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Scotist Semiotics?

Still slowly working on a re-reading and partial translation of Olivier Boulnois’s L’Être et représentation (1999), we have already gotten a hint that Latin scholastics such as Roger Bacon and John Duns Scotus used some of the very same key terminology as the 20th-century Saussurean structuralists, but seem to have held a diametrically opposed view on the specific matter of the relation of signifier and signified. Boulnois does not explicitly mention the more recent French context. The last post was in part about what is called “signification”.

As a university student in the late 70s, I was tremendously excited to learn about French so-called “structuralism”, which seemed to support my own primitive insight that “relations are prior to things”. In this context there was a lot of talk about signifier and signified, growing out of the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure. Together with the American pragmatist Charles Pierce, Saussure is considered to have originated modern semiotics, or the study of signs. For a while, semiotics was high on my horizon.

A key point in the Saussurean tradition, which grew very big in postwar France, was that there is no direct relation of the signifier to the signified. Instead, it was said in effect that we are signifying animals who live and thrive in a sea of signifiers, and build meaning out of differentiation.

For Saussure, the signified is not the referent but the concept. What the concept really is was not discussed in detail. Saussure himself seems to have seen it as falling under what he called psychology and social psychology, which was a rather conventional view when he was writing in the early 20th century, but this plays no real role in his theory.

What is essential is the detachment of signification from reference. For Saussure, the sign is a two-leveled thing that consists of (sensible) signifier and (conceptual) signified. But in relation to its referents in the world, the sign is “arbitrary”. The sound or word “tree” has no inherent relation to a tree. I am not concerned to argue for or against Saussure here, just setting the stage.

For Roger Bacon, signs refer directly to things. For Scotus, “The sign leads immediately to the signified. Between them, we must not ask about any intermediary. It attaches only to a single signified: the present thing itself. It represents it” (p. 26, my translation throughout, emphasis in original throughout)

Here we see an explicit strong positive valuation both on presence and immediacy, and at the same time on representation. Representability will be Scotus’s minimal criterion of being. I see all three of these claims as deeply problematic, but that does not mean they can be simply and categorically rejected.

“This theory is unfolded in four theses:

“1) Every sign is a thing, and reciprocally every thing can be a sign; it is thus that the father is a sign in relation to his son. ‘The sign is said relative to a signified, as “father” relative to a “son”; and it is also necessarily the sign of something, which is its foundation.’ A sign is at the same time the manifestation of something, and refers to an other. It is necessarily a real foundation, even if it also implies a relation of signifying/signified. On the one hand, it brings an information to the sense, the sensible species (visible, audible, etc.), or to the cognitive power (the intelligible species); on the other, it produces a knowledge of something else” (ibid).

The sign thus brings a (participial or ongoing) “information” or informing form to sense or intellect.

The notion of forms being somehow transmitted, and of their being a kind of thing that can be transmitted, has an interesting ambiguity. The image of species as discrete things flying through the air seems hard to sustain. And yet, there is a sense in which form is not locked up in one thing, but can be “communicated”. And what we call the thing — not merely stuff or an object, but participial “information”, or some form as a happening — is grounded in the becoming or manifestation associated with a present participle.

This manifestation is the mark of reality, which is not just a collection of ready-made objects or truths but a process of being manifested. This goes beyond mere presence as a snapshot or image capable of being mastered, and beyond mere representation as referentially standing for something. This is the sense in which objectivity as a happening involving essentiality goes far beyond the mere being of objects mastered or possessed.

I have always thought it was a happening or unfolding (or happening-as-unfolding, as distinct from happening as a mere punctual event — procession or “emanation”) like this that the neoplatonic talk about something beyond being aimed at — not mere being-there or a necessary support for it, but a nonpunctual unfolding of unmastered essence that is precisely not to be identified with “Being”, or with the putative object of “ontology”. And on the other hand, I want to think that ordinary being is already nonpunctual or outside of itself, and thus strictly transcends both representation and event, at very the same time that it is susceptible to genuine understanding and criteria of reasonableness.

“2) Every sign supposes an inference. Here Scotus recollects the Aristotelian heritage, in line with the unification aimed at since Albert the Great. Taking the theology of sacraments as a point of departure, and trinitarian theology as an example, it is not limited to the model of the linguistic sign. The sign permits an inference, which starts from the posterior to go back to the inferior [sic]: if b, then a. A thing signifies another if its existence entails that of another, be it anterior or posterior. Indeed it becomes the element of a reasoning by inference or likelihood (enthymeme). One same theory of the sign is to provide an account of signification and of inference. It allows a unified theory of semiotics as cognitive science to be constructed. The linguistic sign is only a particular case, thought on the model of inference. It functions not as a code (according to a biunivocal correspondence), but according to relations that are more numerous and more complex” (p. 27).

Quite unexpectedly, we have here not only an emphasis on inference in the context of signification, but it is contrasted with a mechanical code or biunivocal correspondence in a way that makes it sound like what Sellars and Brandom call material inference. But for Brandom this grounds a non-representationalist account, whereas Scotus, as we will see over the course of a number of upcoming posts, is arguably the arch-representationalist of the whole Western tradition.

“3) Scotus aims to provide a general and unique theory of the sign. To be a sign, it suffices to be a thing. But what is a ‘thing’? Not always a sensible, physical, material reality: for him it suffices to have a formal being, a reality sufficiently unified and positive to be able to be opposed to the term with which it is in relation, to become the foundation of this relation. The sign is the real term of a real knowledge. Unlike a sensible thing, a sign is first of all a formal object, a possible object of knowledge. ‘This is true not only of the sensible sign, taking “sense” [in Augustine’s definition] strictly, for the corporeal sense, but again it is true for the incorporeal sense, taking sense generally, for any cognitive power.’ The senses are not only sensibility (here, in the organic sense), but knowledge in the broad sense — intellection. The sign is not always sensible; it can be immaterial, and consist in a concept or an intelligible species. Like Bacon, Duns Scotus integrates in the theory of the sign the intelligible signs that are the concepts of the soul. But he envisions also the case of the angels, who communicate and transmit species or purely intelligible representations. By a philosophical decision, Scotus generalizes the status of the sign. The subtle Doctor gives an indifferent definition that is neutral and transcends genres. He conceives a transcendental semiotic” (pp. 27-28, brackets in original).

The idea of “formal distinction” — roughly, that there can be a “real” difference in definition where there is no difference in “being”, whatever that is — seems both plausible, and by no means inherently tied to the objectionable claims that will is superior to reason.

I’m still grappling with the suggestion that a concept could be a sign. That concepts are inferences, or at least are closely associated with inferences, seems plausible enough, and certainly better than the idea that a concept is a mental image. Brandom identifies concepts with rules we adopt to govern inference. That signification is closely related to inference also makes sense. But while it makes sense that a concept would be immaterial, I find it hard to affirm that the same would be true of a sign.

“4) The sign concerns the category of relation. Bacon had already remarked that ‘the sign pertains to the category of relation’. By itself, the sign brings about the knowledge of something else. It is constituted by a relation of inference to the thing signified. Does it go the same for signification as for knowledge? For Bacon, the sign represents something to someone: it implies two relations, in the accusative and in the dative, toward the signified and toward the interpreter, and it is the second that is essential. But Aristotle himself describes knowledge as a relation, and remarks that the destruction of the thing known entails that of the corresponding knowledge. Does the sign still signify when its signified disappears? The first, traditional, position consists in dissociating the truth of enunciation from the truth of the sign, and says, like Anselm, that there is a ‘true sign’ even when it does not signify something. Quite the contrary, for Bacon the sign loses its value as a sign. ‘If we cannot conceive anything by a sign, it is void (cassum) and vain, it cannot be a true sign; but it is only a sign according to the substance of the sign, and it does not have the status of a sign: it is thus that the substance of the father remains when his son is dead, but not the relation of paternity. And whatever vocal sound, the circle of wine or an other [sign], imposed in act in relation to a thing and instituted for it, can represent it and signify it, if what it signifies does not exist in act, it is not a sign in act.’ If the thing that it represents is absent, the sign represents nothing, it is indeed not a sign. It must receive a new institution” (pp. 28-29).

This use of Latin substantia seems very far indeed from Aristotle’s ousia.

Earlier, Boulnois had contrasted the radicality of Bacon’s direct realism with traditional views. He said that Bacon’s notion of the sign — in contrast with either that of Augustine or that of Aristotle — involves only two elements, omitting the mediating role of concepts or of the soul. Here it sounds like Bacon on another level does still leave a role for an interpreter. But perhaps an implicit distinction is being made between interpretation as immanent to the level of content (which a direct realist would presumably reject), and a transcendent dimension of something like the person of an interpreter standing over and above any content, which may be related to the voluntarism we will be hearing about shortly.

“The distinction between the kinds of sign is at the center of the semiotic theory: it brings out the principal articulations, and in particular allows the relation of signs in general to linguistic signs, of semiotics to semantics, to be thought. In Scotus, the relation signifier/signified is organized along three divisions” (p. 30).

Much more than a simple division of the subject matter is going on here.

“1) The relation signifier/signified can be natural or conventional. The natural sign manifests a real relation that is found in nature, while the conventional sign translates a relation of reason, which only exists for the intellect that establishes it. This opposition recovers the division between two kinds of inferential signs. The non-linguistic natural signs imply a causality and a real relation; the instituted signs, of which linguistic signs are a part, imply an intellectual decision, and indeed a relation of reason. The conventional (ad placitum) sign has only a relation of reason with its object; it is a second intention, a simple perspective of the mind with no objective correlate. Scotus gives as an example ‘the voice and the gestures of the monks’ who have taken a vow of silence. These signs ‘could signify other things, if it pleased the institutors’, for what has been instituted at will can be revoked at will. — But the natural sign better reveals the essence of the sign: ‘The natural sign signifies more truly than the conventional sign’. In effect, the natural relation of the thing to its sign is a real relation, implying a first intention: an aspect of the thing has exercised a direct causality on what signifies it. For example, the relation of smoke to fire and that of the thing to the concept are real” (pp. 30-31).

The vocabulary of first and second intentions comes from Avicenna. Roughly, first intentions are supposed to refer directly to concrete real things and genera like “horse”, whereas second intentions refer to abstract concepts like “subject” or “genus”. For Avicenna, Scotus, and others in the scholastic tradition, second intentions generally have a second-class status and valuation in comparison to first intentions.

Whether there really are such things as natural signs is a question that will have to be considered. Of course insofar as there are natural things, or phenomena that we agree to call natural things, there “are” such natural things as smoke and fire. We can probably agree too that smoke is in some sense “caused” by fire. But that that inference from smoke to fire is truly naturally given, and not in any way due to us, is quite debatable.

Scotus’s talk about the will of the institutors of a language is also problematic. It can be fairly said that the state of a natural language at a given time is not the product of anyone’s will, individual or collective. Even more generally, real history is not based on a foundational moment. It is the cumulative compound of many accidents.

“Duns Scotus nonetheless does not relate signification to knowledge, but to will. Speech is an ordered communication, which makes manifest certain signs of a mutual will…. Language does not express a knowledge, but rather indicates a will…. What we understand, what is said, manifests what the speaker wants to say. It is inscribed in the space of reciprocity (mutuae voluntatis), and not that of monologue or meditation. Finally, it has communication in this space of interlocution as its aim. Language agrees with the human as a being who is not limited to reason, but who is given a will” (p. 31).

The invocation of mutuality and reciprocity and a “space of interlocution” here is an important surprise that makes this more interesting. This overlaps with the concerns of Hegel, Gadamer, Habermas, and Brandom.

I use the locution “I want to say that x” from time to time myself. Right now “I want to say” that while to speak of a definite will in the sense of intending this and not that is a perfectly good distinction, claims that there even is a power of pure arbitrary choice — let alone that it is superior to intellect — ought to be rejected. What the speaker according to herself wants to say is indeed a part of the story of meaning, but it is only a part.

“Signs suppose an institution on our part. They follow from a voluntary decision, and in no way from a nature of signs. The order of signs is not in the nature of things. Established, stopped, they found a status, a state, or an order among the participants in discourse. But the instituted sign can efficaciously represent an invisible reality: a will. It thus represents an intellection, but under its highest form, as will, and allows the willed effect to be produced. The sign thus instituted has a double function: it guarantees the certitude of recognition, it allows the efficacy of its operation. The model is thus that of a pact (pactio), whether it is a matter of a firm engagement (sponsio), a guarantee (fideiussio), or an oath (juramentum). The efficacy of signs comes from a pact between the liberties they represent” (pp. 31-32).

We can see that there is a high-level analogy between this notion of the “institution” of a regime of signs and the common early modern foundation myth of a social contract. Like the social contract, which is supposed to ground strong claims of political sovereignty — and unlike Hegelian mutual recognition, which is always in process and open to another chapter — the institution of signs for Scotus putatively has an “always already founded” status.

As is common in the scholastic tradition, efficacy here is also unequivocally associated with efficient causation, which is treated as the most primary kind of cause, whereas in a purely Aristotelian context efficient causes are subordinate, which implies that efficacy cannot be simply identified with efficient causality. Moreover, for Aristotle himself, something like the art of building is more truly an efficient cause than the architect or the carpenter or the hammer or the hammer’s blow.

“2) The signified can be permanent or intermittent. The sign that always has its signified is a ‘true sign’ in the sense of saint Anselm. It is also called ‘efficacious’ because it implies an efficient causality between the event and its sign. Reciprocally, for the one who depends on it, it always leads to a knowledge. It has no need of an interpreter, and always does what is expected of it: it always realizes its proper operation. The necessary sign can only appear accompanied by its signified: the eclipse is the true sign and efficacity of the interposition of the earth, since it is always the effect. This signification, which rests on a necessary inference, is necessary and always true. Thus all the natural signs are efficacious signs” (p. 32).

From an Aristotelian point of view, I have already expressed some skepticism about the claim that there are natural signs, but in the Catholic tradition it is commonly held that the sacraments, unlike linguistic signs, are efficacious in themselves, and Scotus is giving voice to this.

“But among the conventional signs, certain are efficacious (the sacraments), while others are not. The latter do not always imply their signifieds, but are sometimes true, sometimes false, that is to say neutral. This kind of sign is falsifiable, it is enunciated in variable propositions, and its signification is contingent. It is not efficacious, not having the power to realize its signified: in a proposition, it is not in the power of the speaker to make it so that the sign is accompanied by the thing it signifies. The sign is thus not true by itself, but is an exterior adequation to its signified. The ambivalence between the truth of the sign and truth of adequation mark the division between the conventional sign in general and the efficacious sign” (ibid).

The notion of efficacy here also seems be an all-or-nothing proposition — either total or inapplicable. I think there is a kind of efficacy of signs, but it is never total.

“3) Again we can distinguish signs according to their relation to a temporal signified. Some refer to the past (commemorative signs), others to the future (predictive signs: prognosticum), and others finally to the present (deictic signs: demonstrativum). For Scotus language is a commemorative sign, while the sacrament is a demonstrative sign” (pp. 32-33).

The “commemorative” status of linguistic signs is presumably supposed to be a kind of reference back to a founding event or will. Again I think of social contract theories.

Husserl also speaks of “deictic” expressions, but gives the term the nearly opposite meaning of indexical or occasional, as contrasted with ideal. Something like Husserlian deictic expressions are called “floating” signifiers in the Saussurean tradition, because they have no fixed reference.

“According to Thomas Aquinas, every sacrament has an omnitemporal signification. It is the sign of the past, of the present, and of what is to come (it recalls respectively the Passion of Christ, source of all grace, the present which is the gift of grace, and the glory to which every grace destines the human). Its signification contains an essential presence, present to all the dimensions of time. For Scotus, on the contrary, the sacrament is a demonstrative sign. Like every sign, it has an intentionality pro praesenti. It refers to the present and to it alone. It is in this sense that it is a representative sign: the representational function of the sacrament as sign implies the realization of the signified at the instant of its utterance, and indeed the temporal presence of the object represented. It has a deictic dimension that is demonstrative, in contrast to memory and the promise. Representation is first of all a form of presence.”

Aquinas and Scotus are both doing things with presence, but it seems as though presence in Scotus is contracted to a punctual status that is connected with a punctual or all-at-once view of representation. The strong association of representation with presence is also important.

“Duns Scotus cannot accept the thesis according to which the verb in present tense signifies the instant at which the utterance of every enunciation is completed, or all the conclusions that depend on it. ‘When it is uttered, the verb cosignifies time in the same way that it signifies [the signified]’: as a consequence, when it cosignifies the present, it only refers to the instant of its utterance. When no indication comes to specify a proposition, the time of the enunciated in the present is that of its enunciation. The intention of the speaker comes to coincide with the rhythm of the phrase. Expressed temporality follows lived temporality. In the same way, by the force of discourse, the demonstrative pronoun hoc [this] signifies what it shows the instant it is proffered” (pp. 32-34).

For Brandom, pronouns like “this”, far from being indissociable from immediacy, are anaphoric back-references to something said before.

“Three metaphysical principles are interlaced in the Scotist semantics: the primacy of the will for justifying the institution of signs, that of univocity for establishing their ideal state, and that of presence for explicating their temporal reference” (p. 34).

Next in this series: A Triangular Relation

Signification, Representation

The next section of Boulnois’s L’Être et représentation, barely over a page in length, begins to develop the relation between signification and representation.

“What is a sign? What is signification?”

“If, according to Bacon, the sign and the concept represent, we cannot directly identify signification and representation. Signification is not a special case of representation. But by another detour, we will come to concentrate representation in intellection. If the sign is a thing that, as Augustine says, presents itself to sense, it also presents an other to the spirit — it presents and it represents. The Baconian analysis opens the way for the formula of Scotus: ‘Signifying is representing something to the intellect’. Signification is a representation. In every proposition, the term represents in act all the signifieds. The sign is a substitute for the thing, which allows it to be rendered present to thought so that the latter can conceive it. It implies two distinct relations, to exterior things and to the concepts of the intellect.”

“This distinction recalls the distinction between reference and the semantic field, or, in medieval terms, between supposition and signification. In simple supposition, a term supposes for what it signifies: it recalls all the supports designated by its signification. On this point two interpretations confront one another. For one tradition of logic (called ‘Parisian’), supposition is the act of taking the place of the referent, of being an intentional and semantic back-reference (supponere pro). For another tradition (called ‘Oxonian’), supposing is being the subject of a predicate in a proposition, according to an extensional and syntagmatic presentation (supponere sub). This delimitation seems insufficient, for it obliges us to consider Scotus as Parisian more than Oxonian! He declares in effect ‘The common term supposes for all the supports’ that it recalls. Thus, the common term, ‘when it is not specified by some added [term], supposes absolutely [for] its [common] signified’. Supposition reveals itself as strictly indifferent, with neither priority nor pre-eminence of one support over the others: the term supposes ‘equally for all the [individual supports] that are equally related to its signified’. This indifference is also an indifference to their existence or nonexistence: the term ‘supposes for all the supports, existent or nonexistent’. It refers equally to each one of them. Every universal is distributed in its inferiors, since all the supports are of the same kind and of the same degree supports which the common term recalls. The theory of representation recovers the concept of supposition and takes over the whole weight of the reference of a term in a proposition” (pp. 24-25, my translation, brackets in original).

Next in this series: Scotist Semiotics?

Signs, Concepts, Things

Aristotle, Augustine, and Boethius each in their own way discuss signification as a triadic relation, with the soul or concepts in between signs and things. The 13th-century Franciscan Roger Bacon diverges sharply from this older view, arguing instead that signs refer directly to things. Bacon, who with Albert the Great was the first European to lecture publicly on the major works of Aristotle, is said to have initiated the study of Greek and Arabic optics (perspectiva) in the Latin-speaking world. The 1978 discovery of a manuscript of his lost work De Signis (On Signs) has raised scholarly awareness of his semiotics.

Boulnois has previously mentioned that Bacon treats concepts as a kind of sign. Here he contrasts Augustine and Aristotle with Bacon.

“Augustine thinks signification as a triadic relation between a thing, the sensible species perceived by the senses; another, the signified; and an interpreter, the mediating thought…. From the outset, Augustine distinguishes ‘natural’ signs from ‘given’ signs (data). Natural signs do not involve a voluntary production, but correspond to a natural causality: footprints recall the passage of an animal that produced them, smoke the fire that caused it. But the ‘given’ signs presuppose the intentional activity of a living being” (L’Être et représentation, p. 18, my translation throughout).

I like the idea that there is always need for interpretation.

The idea of natural signs is fascinating. These would have to be distinct from the sensible and intelligible “species” whose existence and role were debated by medieval authors. Whereas species are a kind of images or likenesses of things, smoke is not an image of fire, and tracks are not the image of an animal. The natural signs are each interpretable as effects of a particular kind, that point to a particular kind of natural cause. This implies the existence of a natural causality that is real in the sense of being in the things and not imposed by us, even if its particulars require interpretation.

Meanwhile, “given” signs do reflect a sort of imposition, even if the imposition is not the act of an individual. In contrast with the natural signs, they are said to be voluntary. The main example seems to be the words and expressions of a language. Relative to an individual, they are pre-given; but relative to a historical community, they mean what the community in fact takes them to mean.

“Augustine articulates this theory of the sign to that of language and intellection, notably with the idea of the verbum cordis [word of the heart], mental language, interior word, thought fixed on a word, definitional image of the thing in thought: ‘Even without sounding words, the one who thinks speaks in his heart’ ” (p. 19).

On this view, thought is understood as a kind of speaking in one’s heart. Subjective meanings attributable to speakers of spoken language are to be explained in terms of a “mental language” that is different from, but analogous to, any particular spoken language. This is different from the view that speaking in one’s heart is enabled by an interiorization of spoken language, without the need to posit a separate mental language.

Boulnois contrasts Augustine’s view with Aristotle’s “semiotics of inference”.

“But a completely different definition of the sign, of Aristotelian origin, interferes with this…. Here the sign is a proposition, the point of departure for reasoning by inference, such that it founds a demonstration…. The sign is the antecedent of a conditional proposition or of an inference” (ibid). “The sign, which in Augustine grounds a relation between two things, in Aristotle founds induction between two propositions” (p. 20).

Neither of these is equivalent to the simple view that signs stand for things directly, which is closer to what Bacon will defend. Boulnois is reading Augustine as saying that a sign is or grounds a real relation between two things, and Aristotle as saying it is or grounds a relation of implication between two assertions. But for both Aristotle and Augustine, the sign refers primarily to some kind of relation, rather than simply to a thing.

“Besides this semiotics of inference, Aristotle develops a complex semantics at the beginning of the treatise On Interpretation…. The symbolic relation is constitutive of language, but it can also be expressed in the vocabulary of the semeion [sign], of logical inference, which allows a passage from sensible expressions to concepts…. But by the intermediary of the concept, indirectly, signs refer to the thing” (pp. 20-21).

Aristotle and Augustine each develop their own kind of indirect or mediated or “moderate” realism.

“The Aristotelian definition of the sign as a principle of inference is reprised by Peter of Spain…. Whereas Augustine only envisages signs as presenting sensible species, Bacon wants to account for the intelligibles evoked by Aristotle — the concepts. But he makes them representing signs” (pp. 22-23).

Here Boulnois does connect signs with species in Augustine’s case, but their relation is still not one of identity. Many of Augustine’s medieval readers would likely have interpolated a notion of species (e.g., a sensible species of smoke, for smoke) into their understanding of Augustine’s account. In this way we might say that a sensible species of smoke is a sign of fire (“is” of predication, not “is” of identity). But smoke as a sign of fire is not the same as the sensible species of the smoke.

“This reorganization rests on the concept of representation, already used by Peter of Spain: when a sign represents, it constitutes a term in a proposition, and recalls many intentional objects (the signifieds), or it ‘supposes for’ them. With the concept of representation, expressing a theory of supposition (or of reference), Peter of Spain gives himself the means to unify the general relation between sign and signified (signification in Augustine), and the conventional relation between the vocal sound and the thing named. Avoiding here the mediation of the concept, he brings together under a single vocable the natural relation of the concept to the thing and the conventional relation of the vocal sound to the concept. In reprising this vocabulary, Bacon integrates in the same term of representation the relation of the sensible sign to the thing signified and of the concept to the thing known. He takes sides at the same time against Boethius, in posing that the signified of the concept is the thing itself and not an intermediary concept. Thus while Boethius ordered semantics by noetics, the theory of representation puts them on the same plane” (p. 23).

Direct realism was actually a radical innovation, as Boulnois points out.

“Bacon thus can unify all the relations, natural and conventional, between vocal sounds, intellections, and things, under the general concept of the sign. Even though he recognizes that Aristotle concentrates in the treatise On Interpretation on conventional signs, vocal sounds, it is necessary to produce a universal theory of signs, including intellections, vocal sounds, and writing” (pp. 23-24).

One abstract theory of signs and things signified is used to cover both natural and linguistic cases.

“Starting from this Baconian innovation, it will be necessary to examine the challenges of this response to the great semantic controversy over the sign. If the concept is a sign and if the sign represents the thing itself, in what way do the great semantic questions play out based on this fundamental decision? From this foyer can be explained the natural character of the concept, the convention of the linguistic sign, and the importance of an imposition inscribed in a juridical and political order” (p. 24).

From this standpoint, concepts are assimilated to natural signs, whereas linguistic signs are arbitrary and depend on convention. Concepts on this view are individually self-contained. They are what they are independent of any articulation by us. It remains that they must be naturally or supernaturally given to us. The implicit notion of any concept in Aristotle, on the other hand, depends not only on its form, but also more generally on what is (or would be) well said by us, which is to say on its articulation in language, which must be understood against a background of other articulations in language.

Next in this series: Signification, Representation

Being and Representation Revisited

Michel Foucault in Les mots et les choses (literally Words and Things, 1966; English tr. The Order of Things), the book that made him a celebrity in France and raised the brewing French controversy over so-called “structuralism” and humanism into high gear, argues that there was a major paradigm shift from resemblance to more abstract representation at the beginning of the classical age (17th century). More recently, Robert Brandom has focused more specifically on Descartes’s analytic geometry as based on a global isomorphic representation of geometry in terms of algebra, which replaced the medieval paradigm of resemblance.

Certainly the notion of representation plays a fundamental role in both Descartes and Locke. Foucault made a huge impression on me when I first read him around 1979, and — as witnessed here — Brandom is one of my current leading lights. But Foucault and Brandom are both just wrong about the middle ages being simply dominated by a paradigm based on resemblance.

While I have several times referred to L’Être et représentation [Being and Representation] (1999) by Olivier Boulnois, I have yet to more substantially work here on this important book, which details the rise of the notion of a “science” of metaphysics as ontology — closely associated with an abstract notion of representation, not reducible to resemblance — in the later middle ages. This offers a vital corrective to the rather ahistorical global generalizations commonly applied to these topics.

On Boulnois’s account, which involves a cast of many, the leading character in these developments will be the theologian John Duns Scotus (1266-1308). Boulnois is a leading scholar and translator of Scotus.

I would note that this substantial work on Scotus also seems to thoroughly invalidate the thinly documented valorization of the Scotist univocity of being by Gilles Deleuze. It is hard to think of a writer more viscerally opposed to the representationalist paradigm than Deleuze. Deleuze’s other valorizations of Spinoza and Leibniz and the ethical notion of affirmation in his early Nietzsche book influenced me in the past. But to my knowledge, Deleuze never even mentions the central role of representation in Scotus and its strong connection with univocity. I felt betrayed when I discovered this.

“To represent means at once to ‘make present’, ‘stand in place of’, ‘resemble’. Precisely, in the Middle Age the vocabulary of repraesentatio is used frequently, in all of these senses” (Boulnois p. 7, my translation throughout).

The point here is not to deny that resemblance plays a major role in medieval thought. It is rather that — as with several other notions commonly associated with modernity, such as a psychological Subject — the later middle ages already saw substantial and systematic use of a more abstract notion of representation.

“Already in Tertulian, the statue of Hercules ‘represents’ Hercules … it indicates his presence in absence — it takes his place. To represent is in a certain way to make present, and Maxim of Turin uses these two terms as synonyms. The liturgical use of the term follows naturally…. A new turn appears in the Cistercian order with Aelred of Rievaulx, as a meditative exercise that makes Christ present in the imagination” (ibid).

In spite of the visual or visualizing character of these uses and their association with notions of resemblance, there is clearly more going on here than just the application of a criterion of resemblance. We see explicit theoretical development centered on the notion of representation.

“But the text that durably imposed the vocabulary of representation seems to be the Latin translation of the De Anima [On the Soul] of Avicenna: the expression appears at least seventeen times in this work…. It is indeed repraesentatio that bears all the difficulty of the platonizing noetics of Avicenna…. In this way the problematic rejoins the central difficulty of another Platonism, that of Augustine, which has to understand how the soul, always spiritual, can have sensible images without losing its spiritual nature…. [T]he problem of representation obliges us to explore the confluence of Augustinianism and Avicennism” (pp. 8-9).

Representation is a fundamental concept of Avicenna’s elaborate psychology, which combines Platonic, Aristotelian, and medical elements. (Avicenna was the second greatest medical authority in the middle ages, after Galen.)

The historical importance of the adoption of Avicenna by later medieval Augustinians was already pointed out by the great Thomist scholar Etienne Gilson in the early 20th century.

“The Middle Age explains repraesentatio by its equivalents: stare pro (taking the place of) — signs take the place of things that cause them and to which they refer; supponere pro (supposing for) — in a proposition, the terms take the place of the thing to which they refer; similitudo, species, imago (being a resemblance, an image) — the sensible species, the phantasm, the concept representing the object they resemble; supplere vicem (playing the role of) — abstractive knowing takes the place of the object” (p. 9).

The role of signs in thought and language was already discussed by Roger Bacon in the 13th century. The theory of “supposition” was an important and sophisticated Latin innovation that anticipates modern referential semantics. Theories of “species” were another major non-Aristotelian Latin development, possibly derived from Stoic physiological-epistemological theories of phantasia.

“We need to ask ourselves about the logical, optical, and noetic status of representation, corresponding to the functions of the sign, of the sensible image (species or phantasm), of the concept. Taking the place of, being the image of, resembling, conceiving are diverse regimes that need to be studied in their own right. Then we need to rearticulate these terms one to another, and ask ourselves how the representation of being is constituted successively as a semantics, an eidetics, and a noetics. In a theory where concepts are themselves signs, where they also have sensible species for content, these three dimensions form a coherent system” (pp. 9-10).

His reference to the “representation of being” here anticipates what we will see as the Scotist approach to being in terms of representation. Roger Bacon treats concepts as signs.

The Latin middle ages saw huge development in logic, semantics, the theory of signs, optics, and noetics. Scholastic interest in logic is well known, and we have seen at least a taste of medieval noetics in the disputes about Aristotelian intellect. There was major development in geometrical optics in the Arabic-speaking world, and in the medieval and Renaissance Latin world. Representability is the minimal criterion of univocal being in Scotus.

“But it is also necessary to examine its genesis. What form of concentration allowed signification, knowledge, and thought to be re-expressed using only the concept of representation? And what changed in the notion of representation to make it possible to represent all things in a unique way? Researching the origin of a metaphysics of representation is not to write the history of the concept of representation, but the genealogy of a new structure, the thinking of being by representation” (p. 10).

Here I think he is onto something important. These discussions have a multi-dimensional aspect that is clearly not reducible to a notion of simple resemblance.

We will see that a “metaphysics of representation” and a “thinking of being by representation” are especially characteristic of Scotus, but not only Scotus.

Metaphysics “gets a new formulation in the tradition that goes from Roger Bacon to Duns Scotus, often identified with the English Franciscan school of the 13th-14th century. I hope to show that this is too restrictive, because the problematic plunges its roots further in the Augustinian and Avicennan ground and overflows this school, since we find important elements in Thomas Aquinas or Henry of Ghent” (ibid).

“With these distinctions made, it will be possible to measure the mutations of metaphysics that result. It gets its modern status as a science thanks to the concept of being, which allows Henry of Ghent to know all things in one sole act of thought, and in Duns Scotus replaces the analogy of being by founding its univocity: the unity of metaphysics rests on a noetic unity. We need to investigate that which gives priority to the concept, a unity engendered by intellect, with the power to represent all its meanings in its stable identity” (ibid).

By “modern” here, he means early modern. It is important to note that the disrepute of metaphysics and widespread talk about surpassing it came later. The early moderns generally claimed to have a new and better metaphysics. This will turn out to have Scotist and other scholastic roots.

I did not recall Boulnois’s use of “concept” in this context. This will be something to watch. In the context of univocal being and intellectual intuition of individuals, “concept” has a completely different sense than it does in Hegel or Brandom. By “concept” here, he seems to mean a mental representation that could be simply given as an atomic thing. It is important to note that the term “concept” can also be given a non-mentalist, non-representationalist, and relational rather than atomic interpretation in terms of conditions of use and consequences. This is a fundamental theme in Brandom’s work.

“This study aims at the same time to propose a new interpretation of the history of metaphysics. With the conceptual unity of being, it seeks to understand that which constitutes the invisible foyer and hidden sub-basement of modern philosophy” (ibid).

“This study is centered on the affirmation, more Avicennan than Aristotelian, that the ens can be apprehended in a unique concept, which leads to the univocity of the ens. The object of metaphysics thus becomes the first object of thought in the order of conception (first adequate object: being) and not the first object in the order of perfection (first object by eminence: God)” (p. 12).

Ens is the present participle of the verb esse, “to be”. Implicitly it refers to an individual entity, a particular “being”. This will be related to claims of knowledge by intellectual intuition of individuals as individuals. In this context, claims of univocity go hand-in-hand with claims to univocally know by intellectual intuition. “Concept” here seems to be tied to intellectual intuition, whereas in Kant and Hegel the two are sharply opposed.

“Contemporary studies of ‘modern metaphysics’ from Suárez to Kant (Schulmetaphysik) show that the classic articulation of metaphysics into metaphysica generalis and metaphysica specialis rests on a discreet but decisive acceptance of the univocity of the concept of being, particularly in Suárez. Thus modern metaphysics acquired the status of a science and a univocal constitution thanks to the concept of ens in Scotus, which replaced the analogy of being. The univocity of being comprehended in a unique concept remains the principal turn in the history of metaphysics…. This structure imposes itself from the 14th to the 18th century, passing through the work of Suarez and Wolff” (p. 13).

The bad idea here is that a being has a concept, straightforwardly and univocally. This is antithetical to Aristotle, for whom the very beginning of wisdom is that things are said in many ways. I have occasionally invoked “beings” as objects of Aristotelian phronesis, which is all about grasping particulars in an open way that is not locked in to a univocal “concept”.

Next in this series: Signs, Concepts, Things

Power and Its Shadow

Omnipotence has been a problematic concept introduced by theologians in the monotheistic traditions. It has affected traditional metaphysics, the theory of knowledge, and politics. It has deep historical connections with political absolutism.

Ethics in the Socratic tradition take as a starting point something like the Kantian autonomy of reason, coupled with an agnostic but sympathetic view of religion.

For the Latin scholastic theologians, the autonomy of philosophical inquiry is only relative. But most stop short of a completely unqualified omnipotence, and do endorse a relative autonomy of philosophy. There is a long tradition of “faith seeking understanding”. This allows for a socially beneficial relation of benevolent mutual respect between theological and philosophical discourse.

For several centuries in the later middle ages, the main vehicle for expression of Christian theology consisted of meta-commentaries on the 12th-century theologian Peter Lombard’s commentary on the Bible, known as the Sentences. Lombard’s work was one of the foundations of Latin scholasticism. Over 1400 commentaries on it are known. Lombard was a student of the great Peter Abelard, but backed off from Abelard’s more controversial views.

Here I will largely translate and comment upon a brief survey of omnipotence in the Sentences commentary tradition by Olivier Boulnois. This introduction to his edited volume La puissance et son ombre: de Pierre Lombard à Luther (1994) touches upon many points of “historiographical” interest. The French volume focuses on Lombard’s distinctions 42-44, which are the parts dealing with omnipotence. It includes translations from Lombard himself, William of Auxerre, Hugh of Saint-Cher, Albert the Great, Bonaventure, Aquinas, Augustinus Triumphus, Duns Scotus, Durand of Saint-Pourcain, William of Ockham, Gregory of Rimini, and Martin Luther. My aim here is only to partially translate and comment upon the introduction by Boulnois, which is entitled “What God Cannot Do”.

“Can God walk, speak, lie, sin, die, make a mistake? Can he restore virginity? Do other than what he does? Create other worlds?…. Can God annul the most fundamental eternal truths or change them?” (p. 11, my translation throughout).

First, it should be noted that there is not just one concept of omnipotence. Its meaning has been the subject of great controversy in the past. We will see several competing versions in what follows.

Second, the medieval theological mainstream in fact recognized that there are some things God cannot do, or at least will never do. The great scholastics recognized that omnipotence has be qualified in some way in order to be at all defensible, even if they would not themselves phrase it that way. Their arguments are about where and how to draw the line.

“[T]o ask what God cannot do is to research the limits of the possible, and to pose a question that bears on one of the principal senses of being in Aristotle” (pp. 11-12).

The last is a reference to potentiality (dynamis in Aristotle’s Greek), which in the Latin tradition is mainly understood as a kind of power.

“The fundamental question becomes: what does the proposition ‘he can’ signify? To respond, it is necessary to articulate three concepts: power [puissance], ability [pouvoir], possibility” (p. 12).

Puissance and pouvoir can both mean power, but with different nuances. Puissance is standardly used to translate the potentia of the Latin tradition. Pouvoir is used to express ability, and also political power.

Boulnois asks, “With what power [pouissance] are we concerned here? With Aristotle’s being in potentiality (intermediate between being and non-being)? Or with the effective power [pouissance] to make be what is not? But doesn’t that presuppose power [pouissance] in the first sense?” (ibid).”

“Effective power to make be what is not” recalls the theory of creation in Aquinas.

Boulnois continues, switching to the other French term for power, “With what model of power [pouvoir] are we confronted? With the generosity of an overcapacity that dispenses in accord with its own goodness? With the arbitrariness of always-revocable decrees? With the fixation of laws in conformity with which power [pouvoir] must itself act to act legitimately?” (ibid).

Here we begin to see the connection with political power.

“What form of the possible do we encounter? This is the whole problem of modality: in the logical sense, everything noncontradictory is possible; but isn’t it necessary to add a second form of possibility, real possibility, that which can be effectively realized by causes?” (ibid).

Possibility and necessity are both modal concepts. I still need to write more about the ethical significance of modality. While preparing this post I dashed off another quick note.

“For the problem of omnipotence bears on the limit conditions of an order of the world and an order of discourse” (ibid).

Claims of omnipotence have a global impact on how we understand everything else, which is literally explicit in the very term. (“Omni” is Latin for “all”).

“The situation of the question of omnipotence in the organic unity of the Sentences leads to thinking the possible in terms of divine omnipotence, and not the inverse” (p. 15).

When two terms are identified or linked, questions of the order of explanation can acquire a large importance. Here this involves the relation between philosophy and theology.

“Peter Lombard analyzes divine power in a double way” (p. 16). “From then on, the question turns on the status of the possible in the divine understanding: does what is impossible for God come from God (as Henry of Ghent believed at one time) or rather from the inconsistency of the thing itself (Duns Scotus)? Or again, is it necessary to say that the question has no sense, it being given that there is a strict reciprocity between the reality of the possible and divine thought (Ockham, reprised by Luther)?” (p. 17).

“But the evolution of the interpretation explains the modern contradiction between divergent points of view: a God who is the cause of the possibility of eternal truths (Descartes), or is submitted to the necessity of the best of [all] worlds (Leibniz), or again is identical with the necessity of all his attributes (Spinoza)” (p. 18).

Omnipotence in Descartes underwrites a theological voluntarism. Infinity and a very different kind of omnipotence are the most important properties of Spinoza’s God, who is also equated with Nature. Leibniz uses another nonstandard kind of omnipotence, explicitly developing his metaphysical views in terms of a highly rationalized form of creationism.

“For the problem of omnipotence is first of all a problem of exegesis” (p. 19). “If God can do anything, isn’t it necessary to say that he can lie, be mistaken, be put to death? Doesn’t one go to the point of making God a bad power? Augustine strives to resolve the difficulty: ‘And its inability to lie is a great power of the Word’. As a consequence, divine omnipotence does not consist in being able to do all, except in an inadequate sense…. Thus omnipotence is defined simply as God’s power to not be prevented from doing all the good that he wills. Augustine carefully avoids defining omni-potence as a power to do all” (p. 20).

We are teetering on the edge of paradox here. It is precisely the qualifications of what initially seems like the unqualified par excellence that allow an ethical perspective to be recovered. At the very least, this is in great tension with the motif of unqualified power.

“If God cannot do something, that is because it is not a true power (walking, sinning, being mistaken are marks of imperfection)…. If all that God cannot do is only weakness and negativity, God will be in himself every positive power. ‘He can do all that power can do’. Divine omnipotence has become the infinite affirmation of power” (p. 21).

For the 11th-century monastic reformer Peter Damian, according to Boulnois, “The origin of nature is not subject to the same laws as nature. Creation ex nihilo affords a striking illustration of this: ‘Nature itself is made against nature’. Nature thus becomes identical to the will of God: ‘Nature itself has its proper nature, which is to say the will of God” (pp. 24-25).

“The whole question of modality is raised here…. For Aristotle, only the future is contingent…. But for the theologian, who speaks of the possible insofar as it is the object of divine power, even if a thing is, insofar as it is, it can not be…. Even if an event is realized, at the very moment when it is real, it is not necessary. For it could not be if it were not willed by God” (p. 25). “The restoration of [virginity, according to Damian] resembles a new creation, and it is not subject to any mundane law, even that of contradiction…. All power and all knowing are coeternal with God, sovereign creator of the world” (pp. 26-27).

Again modality comes up. The idea that the present state of the world is contingent is reasonable in itself.

Among the most radical claims associated with omnipotence is that God can change the past. Up to a point, it seems to me that we should affirm the contingency of the present as well as the future, but it is also very possible to go too far in this. What is challenging to specify is how to draw the line between good flexibility and bad arbitrariness.

For Aristotle, Boulnois says ” ‘That which is, when it is, and that which is not, when it is not, is necessary’. This principle does not bear only on a necessity of discourse. It also implies a real necessity. For Aristotle, the possible is nothing but being in potentiality, that is to say being which tends toward existence, and which at the end of an infinite time, will end by coming to be. There is what could be called a statistical interpretation of modality, according to which that is possible which was, is, or will be in an infinite time. Indeed it is a temporal interpretation, according to which there always will be a state of affairs in which the contingent is realized. Relayed by Maimonides, this principle is the basis of the celebrated ‘third way’ of showing the existence of God in Thomas Aquinas” (p. 32).

Aristotle’s “statistical” modality is not statistical in the numerical sense. He defines the necessary as that which is always true. “Always” may not be entirely air-tight. He also explicitly speaks of things that are true “for the most part”, and sometimes of things that are always true or true for the most part.

Boulnois continues, “The motif of this disequilibrium can be easily designated: it is the primacy of presence in all metaphysical analysis of manifestation. While the [more traditional] theologians, following Augustine, envisage temporality as a triple manifestation of the divine power in the past, present, and future, Bonaventure, in the manner of the Aristotelian metaphysics, places himself in the perspective of the thing in its evidence enunciable by the finite subject. He goes on to invoke an important argument: between the thing and its form of presence (be it a presence of the past or an existence in the present instant), there exists an analytic relation…. The presence of the thing is included in all manifestation. On the other hand the future, which is not yet, is not analytically included in the content of the thing that comes to be” (pp. 32-33).

There really was a “metaphysics of presence” in Latin scholasticism. The error is to attribute it to directly to Aristotle.

“From this point on, Thomas Aquinas, Giles of Rome, and Ockham pose only the question of the necessity of the past…. They no longer ask if the same question can be extended to the future. The reference to Peter Damian conceals a mutation of the problematic: instead of being posed from the transcendent freedom of God, the possibility of the contingent will only be envisaged starting from the human experience of the present. The ontology of the contingent becomes the possibility of finite freedom” (p. 33).

“All the commentaries on the Sentences, following the line of Peter Lombard, preserve the memory of the condemnation of Abelard by the council of Sens. In the spirit of this council, it is not permitted to think that God is necessarily determined to act and can only do what he does. The council Fathers, led by Bernard of Clairvaux, see in this prohibition a line that is not to be crossed. The omnipotence of God requires us to think that he can do what he does not do, omit what he does not omit, do what he does in another manner or at another moment, or similarly omit it. The divine omnipotence thus appears as sovereignly free, indifferent between acting and not acting” (pp. 33-34).

This is the point at which the thesis of omnipotence becomes dangerous.

“Peter Abelard himself was moved by a metaphysical principle, the principle of reason. God can only do what he does, because ‘God does nothing without a reason’…. Abelard does not admit that God can act against the order he has decided to follow…. God cannot go against his proper wisdom and his proper rationality. Reason imposes itself on him in being the form of his freedom. In a sense, Abelard is quite simply faithful to the patristic tradition that orients divine action toward the good. But he systematizes to the point of paradox, in limiting divine freedom by his wisdom” (p. 34).

The whole question about whether or not God can act “against” what he has “decided” is artificial, because it assumes an anthropomorphic and temporal notion of “decision”. If God is pre-eminently the Eternal as Augustine says, the temporal metaphor of decision is inappropriate.

“Peter Damian makes an equation between divine omnipotence and human freedom: what is possible for the human must at least be possible for God” (ibid).

This argument clearly depends on an anthropomorphic analogy. What is called “possible” for the human depends in part on the particular character of human finitude. It is not at all the same as what would be called “possible” for an eternal neoplatonic God exempt from all finitude. Frankly, it is not even clear that it is appropriate to speak of possibility in relation to God at all. Aristotle says that the first cause is pure act and entelechy. Augustine very strongly associates God with the eternal.

“As Peter Lombard well saw, contrary to the censors of Abelard who ignore the point, the position of Abelard is equally motivated by the principle of the best. As with Leibniz later on, the principle of the best follows from an interpretation of the principle of causality…. Abelard in turn follows the principle of causality, attested by Plato: ‘Nothing comes to be without a cause’. But he reinterprets it in the light of Christian theology, for which the cause of the created resides in the exemplary reason, the divine idea, model, or archetype by which God thinks the creatable before instituting it. It is in this sense that Augustine writes: ‘Who would dare say that God created things without reason?’ For Abelard, as a consequence, the world is created in a universal order, and in it no event escapes divine providence: nothing that appears contingent or due to chance comes to be outside of his prescience or his wisdom. Reason itself is a means of revelation. Despite the apparent disagreements between the Bible and Plato, a more profound reading of these two texts allows us to reconcile them, and to underline the identity between the rationality of God and his freedom” (p. 36).

“For in this problematic cause and reason are synonyms: ‘ratio vel causa‘, writes Peter Lombard…. The position of Abelard is indeed an important stage in the constitution of the principle of reason, between Plato and Leibniz. In Plato, the principle of causality, exterior to the demiurge, and the principle of the goodness of the cosmos are enunciated separately. For Abelard, the principle of reason has become interior to the divine wisdom, and conforms to the primacy of goodness. For Leibniz, finally, the principle of reason is no longer divine, but is identified with essence in general: every substance is the sufficient reason of its accidents” (p. 37).

“Without a doubt, the condemnation of Abelard played a decisive role here. We recall that Heidegger speaks of a ‘time of incubation’ of the principle of reason, already formulated since the birth of philosophy. But he does not respond to the question he himself raises” (p. 37). “In all the rigor of their terms, the condemnations of the council of Sens, in rejecting the application of the principle of reason to God, preserved the principle of reason in an incubator” (p. 38).

“If God creates a world, he cannot create it without what makes it a world: its order, the harmony of its parts…. God cannot create without: 1) what makes it a totality: that which is required for the achievement of a universe; 2) what makes its parts compatible with one another: the conditions of existence of creatures, one in relation to another; 3) what permits each of its parts to have sufficient consistency to possess the perfection of an essence and that of existing. The creation of a world results in the positing of a finite order, governed by the mathematical or musical principle of the harmony of the all, that is to say a certain proportion between the parts” (p. 39).

The strong notion of the coherence requirements of a world in Leibniz removes the usual arbitrariness from the notion of creation.

“This common problematic leaves room for a whole gamut of individual positions, from Albert the Great to Ockham. For Albert the Great, ‘if one places oneself in the point of view of being’, starting from the things that really exist, no better order is conceivable…. For Bonaventure, … God can make either a world different by its substances (but which is not really better, because it is incomparable), or a world different by its accidents (but that is really the same as this one)…. For Ockham, on the contrary the most probable position is ‘that which admits that God can make another world better than this one and specifically distinct from it’ ” (pp. 39-40).

“Can God change eternal truths?…. Descartes raises this question” (p. 40). “God does not know truths as true unless he wills that they be so” (p. 41). “This debate has a long medieval history” (ibid).

Hugh of Saint-Cher is credited with originating the distinction between absolute and ordained power.

“Hugh of Saint-Cher [distinguishes] two aspects of divine power. As conditioned, it cannot be contradictory…. In the measure that the order of the finite is subject to the principle of contradiction, God cannot make two opposed propositions [both] true. But in itself, the same power as absolute is not subject to the principle of contradiction: nothing can limit its power” (ibid). “In this he anticipates in an unheard-of way the motifs and the difficulties of the Cartesian position, even if he does not like [Descartes] speak of creation or of eternal truths” (p. 42).

“Thomas Aquinas poses the same question, but he responds in a completely different way…. The divine power can only make what is possible, that is to say what is in the nature of things. The nature of simple essences and the principle of non-contradiction are the source of all their proprieties, and the divine power is in a way limited to these possibilities” (pp. 42-43).

Here Aquinas comes across as much more sensible than some of the others. In significant measure at least, he upholds the reality of secondary causes. A concept of God construed in a way that would invalidate all other concepts and reason itself seems fit only for sectarians.

“Subsequently, the debate develops in another form: is the impossible impossible because God so decided, or is it impossible by nature…? Henry of Ghent at one time held the first thesis, but ended up retracting it. Duns Scotus maintains an order that supposes the distinction of diverse moments…. It is only logical contradiction between the parts that grounds the formal impossibility of the thing, and indeed the divine intellection of that impossibility. There is an irrevocable anteriority of the possible and indeed of the impossible to the divine intellect. Possibility is imposed on God in the same way it is imposed on the human (that is to say in a univocal way)” (p. 43).

This is an important qualification about Scotus. Although he was regarded as a realist in the controversies about nominalism and realism, he generally comes across as an extreme voluntarist. But Boulnois is a leading Scotus scholar who has translated 2000 pages of Scotus and written a large book about him, so I assume he knows what he is talking about.

“For Ockham, on the contrary, power and the possible are correlatives. There is in the first instance an absolute real identity between divine intellect and will. And in addition, there is no anteriority of the possible to the intellect. The possible not being other than the non-contradictory, all the possibles are independent. No limit of the ontological consistency of the possible restrains the divine power…. Ockham accepts all the consequences of the identification of the absolute possible with the divine power…. There is neither an anteriority of the impossible to the divine omnipotence (Scotus), nor an anteriority of omnipotence to the impossible (Henry of Ghent), but a strict correlation” (pp. 43-44).

Once again, when two things are assimilated together, it may mean that one is being reduced to the other. For instance, I hold that there is no separately existing thing called will — that Aristotelian intellect, practical judgment, and wisdom better explain the freedom that some want to supernaturally explain by will. Ockham on the other hand is a voluntarist who sees will everywhere, and seems to deny that modality is anything real.

“An other is not always a world. It is only after Bonaventure that the theologians come to speak of a possible other world” (p. 46).

This is fascinating. I never would have guessed that Bonaventure would partially anticipate Leibniz on the subject of worlds.

“For Scotus, the order fixed by God appears to be necessary from the point of view of every inferior agent, when it acts according to that order…. In the order instituted by God (nature), starting from contingent hypotheses, the laws of nature are necessary for the finite. They draw their necessity from the fact that it is God who invests them with their legality” (p. 47).

From this point of view, necessity only comes about from divine will. Sheer will conceived as a brute fact is thus said to come before justice or wisdom. This undermines all criteria.

“For Aristotle, the concept of world is that of a totality: there is only one possible world, and it is a fortiori the best” (p. 48).

But the argument that this is the best world because there is no other is a very weak one that Aristotle does not himself make, because he does not consider alternate worlds, and also does not consider the world to be created.

“For [Peter Damian], even a good that is never produced is in the power of God, the reason for its retention residing in the secret of his good will. His analysis results in distinguishing two poles in the divine power: on the one hand, the omni-potence taken in itself, which no im-potence can encumber, and on the other hand the order in which it is exercised, and which can explain that omnipotence is not manifested…. Thus, Peter Damian constructs the conceptual armature between two poles, which later took the name of absolute power and ordained power” (p. 53).

Peter Damian was an 11th-century monastic reformer who campaigned vigorously against corruption in the Church. He advocated solitude and ascetism, and reportedly introduced practices of flagellation that were regarded as too extreme by some. In the early 20th century, it was argued that Damian exempted God from the principle of non-contradiction, but this has been rejected by later scholars. He wrote a treatise on omnipotence arguing that God can restore virginity, but according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, he neither claimed that God can change a past event, nor that God can contradict himself.

What will become the distinction between absolute and ordained power allows appearances to be (mostly) saved while the claim of absolute power is maintained. I would note that this is an elaboration of Augustine’s reconciliation of miracles with natural causes, which treats natural causes as God’s established habits that are not invalidated by miracles. It will often be expressed using Aristotle’s notion of things that happen in a certain way “for the most part”, but there is no indication that Aristotle intended this as a way of leaving room for miracles. What happens for the most part in Aristotle involves variation in the way that the order of nature works out in particular cases, not suspension of it or exceptions to it.

“The ordained power has for object that which has been preordained, or disposed by God. It is a preordination of the possible in the divine understanding, and not the order of the real outside of God. Indeed it coincides with his prescience…. The ordained power does not presuppose order and is not determined by it; on the contrary, it is it that determines it in determining itself: it prefigures it, it is the pre-supposition of order. It is the pre-order” (p. 55).

According to this view, the order of the world corresponds to the “habitual” operation of creation. The habitual order is subordinate to the power of creation that produces it. The habituality of the created order is real, but it also has real exceptions in the form of miracles.

According to Boulnois, “Absolute power and ordained power form a couple of concepts, a dialectic, such that we never find one without the other. There is no theology of absolute power without the theology of ordained power. What we find instead are different ways of thinking this dialectic” (ibid).

“The object of absolute power is identical to the object of divine wisdom, to the totality of what is possible for God. The object of ordained power is identical to the object of the principled will of God” (pp. 55-56).

“For God does nothing without prescience. His action is subordinated to the order predetermined by him, and can never depart from that order. As a consequence, operative power is subordinated to ordained power; and reciprocally, God never operates directly by his absolute power. Absolute power taken in itself, naked, is not operative” (p. 56).

It was I and not Boulnois who earlier brought Augustine’s justification of miracles into the discussion. I much prefer Aristotelian natural variability to the Augustinian theory of miracles. But on the older view Boulnois is characterizing here — that God never acts directly by his absolute power — it would seem that there could be no exceptions to the ordained order. This seems consistent with Augustine’s rigorous view of eternity, but it is in tension with Augustine’s justification of miracles.

It appears that Duns Scotus (1266-1308) was instrumental in changing the traditional Augustinian pattern in these matters. Boulnois is a world-class expert on Scotus, so he is well qualified to point this out.

“While reprising these classical elements, the interpretation of Scotus breaks with his predecessors, for three reasons: 1) The theory of absolute power and ordained power is extended to every free being. 2) In reprising the distinction between fact and principle, Scotus conceives the two members of the distinction as two ways of acting and not simply as two powers. God intervenes in fact by his absolute power to modify what is in principle the course of things. 3) Even when he has chosen an order, at the same time and from the same point of view, God can do that which he did not decide upon. The divine power is open to an array of synchronic possibilities, and the state chosen in fact does not exclude other possibilities” (p. 56).

Each of these three points is significant: 1) Beliefs about human free will come to be patterned on a pronouncedly voluntaristic interpretation of divine omnipotence. 2) Fact is for possibly the first time asserted to be more decisive and more inclusive than principle or essence. Reason must accommodate presumed facts, rather than governing their interpretation. 3) Far from being stably grounded in eternity and essence, order of all kinds is now treated as fundamentally contingent and revocable.

In 20th-century scholarship, the emergence of such “modernist” views was most often associated with William of Ockham, who as the arch “nominalist” in accounts of the 14th-century debate about universals has been treated as diametrically opposed to the more traditional “realism” attributed to Scotus. But according to Boulnois, Scotus was the decisive innovator with respect to these views about will, fact, and order.

“It is this interpretation that seems to have had the most influence on subsequent medieval thought.”

“There are two models, fundamentally distinct: 1) A logical model, for which absolute power is the power capable of the totality of possibilities (of all that is non-contradictory), and the ordained power corresponds to the choice of a particular order. 2) An operative model, for which divine intervention de potentia absoluta is a possibility of modifying in fact that which is in principle the course of things. What is outside of order is not disorder but fact.” (ibid). “For Scotus, the model is no longer a logical model, but an operative model. He no longer distinguishes two forms of power but two forms of action (according to the law and outside the law)” (p. 57).

What is described as the traditional view here tends to make order overly strong, presuming it to be capable of explaining all facts, while the “modernist” view makes fact overly strong, tending toward a proto-fundamentalist denial of the need for interpretation, and at the same time shrinking the scope of order so that fact always exceeds it.

As Boulnois argues more generally in his big book on Scotus, L’Être et représentation (“Being and Representation”, 1999), this historic transformation is too large to be attributed to a single figure, but Scotus is nonetheless at its center. Modern large-scale interpretation of the history of Latin philosophy has generally centered on Aquinas, who was canonized as a saint in 1323, and specially declared by the Pope to be central to Catholic philosophy in 1879 after the rise of neo-Thomism.

(From a broad point of view, the “moderate realism” of Aquinas has much to recommend it, but one-sided emphasis on Aquinas has obscured the real diversity and complexity of Latin philosophical views and the important role of numerous others, including Scotus. The pragmatist Charles Pierce rather casually called himself a Scotist realist. Heidegger wrote his dissertation on Scotus, but in later work tended to reject Latin philosophy with a very broad brush, without addressing important historical detail.)

“No more than his predecessors does Scotus say that God acts by an absolute power, but only that he can act otherwise than he does (and it is in this that his power is absolute). This has no immediate operative content…. Duns Scotus does not say that God acts by his naked absolute power, but precisely always, according to a beautiful oxymoron, ‘in the manner ordained by his absolute power’. What characterizes the position of Scotus, more than the operative model of absolute power alone, is at the same time the extreme opposition of this dialectic between the two concepts and the possibility at every instant of one toggling to the other. To safeguard divine freedom, Scotus creates an infinite oscillation between an instituted juridical order and a de facto power that is nonetheless not disordered and immoral” (ibid).

What Boulnois calls a beautiful oxymoron in Scotus, the de facto claim of an infinite oscillation between order and fact — evinced by the phrase “ordained by his absolute power” — seems to collapse the evolved distinction between ordained and absolute power. Perhaps this is why Scotus was called the “subtle doctor”. But the implications of this position are not at all subtle. They are quite dramatic.

“What characterizes the end of the Middle Age is at once the inflation of arguments resorting to absolute power and a fragmentation of models allowing it to be thought” (p. 58).

Boulnois cites Avignon Pope John XXII’s blunt declaration that the absolute and ordained power of God are the same thing. John apparently used this to justify a politicized claim that salvation can only be achieved through the institutionalized sacraments of the Church. “All that which is ordained by God is irrevocable” (p. 59). This was a time of bitter conflict between the Avignon Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor Louis IV. It was under John that Aquinas was canonized as a saint. John was also the one who formally declared witchcraft to be a heresy.

We saw above that William of Ockham also emphasized the inseparability of absolute and ordained power. But he apparently used it to argue for the opposite practical conclusion, that law and ordained power can always be surpassed by fact and absolute power, and that salvation can be achieved through faith alone. Under the protection of Louis IV, Ockham accused the Pope of heresy.

(From the point of view of the logical pragmatics I have discussed in reading Brandom, the formal identification of two things with different connotations can be interpreted as a reduction of one to the other, or of the other to the one, or as a nonreductive combination of the two. Different connotations imply different pragmatics or conditions of use.)

Boulnois says that Ockham interprets the thesis of the nonseparability of the nominally distinct powers (absolute versus ordained) in terms of its consequences for the power’s object (the world), rather than in terms of its subject (God).

“John XXII insists on the fact that the identity of divine power entails the invariability of the order chosen by God…. For [Ockham], the theory of John XXII comes back to saying that the order of the world cannot be other than it is. From this it follows evidently that no creature can do what it does not do…. He sees in this a resurgence of Greco-Arabic necessitarianism, an error condemned in 1277. And to say that humans can only be saved by the institution is not only an error, but a heresy: in fact, many humans are saved by their faith without being baptized” (p. 60).

“Greco-Arabic necessitarianism” is another exaggeration. Among the Greeks, the only real necessitarians are the Stoics. Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes do all seem to slant things in the direction of objective order and necessity, but the radical voluntarism of Ghazali seems to have been more historically influential in the Arabic tradition.

“For Ockham, order is always a de facto order, a complex of contingent and revocable singularities. It is thus the object of ordained power; but what God can do (in principle), even if he never does it, is the object of absolute power. There is here an extraordinary cross-chase in relation to Duns Scotus. What the one calls the object of ordained power, the other calls the object of absolute power, and vice versa. The fact and the principle exchange their role” (ibid).

On Boulnois’s account, Ockham is a less radical voluntarist than Scotus.

“For Ockham, it is necessary to thus understand the distinction ‘power to do something’: the expression is sometimes taken according the laws ordained and instituted by God, and of these things one says that God can do them by his ordained power. In another way, ‘power’ is taken in the sense of power to do anything that is not self-contradictory, that God has ordained that he will do or not do, and of these things, one says that God can do by his absolute power. The ‘ordained power’ indeed does designate the order established by God, as in Duns Scotus. But the ‘absolute power’ designates not his de facto power, but only everything that is not contradictory: it has a logical sense and not an operative one (since it designates what God does not do); he returns quite simply to the traditional sense admitted before Scotus” (pp. 60-61).

“[Ockham’s influential student] Adam Wodeham explicitly cites two interpretations of absolute power…. Adam Wodeham clearly thinks ordained power as an order instituted regularly and capable of dispensation, like Scotus and Ockham. But he is also aware of the existence of two models for thinking absolute power: that of Duns Scotus, for whom the power to do the contrary of the established order is absolute, that is to say autonomous and absolutely capable of acting; and that of Ockham, for whom the absolute power of God is subject to the logical principle of contradiction. For Scotus, even when God has ordained the contrary, he can do something by his absolute power. For Ockham, God can only act by his absolute power if there is no contradiction with what he has ordained” (p. 61).

“As a consequence — and contrary to received ideas — the great epistemological rupture of the 14th century was effectuated by Scotus more than by Ockham…. [Scotus] is infinitely more revolutionary, in admitting that God has a de facto power that is other than the power in principle without being immoral. Nonetheless, the position of Ockham and that of Scotus converge on one point, essential for theological ethics: even if, by the ordained power of God, the human can only be saved by baptism and entry into the institution, by the absolute power of God, the human can be saved without Church or charity…. One of the distant consequences of this hypertrophy of absolute power will be the possibility, vigorously enunciated by Luther, that there is a predetermination indifferent to good and evil” (p. 62).

Luther argued for justification by faith alone, traced all authority solely to the Bible, and tended to emphasize its literal word.

“It would be exaggerated to make the new theory of divine power bear all of the motif of the metamorphosis of theology after Scotus. It would also be exaggerated to try to reduce everything to the new theories of intuition or of the primacy of will. First of all, Scotus is only the spokesman for a whole generation of thinkers who each contributed to the restructuring of theology” (p. 63).

But these caveats address only certain over-simplifications of the historical interpretation Boulnois develops.

“It is the triangle of power, knowledge, and will that is modified in its entirety. In the human as in God, power [pouvoir] becomes a power [puissance] to act in principle or in fact. Power remains a capacity to act according to an order (interpreted juridically as a law), but it also becomes the capacity to act outside the law or against it. Furthermore, for thinking of the problems of beatitude from the side of common abstractive knowledge, there developed a theory of intuitive knowledge of the singular contingent. Finally, for the Franciscan theologians above all, freedom of the will is an innate quality” (p. 63).

On the threshold of modernity, new voluntaristic super-powers are attributed both to God and to the human. The alleged fact of voluntaristic will is no longer constrained by an orientation toward the good.

“As a consequence, willing is no longer tautologically willing the good. But reciprocally, what God wills is ipso facto the good. On the edge of the new theology of omnipotence, the theories of intuition and of will will be adjoined, to construct a new model of practice and of epistemology. With this new device, it is the whole harmony between the transcendentals, being, truth, and the good, that is disrupted. The objects of power, of will, and of knowledge are no longer necessarily aligned” (pp. 63-64).

“Conceiving divine intervention de potentia absoluta as a real possibility led to an undermining of the intelligibility and predictability of natural phenomena. The order of the real no longer appears except as a descent into particularity in the ocean of possibles. This disjunction has a paradoxical consequence: philosophy is all the more free to expound the necessity of the order of the present world, while the theologian makes contingency surge into this world here, when he does not invoke an infinity of other possible worlds. The present order can become an absolute, and the absolute can contain an infinity of other orders. The order and the absolute are disseminated in an indefinite variation of hypothetical orders. The order and the absolute are no longer articulated; they pass one into the other” (p. 64).

As Boulnois says, treating divine intervention in the world by absolute power as a real possibility tends to undermine intelligibility. I would add that this undermining of intelligibility undermines ethics as well.

“This renewal of the problematic figures an evolution of theology. It makes God less and less human, less and less reached by knowledge of the order of the universe, less and less oriented toward the norm of the good. Divine omnipotence thus founds a ‘skeptical’ movement, which has consequences for the theology of justification (from Scotus to Luther). The order of salvation appears more and more contingent…. The equilibrium between the order of the world and the omnipotence of God attained in the Sentences of Peter Lombard ended up a victim of its own success. After being articulated with nature, the supernatural becomes omnipresent, and finally suspends all autonomy of the order of nature. There is no longer a consistent finite order. Omnipotence figures a more and more uncertain order of the world, and results in a complete concealment of God and his plans from the human. God is so unknowable that his attributes are founded in the brilliance of his omnipotence, reachable only by faith, and not allowing any certainty to exist. Following this metamorphosis, God, the object par excellence of theological intelligence, who was at first thought of as ineffable, will be finally named as incomprehensible. The world will appear as a labyrinth of axiomatics and exceptions, in which individuals are toys” (pp. 64-65).

This omnipresence of the possibility of supernatural intervention, outside the order of nature — and the correlated suspension of all autonomy of the order of nature — are what undermine intelligibility.

“It is now the model of political power [pouvoir] that serves to think the divine power in an identical, univocal sense, even in a particular case: all power can be exercised either juridically, or de facto” (p. 65).

“By a cross-chase of which history has the secret, these ‘absolutist’ arguments will serve later for the exaltation of monarchic power against pontifical pretensions. In Jean Bodin, they serve to describe the absolute power of the prince. This theory leads to a reinforcement of political absolutism — and simultaneously to an evanescence of the predictability of the law of nature” (p. 66).

“The theme of absolute power grounds the work of Duns Scotus in three dimensions: ontological (the action of every free agent), juridical (the king and his realm), theological (God and his decrees). This origin reveals a structural correspondence between the modern concepts of individual freedom, of divine power [puissance], and of political power [pouvoir]” (ibid).

“The black sun of omnipotence shines with a paradoxical light. When power wants to be without shadow and without limits, it accumulates within itself the night in which all evils are absolved; it endorses dark things and obscurity. On the contrary, the power that is incapable of evil and excludes it is a pure light without darkness. It does not suppress the shadow, or assume it, or absolve it, but dissociates it from itself and separates it from its sharp light. But for this it must be a power capable of lacking power” (p. 68).

Realism, Nominalism, Modality

There is an important intersection between the 14th century debate about realism and nominalism and contemporary questions about the status of modality in logic that ought to be of interest to non-specialists. Both of these topics probably sound obscure to most people. At sound-byte level, the first is about the status of universals, and modality is something we implicitly presuppose any time we try to reach for something “more” than allegedly pure phenomena or mere appearance.

Both sides of the medieval debate often wanted to enlist the support of Aristotle, who took a remarkably even-handed approach to these questions we have yet to clarify. The debate was often invested with a great moral significance, and provoked a number of intemperate claims. But at the same time, both sides were able to use the technical vocabulary of the theory of “supposition” — along with shared familiarity with Aristotle — to discuss semantic issues of concrete meaning and word use in detail, in terms both sides could in large measure agree upon. This led to a very high quality and sophistication in many contributions to the debate on both sides.

On some slight acquaintance, many modern readers can easily sympathize with nominalist critiques of the premature and illegitimate use of universals. We may think of vulgar platonism, excessive abstraction, reification, alienation, and so on. On the other side though, there are premature and illegitimate claims that universals can be explained away entirely. But Hegel’s Frau Bauer could not even recognize her individually named cows, if there were no such thing as legitimately reusable reference, naming, and vocabulary. I think most people should be able to see that there are two sides to the coin here.

If we ask how legitimate repeatabilities in ordinary language are constituted and used, something like modality inevitably comes into play. It now occurs to me that Brandom’s emphasis on the priority of hypotheticals over alleged categoricals in real-world material inference — a point to which I am deeply sympathetic — really calls for something like the notion of modality that he develops.

Aristotle on Friendship

Philia, commonly translated as “friendship” or “love”, is one of the summits of Aristotelian ethics. It embodies a kind of reciprocating good will, grounded in fondness and a kind of identification with the other, and it motivates us to do good. Aristotle discusses it from many angles. This is a historical background for Hegel’s ideas about mutual recognition. I’ve selected a few core passages to comment upon.

“And friendship seems to be present by nature in a parent for a child and in a child for a parent, not only in human beings but also in birds and most animals, and for animals alike in kind toward one another, and especially among human beings, which is why we praise those who are friends of humanity. And one might see among those who travel that every human being is akin and a friend to a human being” (Nicomachean Ethics, book VIII ch. 1, Sachs tr., p. 144, emphasis added).

He considers familial bonds as a kind of friendship grounded in nature, not only among humans but among other animals as well. As the feeling of commonality in human communities, friendship has political significance. He explicitly suggests that we ought by default to see every fellow talking animal as a friend or potential friend.

“And friendship seems to hold cities together” (ibid).

“Cities” are a figurative way of referring to human society in general. Just above, he explicitly mentions every human being.

“And when people are friends there is no need of justice, but when they are just there is still need of friendship, and among things that are just, what inclines toward friendship seems to be most just of all. And friendship is not only necessary but also beautiful, for we praise those who love their friends…. Moreover, people believe that it is the same people who are good men and friends” (ibid).

Without much effort, friends naturally tend to treat one another better than justice would demand. Friendship motivates us to do good.

“[Friends] have goodwill and wish for good things for one another, not being unaware of it” (p. 146).

“[T]here are three species of friendship, equal in number to the kinds of things that are loved; for in accordance with each, there is a reciprocal loving which one is not unaware of, and those who love one another wish for good things for one another in the same sense in which they love. So those who love one another for what is useful do not love one another for themselves, but insofar as something good comes to them from one another. And it is similar with those who love on account of pleasure, since they are fond of charming people not for being people of a certain sort, but because they are pleasing to themselves. So those who love one another for what is useful have a liking based on what is good for themselves, and those who love for pleasure have a liking based on what is pleasant to themselves, and the other person is loved not for what he is, but insofar as he is useful or pleasant. Therefore, these are friendships of an incidental kind, since it is not insofar as the one loved is the very person he is that he is loved, but insofar as he provides, in the one case, something good, or in the other case, pleasure” (ch. 3, p. 146).

Even in the friendships based on usefulness or pleasure, there is a “reciprocal loving”.

“And those who wish for good things for their friends for their own sake are friends most of all, since they are that way in themselves and not incidentally” (p. 147). “And people wish for good things for those they love for those others’ own sake, not as a result of feeling but as a result of an active condition” (ch. 5, p. 150).

Kant’s emphasis on treating other people as ends in themselves has its origins here.

“Now the friendships that have been discussed consist in an equality, since the same things come from both people and they wish for the same things for one another” (ch. 6, p. 151).

“But friendship seems to be present in loving more than in being loved…. And since friendship is present more in loving, and those who love their friends are praised, the virtue belonging to friends seems to be loving” (ch. 8, p. 153).

“And it is especially in this way that those who are unequal might be friends, since it could equalize them” (p. 154).

While there are also friendships among unequals, in which a kind of proportionality to circumstances stands as the next best thing to equality, friendship between equals clearly serves as a kind of model. This equalizing role of friendship is why it is closely linked to justice.

“Now it seems, as was said at the beginning, that friendship and justice concern the same things and are present in the same things; for in every sort of community there seems to be something just, and also friendship. At any rate, people address their shipmates and fellow soldiers as friends, and it is similar with those in other sorts of communities. To whatever extent they share something in common, to that extent there is a friendship, since that too is the extent to which there is something just. And the proverb ‘the things of friends are common’ is right, since friendship consists in community” (ch. 9, p. 154 ).

Aristotle uses the figure of speech that “the friend is another self” (book IX ch. 4, p. 168). We both tend to see our friends as like ourselves, and more often form friendships with those we are disposed to see as like ourselves. As is often the case, he moves back and forth rather fluidly between definition and description, and between more and less proper or exact senses of the word. Thus the same term serves here as a universalizing ideal and there as a distinguishing criterion.

All the Way Down

Once of the things I’ve most appreciated about Brandom has been his unwillingness to reduce normativity and value judgments to non-normative factors. Repeatedly in Making It Explicit, he speaks of norms “all the way down”. There is even a subheading for “all the way down” in the index entry for “norms” (p. 732). But in conjunction with this, he repeatedly suggests that the relation between pragmatics and semantics, while symmetrical in many respects, also includes an asymmetry, according to which it is more appropriate to say that normative pragmatics grounds representational semantics than vice versa. This is in distinction both to common views that privilege representation over inference and semantics over pragmatics, and to the purely symmetrical view of semantics and pragmatics that he seems to propound in Reasons for Logic, Logic for Reasons.

The symmetrical view can be seen in the favorable light of other symmetries that Hegel argues for in his campaign against “one-sidedness”. But it also implies that there is no sense in which normative pragmatics ought to be seen as coming before representational semantics.

Brandom’s 1976 dissertation, which is partly framed as the elaboration of a new form of pragmatism, makes links between the pragmatism it advocates, and a priority of pragmatics over semantics in philosophy of language. But as mentioned above, this year’s Reasons for Logic, Logic for Reasons, while applying inferentialist explanation to semantics in new ways, and while remaining as much as ever committed to an inferentialist order of explanation in general, nonetheless seems to back off from claiming any priority for pragmatics over semantics.

My worry is that this new symmetry and parity between pragmatics and semantics could end up weakening the commitment to “normativity all the way down”. The new thesis of full symmetry builds on his previous analogy between normativity and modality or subjunctive robustness, which I take to be sound. It may be that normativity all the way down does not really require the relative priority of pragmatics over semantics that Brandom claims in the dissertation and Making It Explicit, but I think more on this needs to be said.

Anaphora and Reason Relations

Applying Brandom’s 2025 concept of reason relations to his 1980 expansion of anaphora, it seems that the new reason relations codify and make explicit the same material inferences that are expressible in terms of anaphoric back-reference between sentences in a non-logical base language. Reason relations are constructed formal objects that are designed to codify an explicit formal representation of the material inferences expressed by anaphora. They provide a conservative extension and explanation of the material inferences expressible in the base language.

Anaphora and Prosentences

This will conclude an examination of Brandom’s early programmatic work “Assertion and Conceptual Roles”. At one point he pithily comments that he is developing an account of saying that does not depend on a prior account of naming. Once again, at a broad level I think that is also something that Aristotle does. Saying viewed this way is more oriented toward valuation than toward representation.

I would suggest that naming is a kind of shorthand for a description or classification that is sufficient to pick something out from other things in the applicable context. What a name cannot be counted on to do is to unambiguously specify an essence or an adequate definition. The very first topic raised in Aristotle’s Categories — which was traditionally placed first in the order of instruction — is “things said in many ways”.

The young Brandom says, “Our strategy now is to use the conditionals we have constructed to develop precise representations of the conceptual contents sentences acquire in virtue of playing a material inferential role in some justificatory system. The most sophisticated use of the notion of a conceptual role has been made by Sellars, who in Science and Metaphysics and elsewhere develops a theory of meaning couched in terms of dot-quoted expressions, where such dot-quotation of an expression results in a term referring to the conceptual (inferential-justificatory) role of that expression” (p. 34).

Every concept worth its salt carries its justification with it. We don’t properly understand an expression if we are unable to justify its use. As Aristotle says, the mark of knowing something is the ability to explain why it is the case. I would maintain that there isn’t any knowing “never you mind how”. The latter is rather the mark of what Plato calls mere opinion.

“According to the present view, it is the defining task of a logic or logical construction that it make possible the explicit codification in a conceptual role of what is implicit in the inferential and justificatory employment of an expression…. [C]onceptual roles in Frege’s and Sellars’ sense can be expressed, using the conditionals of our formal logic not only as the means of expression of roles, but also as providing the model according to which we understand such roles.”

On this view, ordinary if-then reasoning turns out to be a kind of key to understanding meaning. But considerable care is required in working out the details. The conditional that codifies material inferences has different detailed behavior than the common one based on a truth table, and that is a good thing, because the truth table one has significant defects.

“The key to this line of thought is the observation that the only sentences whose roles we understand explicitly are the conditionals. We understand them because we constructed them, stipulating their introduction conditions, and deriving the consequences of such introduction (the validity of detachment)” (ibid).

If-then conditionals allow us to explicitly express the reasons and dependencies that implicitly guide judgment and thought.

“We propose to generalize this clear case, and conceive the mastery of the use of an expression which one must exhibit in order to properly be said to understand it (‘grasp’ its conceptual role) as consisting of two parts, knowing when one is entitled to apply the expression, and knowing what the appropriate consequences of such application are (what justifies using the expression, and what inferences one licenses by so doing). Applying the expression is thus assimilated to performing an inference from the circumstances of appropriate application of the expression to the consequences of its application” (ibid).

But “applying the expression” is just what assertion is. By these lights, every asserting is an inferring.

“On this model, suggested by the later Carnap’s use of partial reduction forms, the conceptual role of any expression is the pair of its circumstances of appropriate application and the consequences of such application, that is, of its (individually) sufficient conditions and of its (jointly) necessary conditions. The application of that expression is to be thought of as an inference from the former to the latter. Assertion thus becomes a limiting case of inference” (p. 35).

It is inference that grounds assertion, not the reverse. Only through inference can anyone understand the significance of an assertion.

“More must be said, however, about the ramifications of taking conditionals to be the models for the conceptual roles of basic sentences, insasmuch as our strategy has been to construct a conditional as stating explicitly (as a license) what is implicit in an inference from its antecedent to its consequent, and then to assimilate the content of basic statements to the model of these constructed conditional statements” (ibid).

“In general, one might think that it was incoherent or circular to define the contents of the categorical sentences of an idiom in terms of the contents of hypothetical sentences of that idiom…. Our construction avoids this worry, since we define conditionals in terms of the contents of basic sentences only in the sense in which those contents are implicit in the informal inferential practices which are the use of the basic sentences.” (pp. 35-36).

Kant already questioned the primitiveness of categorical judgments. My take is that they constitute a form of shorthand for what are really reasonings or interpretations.

“Nor is there anything peculiar about taking a sub-class of sentences as the paradigms to which all others are assimilated in a theory of meaning. Frege, for instance, treats all sentences as implicit identity statements (involving names of the True or the False)…. Thus Frege constructs a theory of meaning based on terms explicated with the logical device of identity, where we base our account on sentences explicated by means of the logical device of conditionals” (p. 36).

Brandom has a complex relation to Frege, championing some of his early work and questioning some of his later work.

“We attempt to give a direct account of saying and what is said which does not appeal to naming and what is named” (ibid).

“This is the essential difference between conceptual role semantics inspired by the sort of concerns articulated by the later Wittgenstein, and referential semantics inspired by Frege” (ibid).

“As Dummett points out, the later Frege broke from previous logicians in treating logic not as the study of inference, but of a special kind of truth…. This view seems to have been motivated by his presentation of logic as an axiomatic system, where some truths are stipulated and other truths are derived from them by a minimum of purely formal inferential principles. The philosophical critique in terms of linguistic practice of the distinction between meaning-constitutive stipulated truths and empirically discovered truths, together with Gentzen’s achievement of parity of formal power between proof-theoretic methods of studying consequence relations and the truth-oriented methods epitomized by matrix interpretations … require us to reassess the relations of explanatory priority between the notions of inference and truth” (p. 36).

Brandom makes a good case for seeing the early Frege as a proto-inferentialist concerned with the formalization of material inference. The later Frege propounded an original and rather strange notion of truth and truth-values as foundational. He held that truth is a (unique) object referred to by all true statements, rather than a property.

“One of Frege’s achievements is his formulation of the principle of semantic explanation, according to which the appropriateness of a form of inference is to be accounted for by showing that it never leads from true premises to conclusions which are not true. The usual way in which to exploit this principle is to begin with an account of truth (typically in representational or referential terms) and partition a space of abstractly possible inferences and forms of inference into those which are appropriate and those which are not appropriate according to the semantic principle, as Frege does in the Begriffschrift. Our approach in effect reverses this order of explanation, beginning analysis with a set of appropriate inferences and explaining semantic interpretants, including truth-values, in terms of them” (pp. 36-37).

The idea of this “principle of explanation” is that sound reasoning from true premises cannot yield a false conclusion. This is not a fact, but a definition that also has characteristics of a Kantian imperative. It is up to us to make it true.

He considers possible objections to the idea of treating hypothetical judgments as more originary than categorical judgments. This should not be taken to apply at the level of truths. In a similar vein, he also says that what our words mean does not determine what we believe.

“Just as it is implausible to take what is possible as determining what is actual, so it is implausible to take the totality of conditional truths as determining the totality of unconditional truths. Indeed, the possession by a formal system of this semantic property would be a strong reason to take its conditional as not a reasonable rendering of the English hypothetical construction ‘if … then’. Embarrassingly enough, the standard truth-functional (mis-named ‘material’) conditional which Frege employs has just this property, namely that if the truth-values of all of the conditionals of the language are settled, then the truth-values of all the sentences of the language are settled. This is proven in Appendix II” (p. 37).

This surprising proof really turns things around. I suppose this result is related to the concerns about “logical omniscience” in classical logic. It is not reasonable to suppose that if a human knows A, then she necessarily knows all the consequences of A. But this is independent of the question of whether we really know anything unconditionally (I tend to think not). There is a also question whether we are properly said to “know” abstract tautologies like A = A, without necessarily knowing what A is (I am inclined to use some other word than knowledge for these cases).

“Our genuine conditional, introduced as codifying a set of non-formal inferences, will not have this undesirable property…. We avoid that result by taking the principle that appropriate inference should never lead from true premises to conclusions which are not true as a necessary, but not sufficient condition for appropriateness of inference. The truth-functional conditional results from taking the principle to provide sufficient conditions as well” (ibid).

Again, this falls within the tradition of alternative, “better” definitions of implication.

“Taking Frege’s semantic explanatory principle as a necessary condition on an account of inferential relations settles that the primary semantic notion will be whatever it is that is preserved by appropriate inferences. Frege calls this ‘truth’, but abstractly there are other properties which could also play this role (e.g., justificatory responsibility) and there are good reasons to expect an adequate semantic theory to account as well for the preservation of ‘relevance’ of some kind by appropriate inferences. This primary semantic notion, however, pertains only to the use of a sentence as a free-standing assertive utterance. A full notion of sentential content must specify as well the role a sentence has as a component in other, compound, sentences, paradigmatically in conditionals. It cannot be determined a priori that these two roles coincide. If with Frege we take the first semantic property to be a truth-value either possessed or not by any sentence, then the assumption that the second or componential notion coincides with the first results in classic two-valued truth-functional logic” (p. 38).

It is noteworthy that even the later Frege’s concern in this context was with “whatever it is that is preserved by appropriate inferences”.

He has previously used the term “designatedness”, which names that “whatever it is that inference preserves” that plays a role in multi-valued logics broadly analogous to that played by truth in two-valued logics.

“[M]any-valued semantics requires the assignment to each sentence of two different sorts of semantic interpretant: a designatedness value indicating possession or lack by a sentence used as a free-standing utterance of the property which appropriate inference must preserve, and a multivalue codifying the contribution the sentence makes to the designatedness value of compound sentences containing it, according to the principle … Two sentences have the same multivalue if and only if they are intersubstitutable salva designatedness value in every sort of compound sentence” (p. 39).

He relates the current development to technical work on the algebraic interpretation of logics.

“A matrix is characteristic for a logic if it verifies just the theorems of that logic. Lindenbaum showed that every logic has a characteristic matrix, namely the one gotten by taking the set of multivalues to be classes of inferentially equivalent sentences, and the designated multivalues to be the theorems of the logic in question” (ibid).

“We are now in a position to notice that a repertoire, together with the partial ordering induced on the sentences of a repertoire by the conditionals contained in its formally expanded consequence extension constitute such a Lindenbaum matrix” (ibid).

The conditional as Brandom has defined it provably meets Frege’s criterion of inference preservation. Brandom has extended algebraic logic to include patterns of material inference.

“Theorem 1 above shows that modus ponens preserves designatedness, that is membership in the extended repertoire. Or, to put the same point another way, that result shows that our constructed conditional satisfies Frege’s semantic explanatory principle when membership in a repertoire is taken as the prime semantic notion, and social practice determines an antecedent class of appropriate material inferences. The formally extended repertoire thus is, in a precise sense, the characteristic semantic matrix not for a logic or a set of formal inferences, but for a set of material inferences” (p. 40).

“There are three specific points which should be made concerning this interpretation. First, what is captured by semantic matrices is taken to be a matter of formal inferences first, and logical truths verified by the matrix only second, although this is not how such matrices are usually thought of. Second, we generalize the notion of a characteristic matrix for a set of formal inferences to apply to material inferences as well. Finally, notice that in addition to the structure of material inference codified in each repertoire-matrix we can in fact identify a logic with regard to the whole idiom, insofar as some complicated conditionals will appear in all repertoires. We have not constructed a characteristic matrix for this logic by ordering the sentences of the language according to repertoire-designated conditionals. In some ways it is accordingly more appropriate to say that each repertoire expresses a single matrix valuation characteristic of a set of material inferences, and that the whole idiom comprising all admissible repertoires is characteristic of the formal or logical inferences involving the conditional we used to make explicit the materially appropriate inferences” (ibid).

“In this way, then, we can exploit Frege’s semantic explanatory principle and the truth-oriented matrix semantics it inspired as theoretical auxiliaries useful in the formal analysis of a socially specified set of appropriate inferences” (ibid).

“Seeing logic in the way I have been recommending, however, as a formal tool for the explicit expression of inferential roles, obviates the need for appealing to prior notions of truth or truth-value. We have interpreted Frege’s truth-values as they figure in his semantic principle first as the designatedness values of multivalued logic, and then moving from concern with the codification of formal inference to concern with the codification of material inference, interpreted as expressing membership in a repertoire. Recalling the social practical origins of these repertoires, it would be appropriate to call the two circumstances of membership and non-membership in a particular repertoire assertibility values with respect to that repertoire. We have given a much more precise sense to this term than semantic theorists who advocate the primacy of assertibility over truth typically manage to do, however” (pp. 40-41).

“We represent the matrix valuation on the language induced by a formally expanded repertoire by associating with each sentence its repertoire-relative conceptual role, consisting of inferential circumstances and consequences of assertion. It is clear that this is an adequate representation in that this set of roles, together with the repertoire generating them, determines the partial order of the language by the conditional which is the Lindenbaum matrix. These conceptual roles are thus taken as multivalues, with repertoire membership identified as designatedness with respect to the semantic principle. The multivalues must, of course, determine compounding behavior according to our motivation…. It is … a criterion of adequacy of this representation that sentences with the same conceptual role, that is, multivalue, should be intersubstitutable in conditionals preserving both designatedness values and multivalues” (p. 41).

So far he has focused on a notion of the conditional that is a primitive “arrow” rather than something defined by a truth table. He briefly considers how to define other connectives that work off of the designatedness that plays a truth-like role in multi-valued logics, but again affirms the special importance of conditionals.

” ‘Truth-functional’ connectives can now be introduced using designatedness values as the extensions of sentences…. We would like to be able to semantically interpret all forms of sentence compounding by means of functions taking conceptual roles, or sets of them, into conceptual roles, as we can do for conditionals…. Our use of the conditional as both the model of and a tool for the expression of conceptual roles embodies the belief that the contribution a sentence makes to the roles of conditional it is a component in suffices to determine its role in other compounds” (p. 42).

He quotes Frege saying that the kernel of the problem of judgment splits into that of truth and that of what he calls “a thought”, which refers to some declarative content. Given Frege’s unitary view of “truth”, this thought-content identified with saying and conceptual roles has to be responsible for all differentiation.

“By a thought, Frege makes clear, is intended what is referred to in English by that-p clauses. We have identified these judged contents as conceptual roles. In what follows, we try to exhibit a representative variety of uses of such that-p clauses in terms of conceptual roles” (p. 43).

Finally we come to prosentences.

“Our starting point is the prosentential theory of truth of Grover, Camp, and Belnap. That account can best be sketched as the product of three different lines of thought: i) the redundancy theory of Ramsey and others, which says that the conceptual content of ‘it is true that-p‘ is always just the same as that of p…. ii) an account of truth in terms of infinite conjunctions and disjunctions…. [T]he best succinct statement of this view is in Putnam’s Meaning and the Moral Sciences…. ‘If we had a meta-language with infinite conjunctions and infinite disjunctions (countable infinite) we wouldn’t need “true”!…. [F]or example, we could say … “He said ‘P1‘ & P1” (ibid).

“iii) Finally, and this is what is distinctive to the view under discussion, it is observed that pronouns serve two sorts of purposes. In their lazy use, … they may simply be replaced by their antecedents (salva conceptual role). In their quantificational use, as in ‘Each positive number is such that if it is even, adding it to 1 yields an odd number’, the semantic role of the pronoun is determined by a set of admissible substituends (in turn determined by the pronomial antecedent)” (p. 44).

“Thus ‘Everything he said is true’ is construed as a quantificational prosentence, which picks up from its anaphoric antecedent a set of admissible substituends (things that he said), and is semantically equivalent to their conjunction” (ibid).

“The authors of the prosentential theory are concerned that ‘is true’ be taken to be a fragment of a prosentence, not a predicate which characterizes sentence-nominalization…. The authors are worried that if the first part of a sentence of the form ‘X is true’ is taken to be a referring sentential nominalization that, first, ‘is true’ will inevitably be taken to be a predicate, and second, the anaphoric prosentential reference of the whole sentence will be passed over in favor of the view that the nominalization does all the referring that gets done, and would vitiate the view” (p. 45).

“In fact this is a situation in which we can have our cake and eat it too. We consider ‘X is true’ as composed of a sentence nominalization X which refers to sentences, and a prosentence-forming operator ‘is true’.” (ibid).

“Our construction of conceptual roles in terms of conditionals of course presents natural criteria of adequacy for translation functions between repertoires contained in a single idiom, or which are members of different idioms” (p. 51).

“We show now how those semantic facts about the idiom can be expressed explicitly as the content of claims made within that idiom. We use the logical vocabulary of conditionals and repertoire attributions we have already constructed to define a further bit of expressive machinery, that-clauses, which will thus have a logical function in making explicit semantic features implicit in the idiom” (p. 53).

“[T]he account of conceptual roles is novel in being entirely non-representational. In the formal idiom we develop, it is not a necessary feature of a saying that-p that the sentence involved represent some state of affairs. Of course sentences used to say things may also be representations, and this fact might be crucial for the understanding of the use of language in empirical inquiry. But our model is broader, and we may hope that it can find application in the explication of other forms of discourse (e.g., literary and political discourse) where the representational paradigm is less apt than it perhaps is for scientific idioms” (p. 55).

“Perhaps the most important feature of our account is the crucial place given to logic, as providing the formal means by which an idiom can come to express explicitly crucial semantic facts which are implicit in the system of justificatory practices which are the use of a language. We argued that the function thus assigned to logic as a formal auxiliary in a theory of meaning is that which Frege originally envisioned and pursued. Our own development looked at he codification of inferential practices in conditionals in some detail, and somewhat less closely at the codification of repertoires in prosentences containing ‘is true’ and in propositional attitudes, and at the codification of roles in ‘that’-clauses. The basic claim here is that logic must not be restricted to the analysis of the meanings sentences acquire in virtue of the formal inferences they are subject to, as is the usual procedure). Logic should not be viewed as an autonomous discipline in this way, but as a tool for the analysis of material inference, and for making explicit the roles played by sentences in systems of material inferential practice. Using logical devices so interpreted, we were able to specify not only what role a performance needs to play in a system of social practices in order to be a saying (asserting, professing, claiming, etc.) that-p, but also to show what it is about that system of practices in virtue of which the content of such a saying can be that someone else has said (asserted, etc.) something. Indeed the only sort of ‘aboutness’ we ever employ is the reference of one bit of discourse to another (anaphoric reference if performance or sentence tokens are at issue, and mediated by conceptual roles otherwise)” (pp. 55-56).

When Aristotle discusses saying something about something, implicitly that second something is also something said. This phrase refers to that phrase. The kind of reference that is most relevant in all this is what I think of as constitutive cross-reference, or as Brandom calls it, back-reference or anaphora. Less adequately, it has been called “self” reference, but if we examine this closely, it does not involve a unitary self or a pure undifferentiated reflexivity, but rather parts referring to other parts.

Conceptual content emerges out of a sea of cross-reference. A constitutive molecular cross-reference of Fregean declarative “thoughts” or “content” or Aristotelian “sayings” precedes sedimentation into molar subjects and objects.

Epilogue to this series: Anaphora and Reason Relations