertain the very same propositions.

Ockham’s opponent and fellow Franciscan Walter Chatton attacked his doctrines in many respects. Chatton granted that the blessed ones can think discursively, but he still denied that articles of faith can be demonstrated, on the grounds that such an article cannot be the conclusion of a heavenly demonstration. In this life we have premises from which we might infer a sentence and believe it; in heaven we have other premises from which we might infer a similar sentence, but – says Chatton – although our common manner of speaking might suggest that we are dealing with the same sentence, we have in fact sentences of a different kind. Because different kinds of premises acquired under different epistemic conditions entail different kinds of conclusions. And the blessed one could not but immediately judge that the wayfarer’s sentence is true. So Chatton infers that, although the knowledge of the wayfarer and the blessed one might be discursively structured, it still is of different kinds and thus incompatible.

Ockham’s reply and Wodeham’s defence

Ockham concedes that the wayfarer’s premises are different from the premises available to the blessed one, but he denies that Chatton’s inference, according to which ‘different kinds of premises entail different kinds of conclusions’ is valid. As Aristotle had already established in his Posterior Analytics, the knowledge of the conclusion is not necessarily caused through the knowledge of the premises. Accordingly, Ockham claims that the blessed one might have the conclusion before he or she turns to assess the premises in order to prove the conclusion. And this conclusion may well be the article of faith that the now blessed one formerly entertained as a wayfarer in this life under insufficient epistemic conditions.

As I have said in the beginning, Ockham’s pupil Adam Wodeham defended this position. He counters Chatton’s tenets by pointing out that it does not contradict the beatific state of the blessed one if he or she forms the sentence of a wayfarer. This was exactly the idea that Chatton meant to attack, when he claimed that the article of faith of a wayfarer could by no means function as the conclusion of a demonstration, otherwise – Chatton had argued – we couldn’t say that the blessed one has more evident knowledge than the wayfarer.

Wodeham’s move against Chatton is even more subtle than Ockham’s initial defence. Wodeham repeats Chatton’s thesis that “the blessed one could not but immediately judge that the wayfarer’s sentence is true” and asks how the blessed one could achieve this judgement without engaging in a syllogistic discourse. Wodeham then explains that, if the blessed one assesses the sentence of the wayfarer, the blessed one has to demonstrate not his own but the wayfarers’ conclusion. Wodeham thus points to the logical blunder committed by Chatton: If the blessed one had solely knowledge of a different type, incompatible with the wayfarer’s knowledge, then the blessed one couldn’t know whether the wayfarer’s sentence is true. According to Wodeham, Chatton missed his target and refuted himself.

Conclusion

Ockham and Wodeham argued against their opponents that the degree of certainty of knowledge and belief depends on the epistemic conditions of the knower. The difference between the knowledge of a wayfarer and of a blessed one is not a difference between types of knowledge but a difference of epistemic situations: If, for instance, I actually see something, I can form a reliable judgement about its existence and the properties belonging to the object seen. If I see God, then I can claim to have evident knowledge about him; in this life however, the sentences I form are expressions of faith. There is thus no difference with regard to the type of rationality, such as the difference between simple intuitions and complex propositions. All knowledge is processed in mental sentences which have a compositional structure and transportable parts.

Ockham’s point was not to raise hopes that we might meet the odd blessed one and ask him or her to demonstrate our conclusions. His thought experiment was designed to show that we need to assume a generally consistent structure of knowledge, if we want to claim compatible criteria for identifying and assessing judgements formed under different epistemic conditions. The scope of rationality that Ockham assumes comprises the knowledge of all thinking creatures, including humans, blessed ones and angels, creatures whose knowledge is shaped by common structures, rendering knowledge identifiable under different epistemic conditions. But for the idea of a common rationality to work, there also needs to be a division of epistemic labour. In this sense, Ockham defends a social notion of rationality.

An afterthought

Ockham’s and particularly Wodeham’s subtle defence against those who assumed a plurality of incompatible types of lower and higher knowledge rest on interesting arguments. But as in many construals of logical form as not merely an instrument but the actual shape of knowledge itself, there remain troubling questions, one of which I’d like to sketch now at the end of this post: Do not many of these defences amount to transcendental arguments by means of which we proceed from supposed facts to the necessary conditions of their possibility? I think we are indeed inclined to infer from the fact that our reasonings are logically reconstructible, that it is a necessary condition of the possibility of such a reconstruction that the logical form really is a feature of our knowledge. Recall: Wodeham claimed that, for the blessed one to assess the wayfarer’s sentence, he or she needs to entertain and demonstrate the wayfarer’s sentence, and that hence their shapes of rationality have to be compatible. That seems quite conclusive.

If I assess a sentence S, the necessary condition of the possibility of my assessing S is obviously that I can form and entertain S, and thus that my mental capacities and structures have to be of a kind allowing for the entertainment of S. We couldn’t even talk about the blessed one doing so without implicitly or explicitly ascribing to him or her that capacity.

The trouble with such arguments is that our ascription of such capacities can be both indispensable and false, false at least in the sense that the capacity of entertaining S might completely exhaust the blessed one’s structured rationality, and that every other piece of his knowledge is indeed couched in a different, namely structureless type of rationality. On a lighter note we might urge this point as follows: When you have finished reading this post and you’ll start forming critical responses in your mind, you’ll certainly do so on the assumption that I have written this post in English and that we share a common rationality. You’ll say: the fact that Martin has written this post and might even respond to my comments rests on the condition that he has the capacity to speak English. But maybe I have just shot my bolt and wouldn’t know how to write anything else that might look like English; perhaps this post is just a sort of gap in my otherwise entirely different way of thinking. To put it in terms of the illustration I gave in the beginning: I might not be processing words, but simply be tossing out a sort of photocopy. So if I can’t reply to your comments the reason may well be that I didn’t write this post in English in the first place. The letters I have written down here may just look very similar to English words. But then again: how could I tell you that without sharing or anticipating your assumptions?

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*This blog post is the revised version of an unpublished paper, first presented at the conference Dialectic on Trial, Cambridge, Clare Hall, 2005, and it contains some passages from my papers published here and here.

Ockham on the division of linguistic labour

One fascinating feature of language is that it enables us to talk about and thus handle things that we have no clue about. Although I have never seen a dinosaur, I can talk about dinosaurs and even recognise images of them. Arguably, this feature of language is owing to what Putnam called the “division of linguistic labour”. Although I don’t know anything about or at least not much about certain things, I can apply the words correctly. The reason I can do so is that I defer to other speakers, in this case experts who do have the knowledge I lack. According to this view, language is not a solitary tool like a hammer, but a social tool, only working in a collective, like a steamship. Although the social understanding of language is often portrayed as a modern idea, I’d like to suggest that it dates back at least to the early 14^th century.

Thinking about language in wake of Putnam, we might find the thesis of the division of linguistic labour quite intuitive. But it doesn’t come naturally if we follow the standard interpretation of what is now known as the semantic triangle as sketched in Aristotle’s Peri hermenias (16a3-9). Here, Aristotle suggests that words relate to things in virtue of the mental concepts we have of things. The reason that words like “apple”, “pomum” or “Apfel” signify the same things is that they signify the same non-linguistic concepts. A common way to take this mediation of the word-thing relation through concepts is to assume that speakers must know the things they refer to. Using the word “apple”, then, requires me to have the concept of apple and thus knowledge of apples. – Now, in the first chapter of his Summa logicae, Ockham rejects this assumption. As is often the case, he frames his rejection as the proper interpretation of Aristotle. The details are a bit technical, but his own view is clear enough. In the translation by Paul Spade (p. 5-6), Ockham argues as follows:

Now I say that utterances are signs subordinated to concepts …, not because, taking the word ‘signs’ in a proper sense, these utterances always signify those concepts of the soul primarily and properly, but rather because utterances are imposed to signify the same things that are signified by the concepts of the mind, so that the concept primarily signifies something naturally, and the utterance secondarily signifies the same thing, to such an extent that once an utterance is instituted to signify something signified by a concept in the mind, if that concept were to change its significate, the utterance itself would by that fact, without any new institution, change its significate. The Philosopher says as much when he says that utterances are “the marks of the passions that are in the soul”. Boethius too means the same thing when he says that utterances “signify” concepts.

According to Ockham, then, words (translated as “utterances”) don’t signify things by signifying concepts first; rather it is enough that words signify the same things that are signified by the concepts that the words are subordinated to. Let’s compare these views schematically (the arrow indicates a signification relation):

Aristotle: word –> concept –> thing

Ockham: concept –> thing

word –> “

So while the Aristotelian model suggests that each successful use of a word requires the user to have a concept that is signified by the word, Ockham’s model only requires that the word be subordinated to a concept. It is neither required that every actual use is mediated by a concept, nor is it required that the actual user does have the concept in question. Arguably, it is enough if some users have such a concept. If this is correct, we can assume that even those users who don’t have the pertinent concepts can use words correctly.

Although Ockham does not develop this idea straightforwardly into a thesis of division of linguistic labour, his rejection of the standard Aristotelian model clearly opens the door to such a view. Although she does not ascribe such a division thesis to Ockham, Sonja Schierbaum’s discussion of Ockham provides further evidence for such a reading. Ockham doesn’t develop this subordination semantics out of the blue. The discussion about the naming of God already led others before him to acknowledge that the use of words allows for talk about things that we don’t understand or have concepts of. (See here for more on this issue.) What Ockham adds in the Summa logicae is the idea that words can generally be used for referring to things irrespective of our concepts or knowledge. All that we need is that some other users have those concepts.

The upshot is (1) that conventional language is a more powerful tool than the mental concepts to which conventional language is subordinated and (2) that individual language use requires other users, especially for cases in which we lack pertinent concepts or knowledge.

The conventional signification of Lockean complex ideas*

In the course of writing up a paper on Locke’s theory of ideas for a volume on The Lockean Mind, it dawned on me that all complex ideas are conventional signs. So in what follows, I’d like to suggest that, while simple ideas are natural signs of their causes, complex ideas, even complex ideas of substances, are conventional signs that depend on linguistic consolidation.

In recent years, work on representation in Locke has reached some sort of consensus. Most scholars agree that simple ideas represent their causes. But it’s not at all clear what complex ideas represent. If substances are not given in experience, what do complex ideas represent? Do they have corresponding objects? Given Locke’s metaphysics, it seems safe to say that there are no apples, dogs, cats, trees or stones in the world, at least not properly speaking. Let’s unpack this a bit: While the ingredients of complex ideas, i.e. simple ideas, represent the qualities (= properties) that cause them, the resulting complex idea might be said to represent its cause insofar as the simple ideas represent their causes. So the complex idea of an apple might be said to be a natural sign of its cause insofar as the simple ideas (of which it consists), say the ideas of round, green, sweet and firm, are natural signs of qualities. Yet, this cannot be the last word, because complex substance ideas seem to have no direct correlate that they represent. Arguably, we cannot say that the things we think of in virtue of complex ideas are given in experience. My idea of an apple is not simply caused by an apple. Rather the complex idea of apple is made up of ideas of qualities, while the apple as a substantial bearer of the perceived qualities is not itself given in experience but presupposed. Looking at the causal explanation of such ideas, we cannot simply invoke extramental qualities. We also need to take into account the tacit mental operations that form the complex idea out of simple ideas (Essay II, xxiii, 1).

What, then, do complex ideas represent? As I have just said, the idea of an apple can of course be analysed into ideas of qualities. But if the apple idea as such is not taken as a sign of the causes (qualities), what does it represent? To answer this question, it is important to note that Locke appeals to an old distinction between two kinds of ideas, archetypes and copies or ektypes. Traditionally, archetypes would be taken to be ideas in the mind of God, where they serve as blueprints of things to be created. Locke doesn’t appeal to divine ideas, but he still makes use of this distinction when discussing adequate and inadequate ideas (see Essay II, xxxi). Arguably, Locke assumes that our mind forms, stores and names such archetypes when we encounter things or invent moral categories. The archetypes are what Locke calls nominal essences in book III. What does this mean? When we have an occurrent idea of an apple, this idea can be seen as a copy of the archetype through which we recognise the thing as an apple. So when we see an apple, we have in fact an idea that matches to some extent the archetype of apples in our mind.

This archetype-copy relation also forms the foundation for Locke’s famous criticism of our assumption that we have cognitive access to real essences of things. According to Locke, we tend to assume that a present idea of an apple matches the real essence of an apple. But this is a mistake, argues Locke. In fact, we refer it to the nominal essence, which is nothing but an abstract idea with a name annexed to it (see Essay III, iii, 15).

An immediate worry arising from this account is that such archetypes would be highly subjective or instable. After all, nominal essences (or archetypes) of substances are formed in our various accidental encounters with things. But if we invoke Locke’s discussion of language, we can see that he meets this worry. Briefly put, the fact that nominal essences are annexed to names means that these essence ideas are socially consolidated. The linguistic community a speaker is part of will sanction some uses and confirm other uses. This way, the abstract ideas are stabilised and even rectifiable in the light of new discoveries. So if I happen to call apples tomatoes, other users will correct and amend my use of the term, and thus make me adapt the conventional nominal essence.

The upshot is that complex ideas of substances (and mixed modes) are conventional signs to some degree. Although complex ideas consist of simple ideas that can be seen as natural signs of their causes, the complex ideas ultimately function as conventional signs for us. What they present to our mind is not solely determined by what causes their ingredients but also by the patterns that are consolidated within a linguistic community. This means that my occurent idea of an apple, while caused by certain qualities, presents to my mind an apple that I can recognise as an instance of what we call apple, because it has to match the socially consolidated criteria of the nominal essence of apple. Were it not for the historically grown categories salient in my speech community, for instance those for certain kinds of fruit, it is possible that my mind would register the recurrent ideas of certain qualities without ever recognising them as pertaining to a certain kind of thing.

Locke makes this point clear when he writes that ideas without names annexed to them would resemble a library with unbound books in which we could access pages without it being determined to which books the pages belong: ‘He that has complex Ideas, without particular names for them, would be in no better Case than a Bookseller, who had in his Ware-house Volumes, that lay there unbound, and without Titles …’ (Essay III, x, 26-27). The point is that the precise ingredients of our complex ideas, the structure and amount of simple ideas belonging to them, are determined by the naming practice in a given speech community. Thus, although the ingredients themselves have a causal origin, the way the ingredients are bound into bundles and used in thinking is a matter of convention.

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* This piece is now kindly featured by Locke Studies 19 (2019).

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