Tag: Olivier Boulnois

A Triangular Relation?

In the previous post, we saw a sharply binary model of signifier and signified being applied by Roger Bacon and Duns Scotus. At least in Bacon’s case, this goes hand in hand with a new kind of “direct” realism that aims to deal directly with things in the world, and repudiates the subtleties of the indirect account of knowledge and meaning by way of concepts and the passions of the soul that was broadly shared by Aristotle, Augustine, and Boethius. But Scotus complicates the picture considerably by also promoting a triangular model that includes concepts understood in a certain way. Scotus also argues for a non-psychological approach to concepts.

“Does the sign signify the thing itself or the concept in the soul? — We have said that for Scotus, the great semantic controversy of the Middle Age, more fundamental than any other, is constituted by the following question: Is the vocal sound the sign of the thing or of the concept?” (Boulnois, L’Être et représentation, p. 35, my translation throughout).

“The line of the English Franciscans seems to have developed this theory long before him: for Roger Bacon, linguistic signs have been arbitrarily instituted by humans to directly indicate the things themselves. Words are not related to things by means of a conceptual interpretation. A new, radically non-Platonic way of thinking language arises: instrument of communication, it ‘takes the place of’ (supponit pro) the thing, and not the idea of the speaker. What is more, it exercises a representative function uniquely defined by its capacity to refer to present and existent things. For Roger Bacon, the name signifies solely the thing on which it has been imposed. It can only refer to things (even if it can signify connotata, by inference). But at the same time, there is a relation between the vox [vocal sound] and the species in the soul. The vocal sound is its proper presentification, but it makes the representation of a thing arise in the mind. It makes the thing be conceived, or makes it arise in the soul. Thus the sign in a single gesture refers to the thing and recalls a representation. The vox is not a concept, but a thing that signifies another; it signifies a singular thing in the present, without involving essence, and no longer passes by way of the intellectus to arrive at the res [thing]. There is a sort of collaterality of the sermo [spoken word] and the intellectus that both refer to the res” (ibid).

Scholastic accounts of language typically focus on proprieties of naming. Implicit in this approach is an account of meaning that begins from individual terms. Broadly speaking, this approach has an affinity to modern bottom-up theories of semantics, which aim to put together a picture of the world in a compositional way from individual terms taken as given.

In the early 20th century, Saussurean linguistics developed an alternative approach that treats the signifier in a relational way, such that each signifier is understood in the first instance as identified by its difference from other signifiers, independent of its nominal reference to a signified. This led to an incipient “deconstructive” analysis of individual terms in the broad current of 20th-century European (especially French) “structuralism”, which then came to be explicitly thematized in developments that Anglophone writers came to refer to as “post” structuralist.

From a completely different starting point in a pragmatist reading of analytic philosophy and German Idealism, in the late 20th century Brandom developed an “inferentialist” semantics that begins from whole sentences as the minimal unit of assertion, and focuses on explaining the “material” inferential properties of propositions in terms of normative assessments of proprieties of concrete assertion, rather than in terms of universal formal rules. Brandom understands the meaning of concepts inferentially, in terms of their use or functional role in assertions, and emphasizes the non-psychological character of meaning understood in this way. From this point of view, concepts are not to be identified with individual terms, and instead have a holistic character, such that each concept involves other concepts.

In sharp contrast to both of these as well as to Aristotle and Augustine, Scotus develops his triangular model of signification in a way that aims to be consistent with a primacy of individual things, and with a direct association of words to things.

“[I]n his first commentary on [Aristotle’s] treatise On Interpretation, [Scotus] maintains, like Boethius and Thomas Aquinas, that the vocal sound signifies the concept, which resembles the thing or ‘represents’ it. The vox immediately signifies the species, the representation of the thing in the intellect, but it mediately signifies that which it represents, which is to say the thing itself. But in the second commentary, closer to Bacon, he holds that the vocal sound directly signifies not the conceptions of the intellect, but the thing itself. When Aristotle and Boethius say that the name directly signifies the passions of the soul, it is necessary to understand by this not the concept, or the resemblance in the soul, but the thing that is conceived. This second version is evidently a radical revision of Scotist semantics. It is also the definitive position of the theological works” (pp. 36-37).

“Following Bacon and [Peter] Olivi, Duns Scotus breaks with the Boethian interpretation of signification, but he does so with a nuance, integrating the Aristotelian semantics; the verbal sign (verbum) is directly the sign of both the thing and the concept, but it is in the first instance the sign of the thing, and then the sign of the concept. The sign comes from a direct causality of the thing and signifies it directly. Nonetheless there is a logical anteriority of the concept, for it is on it that the linguistic sign depends. Scotus formulates his response in the vocabulary of his own theory of causality. The concept, the written sign, and the phoneme are all three ordered effects of the same cause: the thing itself…. Writing, the vocal sound, and the concept are signs, situated on the same plane, none of them exercising any causality over the others, and they signify the same signified” (p. 37).

If the sign is in the first instance the sign of the thing, it is difficult to see how the concept can be logically anterior to the relation of sign to thing. But Scotus apparently wants to assert both, and also that the concept is a kind of sign, and that the sign is a kind of thing.

“[T]he word, the concept, and the thing no longer form a series, but a triangle…. The play of natural causes, the weight of institution, and the semantic relation are articulated with one another, but remain autonomous…. The concept is the first, natural effect of the thing itself. It is it that is first of all a sign of the thing, and not the vocal sound or writing. It constitutes the object of logic, an anterior object, more fundamental than vocal sounds, and supposed by them…. If there is a science of things, metaphysics, and a science of words, grammar, logic occupies an intermediary and central place, as the science of concepts” (p. 39).

Scotus wants to give metaphysics a new status as a rational science, in a strong sense that is independent of Aristotle. Meanwhile, he also explicitly rejects Aristotle’s thesis that logic is a tool for clearly expressing meaning and not a science with its own subject matter, which Brandom has recently revived under the name of logical expressivism.

“Noetics studies the concept insofar as it constitutes an aspect of the mind (mens), where it is found as an accident in a subject. Logic, on the contrary, considers the concept as sign, insofar as it refers to a signified. This is the ambiguity of representation: we consider in it either the thing that represents, or the thing that it represents, the being of the representing or the being represented…. Logic is distinct from psychology…. The aim of thought is not reducible to its psychic reality” (pp. 39-40).

Boulnois does not point it out here, but Scotus’s assumption that the concept is in the mind “as an accident in a subject” is directly opposed to Augustine’s strong contention that the mind should not be seen as a subject in which knowledge and love inhere as accidents.

“In this triangle of word, concept, and thing, the concept is described as a sign, and reciprocally the cognitive act is itself a semiosis. Duns Scotus breaks with Augustine and Boethius, who reserve signification to vocal sounds and writing. He participates in what C. Panaccio has called a general movement of ‘semantization’ of thought. Logic, conceived as a rational science, a theory of signs or of ‘signifying reasoning’ (ratio significandi), is no longer a subalternate discipline, concerned with the expression of thought. Because thought is signifying, logic becomes a theory of thought itself. Nevertheless, it does not fall to it to resolve the problem of the place of thought. Concepts are natural signs, not conventional ones: they are combined in propositions according to logical rules, the structure of which subtends all possible oral or written propositions, even if they are not proffered. They constitute the elements of a universal mental language, of a general grammar and of a pure theory of communication. This language is for Duns Scotus a subjacent condition of all oral enunciations and effective writings” (pp. 40-41).

Thus apparently the treatment of concepts as a kind of sign is closely related to the non-Aristotelian idea that logic is a science with its own subject matter.

“But above all, this ideal possibility is real: it is accomplished par excellence in the domain of angelic communication. Angels communicate with the aid of intelligible signs, which is to say pure concepts, without phonetic or graphical support. Each angel directly causes a concept in another, by an immediate communication. It is on this occasion that Duns Scotus formulates a formal theory of pure thought” (p. 41).

If concepts are natural signs and signs are real things, then concepts are real things.

“The sign establishes a double relation. On the one hand, it is the image of the thing that caused it; on the other hand, what is more important, it signifies it: the concept is a real object, which has a natural existence, belonging to a causal chain; but it bears a resemblance to the object it represents. This resemblance is produced by the concurrent double causality of the thing itself and the intelligible species conserved in memory. — Is it necessary to say that the concept preserves the transparency of representation, while the conventional sign loses it? For a concept, does representare signify a ‘resemblance to’, or simply: ‘taking the place of the presence’ of an object, which was already the sense of the word in Peter of Spain? Does the representivity of the concept for the intellect come from its resemblance to real objects, or from its dependence on a cause?” (pp. 41-42).

Given Scotus’s insistence that the sign refers directly to the thing, it is surprising to read that “We cannot pass directly from the representation to the thing” (p. 43). But our act is different from the reference of the sign, so technically there is no contradiction.

“But even in maintaining that the relation of cause to effect is first, Scotus does not go to the point of abandoning resemblance: both are real aspects of intellection. Even if it supposes the causality of the object, semiosis is a complex process that is not reduced to it, since it supposes a play of resemblances. The sign is recognized more than it is produced” (ibid).

In a way, the play of resemblances resembles the mutual dependence of signifiers in the Saussurean tradition.

That the sign is recognized more than it is produced is a nice injection of good sense that stands in obvious tension with the foundation myth of signs as imposed and instituted “at will”. But the user of a sign is usually not its institutor.

“The phoneme homo no longer signifies the concept of the human: like the concept, it signifies the real human, even if it depends on the concept for this. The three forms of signification (formal sign, oral sign, written sign) are parallel, even if their terms are ordered according to a serial dependency. The signification of the concept is a natural relation between the intellect and things. The signified of phonemes and graphemes remains the thing itself, but it depends on a conventional relation.”

“In this Scotus directly opposes Aristotle, for whom the vox is a sound emitted by the mouth of a human being, accompanied by an imaginative representation. Words are not the tools of knowledge, but of communication” (p. 43).

I think that knowledge in Plato and Aristotle (and Hegel and Gadamer and Habermas and Brandom, among others) implicitly has a dialogical (and therefore in part communicative) character. Gadamer has highlighted the dialogical element in Plato and Aristotle. The “communicative reason” elaborated by Habermas involves a dialogical view of knowledge. It is only “monological” conceptions of knowledge that do not involve an element of communication.

“In itself, the written or oral sign is only an ensemble of sounds or letters, which causes nothing more than the knowledge of itself. The imposition of the sign describes the passage from concept to sign, and reciprocally interpretation allows a reascent from the sign to the intelligible concept that subtends it. The process of interpretation follows a trajectory inverse to that of imposition. It is thus a contingent process of association” (p. 45).

“In the moment of imposition, the imposer associates sense and intellect, in relating a perceived name to a conceived thing. In the moment of interpretation, the hearer recalls the relation between the name perceived in the present, and the past thing that she knew more or less distinctly” (p. 46).

I don’t think of interpretation as happening in a moment. It is not only dialogical, but also involves mediation, concepts, and an extension in time. In the same way, only in a very improper sense is jumping to a conclusion a kind of judgment. But Boulnois is summarizing Scotus here, not necessarily asserting this in his own name.

“Signification cannot take the place of knowledge. There is no transparency between the sign and thought” (ibid).

Knowledge implies a knower in a way that formal signification does not. But the dialogical expression and elaboration of knowledge is closely interwoven with the dialogical elaboration of signification and meaning.

“But what is it that is signified? The thing, yes, but in what sense of the word ‘thing’? According to [Scotus’s] Questions on On Interpretation, not the thing in its singularity and its existence, but the thing as quiddity [what Aristotle calls the “what it is”], indifferent to singularity and universality, to existence and nonexistence: the thing as it is seen by the mediation of a concept…. According to this semantic, signification is no longer an intelligible correlation between the signifying and the concept” (pp. 46-47).

Indeed, “thing” is said in many ways. Thing as quiddity and thing as object are almost mutually exclusive. I use “object” in a deflationary way as a relative term, as in “the object of”, not as naming something that is assumed to be a free-standing thing in its own right. I don’t actively use the term “quiddity”, but I think of it as a more static and self-contained projection of essence, which in its more proper usages is not something self-contained. Brandom says that a concept is not the kind of thing we could have just one of. I think of essence in a similar way. All articulation is inter-articulation, involving more than one term.

“From now on, signification can be thought independent of the scope of the concept.”

“Linguistic signs signify directly, without passing through the concept. They can signify a thing more precisely than intellect can conceive it. The circulus vini, a sign that indicates the presence of new wine in the inn, causes nothing new in the intellect of the one who perceives it. It is an arbitrary sign, constituted by a convention…. Convention is limited to establishing a relation of reason between two things, two physical realities: the sonorous matter of the phoneme (the vox) and the reality signified (the res). To be valid, this relation-convention supposes the knowledge of the two terms…. A weak and confused knowledge of the thing suffices for us to be able to use a sign, and to signify in a suitable way. We can signify in a way that is more precise than we conceive” (pp. 47-48).

Signification is a “formal” concept, in what seems to be Scotus’s distinctive sense of the term “formal”, which is neither Platonic nor Kantian, and also not to be understood in terms of modern logical or mathematical formalism. The formal status of signification is what allows it to be “more precise” than the knowledge we actually have. But as Hegel reminds us, formal precision (in any of these senses) is not always a virtue when applied to real things.

“Duns Scotus is inspired by the analyses of Olivi to establish a relation between semantic representation and juridical representation, the sign and the law.”

Peter Olivi was another important 13th-century Franciscan, and another strong voluntarist.

“A sign can be speculative or practical. The speculative sign leads to knowledge; it allows a concept of the signified to be formed in the intellect, but its characteristic tells us nothing of its real existence; for example, homo is the sign of a concept, and allows the knowledge of an essence, of a nature in general, whether or not a human exists. The practical sign implies the existence of its signified; it is the sign of an existence, and not of a simple possibility…. Since the practical sign signifies the advent of an effect, and this effect depends on the ordered power (that is to say on the free voluntary disposition) of someone who can cause it, only the author of this effect can give this practical sign certain being. It suffices that the institutor is disposed to regularly produce the signified of the sign she institutes…. Contracts, pacts, and promises are examples. The practical sign pertains to a juridical order instituted by humans. It depends on a law…. The sign belongs to the domain of the will of a free agent, who is self-determining in limiting herself to the order she institutes. This one, in proportion to her political power, can engage in rendering real what she has disposed in the order of signs” (pp. 48-49).

To me it seems preposterous to say that the sign belongs to the domain of the will of a free agent. A sign belongs to a field of reciprocal determination that is independent of anyone’s will. (See also Hegel on Willing.)

“The practical sign is an ordination of power. In this sense, it belongs to the theology of absolute power and ordained power. In Duns Scotus, these two concepts apply to every free agent: absolute power includes all that a free being can effectively do, de facto. Ordained power includes all she can do in conformity to a law, de jure. The institutor is an absolutely free agent, who self-determines freely in choosing this or that order” (p. 49).

An earlier book by Boulnois develops the history of the theology of absolute power and ordained power in detail. A later book treats the history of theological voluntarism in the Latin tradition.

For Scotus “It is will that founds the truth of the practical sign, and not the inverse” (p. 52).

But “there are signs of which we are not the institutors, and that we receive as fully established by an alien will…. We are under the law of signs, and they do not always depend on us” (ibid).

Next in this series: Perspectiva

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

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

Ethics and the Dogma of Free Will

The last post treated Olivier Boulnois’s discussion of ethical deliberation and proairesis or “resolution” (which I formerly called “choice”) in Aristotle, which grounds Boulnois’s “genealogy of freedom”. Here are a few highlights of his discussion of how the very un-Aristotelian notion of free will emerged in the later tradition, along with parts of his conclusion.

Elsewhere I have used the common translation of Latin liberum arbitrium as “free will”, but more literally it is something like “free arbitration”, which is what a free will is characteristically supposed to do. In the context of this “archaeological” discussion where the terms appear side by side, the distinction matters.

Frequently, talk about will is fraught with ambiguity. Good will — and more generally, definite will as intent subject to interpretation — is a completely different thing from the indeterminate will conceived as a power of decision ex nihilo that is being criticized here, but the two are often mixed together.

“Voluntas did not always mean will, if we understand by that a directing principle of the powers of the soul, trigger of action and repose, and capable of contraries. The word is attested in classical Latin, in the sense of ‘favor’, ‘good disposition’ ” (Généalogie de la liberté, p. 254, my translation throughout). “[The Greek boulesis], which Cicero translated as voluntas, designates a sage emotion, a rational desire, the superior form that desire takes when the [Stoic] sage is no longer subject to passions” (ibid).

In the Stoics, we can see the beginning of an evolution toward modern concepts of will. But the Stoic usage properly applies only to the ideal of the Stoic sage. It is not yet a faculty of the soul that all humans are supposed to have.

According to Boulnois, the next major step was taken by Alexander of Aphrodisias, in late 2nd to early 3rd century CE. Standing near the beginning of the Greek Aristotelian commentary tradition, Alexander is the most historically influential of the Greek commentators. Relevant here are his arguments against Stoic determinism, in the non-commentary treatise On Fate.

“Is it necessary to define freedom as freedom of the will, or free arbitration? The problem of free arbitration, understood as a completely undetermined power to resolve [or choose], arises from Alexander of Aphrodisias, in a metaphysical rereading of Aristotle. In effect, Alexander is responding to a non-Aristotelian problematic, that of [Stoic] determinism. To do this, he establishes a connection between the concept of proairesis and the rejection of the cosmic determinism of the Stoics, thus giving birth to a ‘libertarian’ interpretation of decision, indeed to the concept of (undetermined) free choice. Where Aristotle affirms that we generically have the capacity to act or to not act, Alexander holds that we singularly, in each conjuncture, have the possibility to act or not, and to act otherwise. This is to say that proairesis becomes a faculty of choice independent of the state of the world — a free arbitration. And it is this concept, called ‘Aristotelian’ by Heidegger but in fact Alexandrian, that imposes itself, as well in [the early Augustine of the Treatise on Free Will] as in scholasticism, up to Descartes. It becomes necessary for this to consider not only action, but an interior power of choice. Free arbitration thus becomes free arbitration of the will” (p. 472, emphasis in original).

“In inventing a libertarian conception of action, Alexander [of Aphrodisias] founds an ethic centered on the capacity to choose for oneself a thing or its contrary, without depending on a preceding cause” (p. 248).

“The concept of free arbitration had already received its certificate of nobility from [the early Christian theologian] Origen…. But he implied no metaphysical thesis on determinism and indeterminism. It is Augustine who submits the concept of free arbitration to this problematic, and discovers the power of the will, in his Treatise on Free Will” (p. 253).

“But it is Augustine who made [voluntas] the founding concept of Western ethics, in joining it to that of free arbitration (liberum arbitrium). He made it the free arbitration of the will” (p. 255, emphasis in original).

“The Treatise on Free Will was at first conceived as a treatise on the good, in which Augustine demonstrated the divine goodness and the origin of evil, in opposition to the Manicheans. But to exonerate God, it was necessary to make the human will responsible for evil” (p. 256).

“The association of the will proper and free arbitration … suggests that the key of the fault [of original sin] resides in a power of choice belonging to the will. Evil does not come from nature, but from that will, in its exercise of choice…. Thus the first occurrence of [the phrase] free arbitration appeared at a crucial moment of reflection on the origin of evil” (p. 257, emphasis in original). “It is the human who is culpable, and God is innocent” (p. 259). “Willing is always in our power; in this consists our freedom” (p. 260).

“Augustine inherits the turn made by Alexander of Aphrodisias. Freedom of action has become a freedom of choice. And the power of choice is identified at once with the principle of assent to representations and the triggering principle of action: the will. Instead of a casuistry, instead of founding responsibility in the meeting of our beliefs and our desires, on the one hand, and on the circumstances of action, on the other, Augustine prefers to construct a unique and hidden inner principle, which is situated in an invisible part of the human (her soul); this principle is will, endowed with a free arbitration” (ibid).

Also influential in this context was the late 5th to early 6th century CE Roman Christian philosopher Boethius.

“In Aristotle, the problem of willing action and that of prescience of the future are totally disjoint. The first is treated in a reflection on ethical responsibility, the second in the framework of a logico-linguistic analysis of statements about the future” (p. 159). But “Boethius elaborates what will become the key argument: if the future is necessarily determined, free arbitration perishes, along with all moral responsibility” (ibid).

In the high middle ages, such arguments were developed to a fine pitch by the Latin scholastics. This turns out to be interrelated with the scholastic turn away from Aristotle’s own very innovative meta-ethical emphasis on the primacy of explanation by final causes, to a new privileging of a transformed notion of efficient cause that is closer to early modern mechanism than it is to Aristotle.

” ‘The final cause is not productive. That is why health is not productive, except metaphorically’ ” (p. 116). “At the end of the 13th century, Henry of Ghent and Duns Scotus understood this passage in an absolute manner. They deduced that the final cause produces nothing, that it is not really a cause” (p. 117). Henry of Ghent wrote, ‘The good that is known, insofar as it is represented in the intellect, moves the will only in a metaphorical way’ ” (quoted, p. 117, emphasis in original).

Though highly sophisticated and genuinely original, this scholastic devaluation of the final cause completely undoes what Aristotle himself highlights as his most important accomplishment in first philosophy (the detailed working out of a unique “final causes first” way of thinking and understanding, which orients itself through a hermeneutics of “that for the sake of which”). The scholastic reversal of Aristotle’s distinctive emphasis on final causes (in favor of putting a transformed notion of efficient causality first) puts a value-neutral notion of sheer power in top position in place of the good at the origin of things. Not only the first cause but also human agency are re-visioned in terms of this creative misreading of efficient causality as not just the means by which ends are achieved, but as a primordial value-neutral driving impulse, or (in the case of God) a value-neutral supreme power of creation from nothing. In philosophical anthropology, this is accompanied by a devaluation of Aristotelian teleological “intellect” in favor of the new voluntaristic notion of will, as the human analogue of creation from nothing.

“For Henry and Scotus, our passage means that the intellect and its object do not move the will…. But this interpretation, which reduces finality to the conjunction of a representation and a subjective will, is a hazardous extrapolation: Aristotle speaks here only of the need to distinguish between a productive cause and a final cause (the aim pursued is not the efficient cause of movement). And all the rest of his thought implies a teleology, that is to say a motion by a final cause, even for the beings that have no representation” (ibid).

“The will ceases to be simply the excellence of good humans (as with the Stoics). It implies a mentalist theory and a causal theory of action. — 1) Mentalist: because all action is explained as the exterior deployment of a mental state…. –2 ) Causal: the will is the cause of action…. Action becomes the effect of the will” (pp. 260-261, emphasis in original).

“At first, the fundamental definition of freedom is strictly ethical. It consists in the absence of constraint and of ignorance, independent of any metaphysical position on determinism or causal indeterminacy” (p. 473). “For at the origin, in Aristotle, [desire and logos or discourse] are clearly distinct…. The aporia arises when in an articulation that is not ontologically clarified, we confuse desire and the logos in the concept of ‘will’ (since the Stoics and Augustine). Successfully to rethink this articulation is the challenge and the task of an ethics. This imposes on us the task of destroying this metaphysical confusion that obstructs the philosophy of action” (p. 475).

The reference to “destruction” might sound a bit shocking, but it refers back to Boulnois’s methodological preliminaries. There, he said

“In the element of thought, destruction and construction are one sole and same act…. My approach is a form of ‘discursive dissolution’: through dissolution, we approach the resolution of the problem.”

“To solve: resolve, destroy. Here it is not simply a matter of ‘deconstruction’…. Can we again philosophize after analytic philosophy? If the analytical method has a virtue, it is to conduct a rational reflection on problems, and to accept that they can have a solution” (p. 20, emphasis in original).

“It is undoubtedly impossible to give a complete analytic interpretation of the problem of freedom. It is likewise impossible to give a complete history of the diverse statements responding to the question. But paradoxically, what is impossible separately becomes possible conjointly.”

“I will reconstruct the principal sources of the doctrine of freedom, and of its intrinsic aporia. I attach myself particularly to the work of Aristotle….”

“When Aristotle affirms that an action ‘accomplished willingly engenders praise and blame, while an action accomplished unwillingly only engenders compassion (suggnome) and perhaps pity’; when Descartes declares that the freedom of indifference is ‘the positive faculty of determining oneself for one or the other of two contraries, that is to say to pursue or to flee, to affirm or to deny’; when Nietzsche demands, apropos of the eternal return: ‘do you will that again and innumerable times again?’, not only does it not concern the same thesis, but above all it does not concern the same question” (pp. 20-21, emphasis in original).

He devotes a whole subsection of the introduction to “the legitimacy of the middle age” as a field of scholarly endeavor.

“In studying the middle ages, we indeed study the hidden face of our history…. To choose the long path, which passes through the Middle Age, is to choose multiplicity and discontinuity” (p. 22).

“[T]here are not two eternal conceptions, one determinist, the other libertarian…. an alternative of which both terms were unknown to Aristotle, who envisaged neither free arbitration (but solely willingness) nor determinism (but only cause and responsibility)” (p. 23).

“This study supposes that we first research the origin and the structure of the question of free arbitration, then we examine the sense of action from Aristotle, as well as its obliteration under a theory of free arbitration” (ibid).

In the conclusion, he says

“The problem of free arbitration, or of the freedom of the will, is a metaphysical artifact for two reasons:”

“1. The will was introduced by the commentators on Aristotle through a complex series of translations and projections, such that rational desire (boulesis) became a will, which renders the primordial sense of action and of practical reason incomprehensible.”

“2. Freedom is not essentially a power of the soul, but a social and ethical aptitude.”

“To go further in the elucidation of the problem of freedom, it is necessary to destroy the concept of will, as the mental and causal principle of human actions. As Wittgenstein well saw, for this it is necessary to confront a radical analysis of action without reproducing this term (anachronistic in relation to Aristotle). For the idea of an interior principle, capable of contraries and cause of action, not only conceals an internal contradiction, but is a fiction that occults the different levels of action in which we are responsible.”

“We have given an account of the actions of which we are the authors. To be responsible for an action, it is necessary to be a cause. This signifies that the agent has the power to act, and for Aristotle, this is a bivalent power, to act or not to act in general. Aristotle never says that, in some precise conjuncture, given the beliefs and representations of the agent, she must have the power to do a thing and its contrary, and to not do what she does. For that is not the question: that is not what makes ethical responsibility; we are responsible for actions of which we are generically the origin; action depends on us, it is ours, when we are not constrained by an exterior force. That is also why we cannot excuse ourselves (exclude ourselves from the cause), by arguing that faulty action was necessarily brought about by our desires…. For our desires are part of us, and our action is not imputable to another…. To speak of a ‘weakness of the will’, is precisely to render the phenomenon incomprehensible” (pp. 175-176, emphasis in original).

“It is only through confusion with the problematic of future contingents that the metaphysical question of the contingency of choice emerged…. For Aristotle never claimed that our capacity to act or to not act now depends uniquely on us” (p. 477, emphasis in original).

“Free arbitration becomes the condition of responsibility, which makes free arbitration a necessary but indemonstrable condition of ethics. — This argument has a double inconvenience: first of all, it requires the admission of an indemonstrable principle; then, in making free arbitration the condition of morality, it prevents us from seeing the converse, that ethical orientation is constitutive of its concept” (p. 478).

“Fundamentally, freedom does not reside in a subjective power to determine oneself. Neither the term ‘will’ nor its functions exist at the origin, in Aristotle: we find neither a power that centralizes the other faculties of the soul, nor a principle of assent at the source of action….. It is ethics that founds freedom, and not freedom that founds ethics” (p. 479, emphasis in original).

“Freedom is not a postulate of practical reason; it is practical reason. And the human is not born free, but she may become so” (p. 481).

Free Will in Aristotle?

A recent large book by Olivier Boulnois, Généalogie de la liberté [Genealogy of Freedom] (2021), provides great detail on the emergence of the notion of free will (liberum arbitrium in Latin). I have previously mentioned his Être et représentation (1999), which gives fascinating documentation of the role of Duns Scotus in the formation of modern notions of representation, and metaphysics as ontology. Boulnois has written extensively on medieval philosophy. Like Alain de Libera, he turns a broadly Foucaultian “archaeological” method in the direction of showing the large and largely unknown role of medieval philosophy in the development of common Western philosophical concepts. This post will focus on a part of his discussion of how Aristotle stands largely apart from later views.

Early on in the present work, Boulnois cites the first sentence of G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica:

“It appears to me that in Ethics, as in all other philosophical studies, the difficulties and disagreements, of which its history is full, are mainly due to a very simple cause: namely to the attempt to answer questions, without first discovering precisely what question it is which you desire to answer” (quoted in Boulnois, p. 34).

Boulnois notes how Latin translations extensively transformed the meanings of Aristotelian concepts.

“Is free will proper to the human? All of medieval and modern reflection on action rests on this thesis…. The concept of proairesis is analyzed for the first time in book III of the Nicomachean Ethics” (Boulnois, p. 133, my translation throughout). “To begin with, must we follow the [12th century Latin] translation of Burgundio? Does proairesis really mean free will?” (p. 134).

“With the translation of proairesis by ‘choice’, the key concept of Aristotelian ethics is integrated into the semantic field of will. The Burgundian node, which connects Aristotle and [the Church Fathers] Nemesius and Damascene in the same bundle of translations, constitutes a second origin of proairesis as free will in the 12th century” (p. 137). “Aristotle defines proairesis as a kind of desire joined with deliberation (with discourse)” (p. 139). “With Aristotle, we are indeed far from the medieval and modern interpretation, which speaks of choice (electio)” (p. 141).

Until now I have followed Joe Sachs’s translation in using “choice” myself. Sachs uses the English word with the same root as the French that Boulnois is questioning, but he explains it in terms of Aristotle’s definition just mentioned. But as we will see in an upcoming post, the Latin tradition gave it a voluntaristic coloring that is foreign to Aristotle.

“The most rigorous translation seems to be ‘resolution’…. Resolution introduces logos and time” (p. 140). “The object of our resolution is first of all the object of our desire, insofar as this results from a deliberation” (pp. 140-141). “Our moral character depends not on our theoretical attitude but on the ensemble of our resolutions, the repetition of which constitutes our disposition to act, indeed our aptitude for beautiful actions” (p. 142).

This ensemble of our resolutions sounds like the commitments of which Brandom and other contemporary writers speak.

“Since Cicero, the boulesis of the Stoics has been translated to Latin by voluntas [will]. But the Stoics affirm that such a mastery of impulse is found only in the sage…. It is only later, with Augustine, that this prerogative of the sage becomes a faculty accessible to all. Our concept of will, as capacity to consent or not to our representations, carries all this history. But in Aristotle, boulesis always designates the desire that pertains to that part of the soul that is capable of speech. It is a form of desire that is enunciable, intelligible…. Boulesis indeed is a wish: a wish does not require the existence of a will; like all desire, it is moved by its object” (p. 143).

“Among our desires, resolution results from a deliberation, which deploys itself in language…. The true principle of our resolution is of the order of language and of thought. Like all living beings, the human is necessarily moved by what appears to her as desirable; but in distinction from the other living beings, it is through speech that the desirable appears to her…. Resolution bears on action that can be accomplished by us…. There is only a place for deliberation when several lines of action are possible…. We deliberate on that which no one can do in our place” (p. 145, emphasis in original).

Here the resolution of deliberation is explicitly grounded in language and thought, and not in an anachronistic non-Aristotelian notion of a faculty of will.

“It is necessary to underline: Aristotle does not exactly say that the resolution depends on us. What depends on us is the action that is the object of that resolution…. Aristotle does propose a theory of decision, or of resolution, but not a theory of freedom of choice, or of free will” (pp. 145-146, emphasis in original).

Unlike Boulnois here, some 20th century writers have used “decision” in the sense that Boulnois gives to “choice”.

“Such actions are ontologically contingent: they could [also] not be. The metaphysical tradition deduced from this the existence of a power of choice, of a will or a free will” (pp. 146-147).

The important point here is that this “metaphysical tradition” does not include Aristotle.

“Nothing obliges us to understand contingency in an absolute manner, and as subject to our power. Aristotle refers to the ensemble of actions that depend on us (eph’ hemin) in general (in the sense of a collectivity: the humans, the agents, the citizens), but not to those that depend on me (here and now)…. But Aristotle never claims that an agent has, other things being equal, at a given instant, the capacity to do one thing or its contrary, to act and not to act. ‘What depends on us’ is a generic capacity, proper to humankind, and not to some particular individual, here and now. Reciprocally, in insisting on the idea that deliberation is the cause of our resolution, Aristotle holds that at the interior of this bivalence, we more often see what the logos presents as desirable” (p. 147, emphasis in original).

“In this context, what is the principle of action?” (p. 150). He quotes Aristotle, “and the principle of resolution is desire and reason…. What affirmation and negation are in thought, pursuit and flight are to desire…. For resolution to be good, it is necessary at the same time that the discourse be true and the desire just” (p. 150).

Boulnois summarizes, “Thus the properly human principle of action is resolution, that is to say the conjunction of desire and of logos in the pursuit of an end” (p. 151).

He turns to the background that Aristotle is responding to.

“The sophists affirm that every desire is good; Plato, that we can only truly will the true or absolute good” (ibid). “While the sophists identify freedom with the capacity to do what we want, and Plato with sole adherence to the Good, Aristotle proposes a third way: ethical freedom is the art of deciding well, of arriving at the resolution the circumstances require…. The resolution taken by the serious human [substituting Sachs’s “serious” for spudaios in the homme de bien or man of the good in Boulnois] is indeed a point of coincidence between the apparent good (which all seek) and the true good (that she discerns). In leaving behind the confrontation between sophists and Platonists, Aristotle has recourse neither to a relativism of appearances nor to an objective norm; in the element of virtue (and of desire), he aims at a coincidence between the phenomenon of good and its truth” (p. 152).

This Aristotelian idea of a point of coincidence between appearance and truth was later taken up by Hegel.

“Is it necessary to say that resolution is free? Does it consist in a choice?… Aristotle never makes the concept of freedom intervene in relation to the question of choice, nor even that of willingness” (p. 153). “Nevertheless, Aristotle knows and uses a concept of freedom (eleutheria). But this pertains to politics and not to the theory of action” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“The Latin translation not withstanding, [the adjective] ‘hekousion’ (willing) does not mean ‘voluntary’ (voluntarium); it is rather the mode of our action, except in cases of constraint or ignorance. Proairesis does not mean ‘free will’ (liberum arbitrium), but decision, resolution… Freedom is the ethical horizon of our action, and not the metaphysical attribute of a will that Aristotle did not envisage” (p. 154).

“It is indeed possible to analyze human action without postulating in the agent a central instance of arbitration, and without inscribing her in a physical determinism…. Ethics is indeed thinkable without a theory of will” (p. 155).

As I have noted many times, Plato and Aristotle founded ethics without the later notion of a faculty of will.

“Ethical action does not necessarily require a freedom of choice. It depends on a resolution (proairesis), which mainly refers to a dimension of anticipation, and does not always imply a choice. Ethics is indeed thinkable without the doctrine of free will” (ibid).

Here again the emphasis is on something like commitment.

“Resolution presupposes a process of deliberation in the agent: she at least implicitly evaluates the reasons to do x rather than nothing; that which she does is not imposed on her from the outset. That is to say that for her, there are a multitude of options and reasons to act” (ibid, emphasis in original).

Deliberation is concerned with the goodness of reasons.

“A stranger to the metaphysical problem of free will, freedom is ethical in essence; it consists in the ability to act well; it is only acquired at the completion of an education in virtue” (ibid).

“All thought about action situates itself in the horizon of the good, and freedom is nothing other than liberation from the bad” (p. 156).

“It is ethics that founds freedom, and not freedom that founds ethics.” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“On the plane of finite existence, no one knows if they have absolutely accomplished the best action. In the same way in their reflections on our moral lack of power, Aristotle and Ovid speak of that which is ‘better’ (comparative) and not of that which is ‘best’ (superlative)” (ibid).

Being and Representation

In L’Être et représentation (1999), Olivier Boulnois documents the emergence of “metaphysics” in its distinctively non-Aristotelian modern sense among various 13th century authors, including Roger Bacon, Henry of Ghent, and Siger of Brabant, leading to its decisive formulation by the Franciscan theologian John Duns Scotus in the 14th century. Avicenna had already claimed that metaphysics is about “being in general”, whereas Aristotle himself had emphasized that “being is said in many ways”, which implies that there is no “being in general”.

Boulnois suggests that the 13th century authors just mentioned paved the way for Scotus’ innovations by already treating being as a concept. We are so used to that, that it is hard for us to grasp what Aristotle means in suggesting that “being in general” is not a proper concept at all.

Scotus argued against Aristotle that there is a unifying, logically minimal criterion of being, and it is representability. To be representable is to be “not nothing”. Unicorns and other imaginary creatures are representable, whereas Aristotle would not have called them beings. Scotus’ concept of representation seems to be purely logical; to have a representation of something is not necessarily to have understanding of it. For Scotus, God and creatures are equally representable, even though creatures, as finite, can be properly understood by the human mind and God, as infinite, cannot. Whereas Aristotle never speaks of an infinite being — only of a perfect one — Scotus’ generic concept of being is very explicitly indifferent to distinctions between finite and infinite.

It is one thing to acknowledge representation as a logical concept among others, and quite another to give it the kind of special first place status that Scotus does in his ontology, and that Locke does in his epistemology.

Boulnois says it is with Scotus that metaphysics became linked to what Kant later called ontotheology. While separating metaphysics as the account of being from theology as the separate account of God, Scotus also made God indifferently one of the objects of metaphysics, along with all the other beings. The combination of these changes actually brought metaphysics closer to revealed theology, and helped it to be perceived as the safe handmaiden of the later Latin tradition, rather than as independent philosophical theology that some found threatening.

If one speaks of a subject of representation, it could be — in a sense of “subject” closer to that of Aristotle — that in which something stands for something, or it could be — in a modern sense — the one who represents. “In the context of representation, the soul is not the content of its thought, but rather has a representation, distinct from itself” (Boulnois, op. cit., p. 152, my translation).

It seems that for both Scotus and Locke, the mind has representations. The soul in Aristotle is thoughts and feelings and capabilities, not something standing behind them. (See also Repraesentatio; Ontology; Being, Existence; Being and Representation Revisited.)

Johnston’s Pippin

Adrian Johnston’s A New German Idealism just arrived, and I’m taking a quick look. It is mainly concerned with Slavoj Žižek’s work. But for now, I’m just concerned with chapter 2 — where Johnston launches a broadside against “deflationary” readings of Hegel, particularly the one he attributes to Robert Pippin — and the preface.

Johnston can be forgiven for not addressing Pippin’s 2018 work on the Logic, but I do not understand why he ignores my favorite book by Pippin, Hegel’s Practical Philosophy (2008).

There, Pippin dwells extensively on Hegel’s Aristotelian side. Much of interest could be said on what it means to be Aristotelian in a post-Kantian context. Many received views will be challenged by such an examination. (For a beginning, see Aristotle and Kant.) As I have said, I read Hegel as both Kantian and Aristotelian (as well as original).

In any case, Johnston seems to think Pippin in Hegel’s Idealism (1989) was intent on reducing Hegel to Kant. That book was indeed concerned to show a strong Kantian element in Hegel. But I did not think of it as reductive. If anything, I read Pippin’s book as a salutary response to those who want to reduce Hegel to a pre-Kantian, and to read Hegel as rolling back from Kant rather than moving forward from Kant. Because he assumes a bad old subjectivist reading of Kant, Johnston seems to think Pippin’s reading of Hegel necessarily rules out the possibility of seeing a realist side to Hegel.

The whole challenge of Hegel is to understand how it it is possible in his terms to be both Critical and realist, without engaging in logical nonsense. (But see Realism, Idealism.) This sort of thing typically requires significant semantic labor, but the achievement of such semantic elaboration is the whole point. Here I worry where Johnston intends to go with his defense of “undialectical” distinctions in the preface. It is one thing to recognize that Hegel does not intend to just do away with Understanding and its distinctions, and quite another to treat those distinctions as final. (See also Univocity.)

Johnston’s lengthy discussion of the positive value of Understanding in the preface does not address how it relates to dialectical transitions. He mainly wants to defend Žižek’s tactic of presenting forced binary choices at particular moments. In particular cases and circumstances this conceivably can be good pedagogy, but it is the details that matter, and Johnston offers no advice on how we are to distinguish a pedagogically good forced choice from a bad one.

(I suspect Žižek’s tactic may be related to his friend Badiou’s defense of the Maoist “One divides into Two” line, which always seemed like blustering nonsense to me. There have been some very rational strands within Marxism; I do not comprehend why someone as intelligent as Badiou would prefer to apologize for the coarsest and most anti-intellectual, but to a lesser extent Althusser did as well. See also Democracy and Social Justice.)

(Worlds away from this, Brandom has a wonderfully clear account of the nonfinality of Understanding’s particular conclusions, illustrated precisely by its very important positive role in the recognition and resolution of error, in which the operations of the Understanding on its own terms give rise to dialectical transitions at the level of Reason, understood in terms of the revision of commitments and possibly of concepts.)

Johnston also seems to assume there is something necessarily reductive about a non-ontological (or not primarily ontological) reading of Hegel. Again, I don’t see why.

I think Aristotle’s metaphysics was basically a semantic investigation, just like his physics. It is the historic forcing of this inquiry back from the wide universe of meaning onto narrow registers of being and existence that I see as reductive.

Based on the work of Olivier Boulnois on the role of the medieval theologian Duns Scotus in the reinterpretation of metaphysics as ontology, I have come to think that in general, modern emphasis on ontology tends to reflect what I take to be historically a medieval Scotist mystification of things Aristotle approached in clearer terms we should recognize today as mainly semantic. (For what it’s worth, the homonymous use of “ontology” in computer science is also mainly semantic.)

Metaphysics or “first philosophy” or “wisdom” was supposed to help us with higher-order understanding, not to be a place where strange existence claims are made.