Burthogge's Implicature

Burthogge and Grice

Totnes

Richard Burthogge, of Devonshire and All Souls, Oxford, is an original, subtle, and relatively readable English 'minor philosopher,' as Grice would put it -- Grice lists 'Bosanquet' and 'Wollaston' as 'minor,' along with indeed 'Witters,' -- as compared to Locke, a 'major,' indeed, along with Kantotle, the majorest --, a contemporary of Locke (from whom Grice borrowed, if never returned, 'the way of words') and with whom he (Burthogge, not Grice) corresponds.

Burthogge (also spelled 'Burthoggius,' -- the spelling Grice prefers) has claims, as it happens, to be counted the first English 'idealist.'

But this characterisation of Burthoggius as an English idealist is not as straightforward as it may seem it is from some of his own pronouncements. 

Burthoggius's theory is quite unlike, e.g. Bishop Berkeley’s, although, as some of those who have discussed Burthoggius point out, there are some remarkable affinities with a 'critical' idealist such as Kant! (Like Kant, and indeed, Burthoggius wrote a treatise on reason). 

Yet, in some ways, Burthoggius may also be more like empiricist and fellow Englishman Locke than like rationalist (and ultimately Scots) Kant (spelt 'Cant,' in Scotland). 

And, in one or two deep ways Burthoggius is, perhaps and ultimately, more like W. V. O. Quine than like any of them!

Vide:

H. P. Grice, "Vacuous names," in Words and objections: essays on the work of W. V. Quine, with Quine, "Reply to H. P. Grice."

Quine: "I enjoyed Grice's essay, even if I did not understand it."

Part of the Oxonian great interest in Burthoggius is because of Burthoggius's relationship to Locke -- Grice was not a Locke scholar (his tutee Strawson was), but he was the Locke lecturer.

Another part of the Oxonian interest is because the question:

‘Is Burthogge an idealist?’ 

is not so far from the question ‘Is Quine an idealist?’ 

And Grice loved the implicatum attached to that erotetic, seeing that he hosted Quine during his stay at St. John's!

("I never saw Grice dressed so smartly!")

The answer to both questions ("Is Burthoggius an idealist?" "Is Quine an idealist?") should be an unqualified ‘Yes!’, despite each philosopher’s empiricist proclivities, even stronger in Burthogge (or Burthoggius) than in Quine (or Quine). 

Burthogge (or 'Burthoggius') feels close enough to Locke, at any rate, to become his admirer and politico-philosophical ally. 

Like Locke, Burthoggius comes from a West Country Puritan family, with a father who had served as an officer on the side of Parliament. 

Our exploration  inspired by M. R. A., and here in memory of Gabriel Nuchelmans, a distinguished historian of philosophical thought. 

Nuchelmans focuses his attention on the philosophy of 'propositional form,' a topic still very much with us and still controversial, central to epistemology, to philosophical psychology, and to ontology, as well as to philosophical logic. 

Nuchelmans's work covers more than two millennia of theory in extraordinary detail, and he is no mere doxographer. 

Nuchelmans always seeks to get to the philosophical heart of things, and to reveal the patterns within and between this or that philosophical theory.

When we read Nuchelman, we are seldom left wondering why any particular recorded view is held, however strange and unpersuasive it may now seem to us. 

What follows owes much to Nuchelmans’s scholarship and thought, and not only when it draws directly on his characteristically perceptive, contextual analysis of the philosophy of Burthogge. 

Like Locke, and indeed Grice, Burthoggius goes to Oxford.

Oddly, Grice, though a Midlander, went to Oxford via Clifton, West Country.

But Burthoggius, unlike Grice, goes to the prestigious All Souls. 

Grice, as a Midlands scholarship boy, was stuck to Corpus -- even, as he later complained -- all the 'hot things' are going on at All Souls -- notably Austin's Thursday evening play-group meetings with the 'seven' -- "to which I was was never invited, having been born on the wrong side of the tracks."

After Oxford, and the obligatory 'grand tour,' family connections take Burthoggius to live at a nice little villa near Totnes (Burthoggius's sister was the lady of the manor) in his native Devonshire, as we implicated ('family connections.')

At Totnes, Burthoggius marries and takes a prominent part in local politics, at a time when England's politics is, largely, C. of E. politics. 

Burthoggius is buried at St. Mary's, Totnes.

Like Locke’s (and unlike Grice's), Burthoggius's epistemology (if not semantics) grows out of his politico-religious concerns and scientific interests. 

Like Locke, Burthoggius dislikes a Quaker and attacks dogmatism and ‘enthusiasm,' in both religion and philosophy. 

(Unlike Grice, who loved to defend the under-dogma. Vide his "Defence of a dogma," contra Quine). 

Like Locke, Burthoggius wants a broad C. of E. with few articles of faith. 

"39?! Too many!"

Cf. Grice on the 39 articles in "Logic and Conversation." 

"Surely it can be said that I'm committed to the thirty-nine articles, even if I don't know what they mean, let alone say!"

Burthoggius publishes a forceful advocacy of religious toleration a few years before Locke’s is eventually published in England. 

Those few years, however, reflect a significant difference in Burthoggius's and Locke's political circumstances. 

Burthogge writes under (metaphorically? no) James II’s government, with its express approval, and is rewarded by positions in local administration at Totnes, of all places.

Locke, at that time in exile in Holland and at least in sympathy with  the English Revolution, perhaps among the plotters, declines what is in effect an invitation to return and do the same. 

Unsurprisingly, Burthogge expressly includes Roman Catholics in his argument for a general religious toleration, whereas, for Locke, it is always politically necessary to exclude them.

Cf. Dummett. 

"Dummett never attended Austin's play group." (Grice). 

With that difference goes another.

While Locke remains firmly within the C. of E., the exigencies of local politics put Burthogge as firmly on the side of the non-conformists (as Grice's father, Herbert Grice, of Harborne, was), those who stay loyal to the clergymen, Presbyterian and Independent, who have been extruded from their livings by that infamous Act of Uniformity ("Everybody is uniform to everybody else.")

This does not mean that Burthogge regards himself as anything but a proud member of the C. of E.!

But when he writes in the preliminaries of "Organum Vetus et Novum," 

"a persecuting furious spirit 

is none of Christ’s; but Anti-Christ’s"

he is probably having mind Louis XIV or the Spanish Inquisition, as certain local Tories (as they are soon to be called) who, when in power, take the opportunity to impose fines on their non-conformist opponents, including Burthogge and his wife, in accordance with an oppressive law in better times ignored. 

not so much Burthogge, "Prudential reasons for repealing the penal laws against recusants, and for a general toleration," published anonymously. 

For discussion of Burthogge’s political situation and career, I recommend Mark Goldie, ‘John Locke’s circle and James II’, in The Historical Journal, 35.

Burthogge, "Organum Vetus et Novum; or, A Discourse of Reason and Truth."

Wherein "The Natural Logick common to Mankinde" is briefly and plainly described 

The immediate purpose of "Organum," however, is to answer critics of Burthogge’s essays in biblical hermeneutics and revealed theology. 

These publications by Burthogge are on divine justice, purportedly refuting some a-theist argument. 

Yet, like Burthogge’s work, they are surely directed against hard-line Calvinism. 

Seemingly harsh doctrine is defended in the letter, but interpreted ‘reasonably’ (if sometimes sophistically) in accordance with the axiom that God cannot justly demand what it is beyond our power to give. 

Such philosophy as appeared is vaguely Platonist. 

Burthogge's "Organum," however, focuses on what it is to be ‘reasonable’ (cf. Grice's linguistic botany of 'reasonable' in his first John Locke Memorial Lecture, at Oxford -- "The price of my boots cannot be 'rational,' only 'reasonable'"), an inquiry leading into the sketch of a fairly comprehensive epistemology that leaves Platonism pretty much behind. 

This theory is, to some, Burthogge’s crowning intellectual achievement, as the theory of the "Essay concerning humane understanding" is, to some, Locke’s. 

***

Burthogge’s main thesis is that every immediate object of experience and thought is an ens cogitationis, an 'appearance,' to both the sense and the imagination, and indeed, to the intellect.

As such, any ens cogitationis owes as much to the three faculties through which it is apprehended (sense, imagination, intellect) as to the reality that gives rise to it, and of which it is an appearance. 

The immediate or proper object of sense is a 'sentiment,' or sensation, caused by an 'impression' of a 'thing' "without upon a sensory," e. g.: a colour, a sound, a taste, and the like, as Burthoggius perceives each.

This 'sentiment,' or sensation is perceived as existing in the external object, or material thing, although whoever thinks clearly about the 'sentiment' or sensation will recognize that it exists only in the mind, or soul.

More radically, Burthogge holds that, like the proper object of sense, the proper object of the understanding, mind, or intellect —viz., a notion or an idea of a thing — is also mind-dependent, being simply the sense or meanings of a word, or an expression.

Words (1678), p. 6. 

This work is available in its entirety, together with "An Essay upon Reason" (abridged) and "Of the Soul of the World and of Particular Souls" in The Philosophical Writings of Richard Burthogge, ed. M. W. Landes, Chicago: Open Court.

The remark quoted expresses a common sentiment. 

Burthogge, "T’Agathon, or, Divine Goodness Explicated and Vindicated from the Exceptions of the Atheist," and "Causa Dei, or an Apology for God."

A word, or an expression, stands for a thing, but for a thing as conceived of in a certain way -- as a substance, or an accident, or a power, or a relation, and so forth. 

Cf. Mill, System of Logic, on the denotata of logical connectors. 

So every object of thought is shaped by the faculty of thought and by its medium of expression, notably, by the general notion or category -- although ‘category’ is not really a word used by Burthogge, as much as is abused by Grice) under which the object is distinguished or characterized. 

Burthogge does list different 'categories,' or classes of words:

Faculties and Powers

Good

Evil

Virtue 

Vice

Verity

Falsity 

Relations

Order

Similitude

Whole

Part

Cause, 

Effect, etc. 

Each of this is what Burthogge calls a "notion."

as 

Whiteness, 

Blackness, 

Bitterness, 

Sweetness, etc. 

each of this is what Burthogge calls a "sentiment," or sensation. 

"The former, the notion, owns no other kind of existence than the latter, the sensation, namely, an objective existence."

‘Objective existence’ is here used in the ordinary scholastic and Cartesian sense of existence in thought (objectum) or ‘in the mind’, as opposed to being 'formally in the things themselves' (res).

So Burthogge’s ‘notion’ is given a similar status to that of a Cartesian idea (cf. Grice, "Descartes on clear and distinct perception, in Way of Words), ‘taken objectively’, i. e., the status of a thing as it is conceived of; although ‘notion’ is also used, understandably if a trifle untidily, for the way of conceiving of a thing. 

The important lesson is that we must not ascribe an independent or formal reality to a thing as we conceive of it, to an intentional or, as Burthogge is fond of calling it, a ‘cogitable’ being.

"He that looks for a notion in a thing, 

looks behind the glass for the image he sees in it."

In other words, a certain kind of metaphysics is misguided, since its supposedly external object or material thing is really the structure of our own thought reflected in, or projected or spread onto (as Hume would prefer -- cf. Grice on Humeian projection) the reality that appears to us. 

Kant’s (and Cant's) ‘Copernican revolution’ seems to have been under way at Totnes.

Burthogge emphasises that there is a difference between such a ‘cogitable being’ as is chimaerical, or a 'mere effect' of 'the Faculties,' and such as is grounded in a reality as well. 

The latter is permissibly called ‘real’, even though it is only 'in the things as the things relate to our Faculties; that is, not in the thing as it is a thing, but as it is an object.'

The grounding of a 'notion' on a reality is always via the process of a 'sentiment' or sensation, in which, Burthogge holds, he is aware of a 'sentiment' or sensation being caused in us by some external material thing: 'so that as a reality is ground to a sentiment, so a sentiments is ground to a notion.'

But it could be that a notion is not so grounded, or not directly. 

Such a notion is a ‘second notion,' or a ‘notion concerning a notion’ -- "meta-notion," as Grice would call it -- and it may include a categorial concept. 

Burthogge, like Grice, has this liking for bracketing what they think are superfluous or otiose words. 

As further removed from reality, a 'meta-notion' is less "clear and distinct" than a ‘more sensible’ first notion. 

Cf. the scholastic terminology of intentio prima and intentio secunda. 

That is to say, presumably, that the meaning (sense, or signification) of the corresponding expression is less immediately evident.

There is thus more danger of confusion in an abstract expression or a thought that employs such a meta-notion than in a thought closer to experience. 

Berkeley and Hume propound similar views.

But the general point that a ‘second notion’ is intelligible only in their parasitic relation to a determined ‘first notion’ is independent of empiricism as such.  

At least one Cartesian, Christopher Wittich, criticizes Spinoza for confusedly making a ‘second notion’ the starting-point of the argument of ethics, despite the fact that such an expression as ‘substance’ has a clear and un-arbitrary meaning only as a way of characterising a formal property shared by the independently identifiable being, the body, the mind, and God. 

However that may be, Burthogge embraces a strongly empiricist, ‘bottom-up’ view of the acquisition of concepts, leaving room neither for innate concepts nor even for an intuitive leap from experience to a grasp of an essence. 

A distinct notion can be achieved by a definition, but a definition is always nominal, never real, simply giving an expression a fixed sense, signification, or meaning. 

The only definition that can be given of a thing is a description of it 'according to the impression the thing makes upon our Faculties, and the conception the thing occasions in the faculties.'

There is thus no possibility of a ‘real’ definition. 

Cf. Robinson on "Definition," cited by Grice in "Actions and Events."

As Burthogge puts it, ‘The notion of an essential definition is non-sense’. 

Every genuine de-finition is merely nominal, and the rest is de-scription. 

All this leads up to the theory of judgement, truth, and method. 

Judgement has two stages.

First, comparing and considering, or reasoning.

This is followed by the involuntary upshot: either assent or dissent.

The right method of reasoning is according to a kind of natural logic as improved by experience 'without assistance of art.'

A proof is showing truth to the mind, and what that involves depends on the nature of truth. 

Burthogge now considers various theories of truth and of the criterion of truth. 

It is evidently a presupposition of Burthogge's discussion that, since a notion cannot be compared with bare reality, but only with one another the conception of truth as correspondence with reality, if unexceptionable, is irrelevant to the question of what is shown when ‘truth’ is shown. 

See Theo Verbeek, ‘Wittich’s Critique of Spinoza’, in T.M. Schmaltz (ed.), Receptions of Descartes (Routledge).  

For the implication of involuntariness, see, e.g., p. 47. 

So, too the scholastic notion of truth as the conformity a thing has to its arche-type in the divine intellect, which Burthogge calls ‘metaphysical truth’, is useless to us, since we have no access to the divine ideas, to God’s view of things.

'He must see the original, and compare the copy with it, that on knowledge will affirm [the latter] to be true.'

Similarly unobservable is Lord Herbert’s natural congruity of our faculties to the truth, as manifested in free and fair assent. 

We have knowledge of the assent, but not of the congruity, and in any case some people cheerfully assent to a falsehood.

Another misguided doctrine, adopted by the Cartesians from the Stoics, is that "clear and distinct perception" is the criterion of truth.

(Vide Grice, "Descartes on clear and distinct perception," and the objetive-subjective distinction re: certainty: 'x is certain' vs. 'I am certain.')

Burthogge objects that the question concerns what is perceived, not how it is perceived. 

We can as "clearly and distinctly" perceive that a proposition is false, as that a proposition is true. 

Moreover, unless truth is a discernible property of the object of judgement, i.e. of the proposition in question, there is no way to distinguish something’s merely seeming true from its being "clearly and distinctly" perceived to be true.

For a related reason, innatism does nothing to explain our knowledge, since it is because of some feature of a proposition supposed innate ("A = A"),  its evident truth, that we assent to it. 

Since we can apprehend whatever such evident truth consists in, the hypothesis of innateness becomes redundant.

Burthogge concludes that the only truth that could be so shown to us as to be the ground of our assent is what he calls, after Quine, ‘logical truth’. 

This, Burhogge explains, as the ‘objective harmony’, consistency and coherence ‘of every things each with other, in the frame and scheme of them in our mindes’. 

That is to say, rather like Donald Davidson, Burthogge offers us a coherence (Duhem-type holistic, or pragmatist) theory of truth, or of the criterion of truth, on the ground that we are locked within the ‘objective’ or ‘notional’ world of our beliefs, or conceptual schemes. 

Since no relation that a proposition bears to a thing in itself can be manifest to us, manifest truth must lie in coherence. 

As with a broken plate, when all the pieces fit together perfectly, we can be certain that they are correctly placed.

And when some parts of an otherwise coherent scheme are missing, there is probability 

From our point of view, Burthogge insists, when every reason is on one side, certainty is as good as infallibility or incorrigibility.

The arguments of the philosophical sceptic supply no reason at all to doubt, even about a contingent matter of fact. 

Burthogge sees no such problem as Descartes sees with respect to the stability of knowledge. 

In effect, Burthogge sets aside an element in a traditional account of knowledge (episteme, scientia), together with the distinction upon which Descartes lays such emphasis, between moral and metaphysical (or ontological) certainty. 

Burthogge simply dismisses Descartes’s ‘metaphysical’ or ontological doubt ("Do I think? Do I exist?") as 'unreasonable and contradictious.'

Despite this account of what ‘logical truth’ is, Burthogge evidently takes coherence to be a mark of correspondence. 

Burthoggius underpins the principle that the most consistent account is the most probable by an assumption that a thing in itself forms part of a harmonious system. 

Accordingly, there is, or should be ‘one Science, one Globe of Knowledge, as there is of Things And the more large, general, and comprehensive our Knowledge is, the more assured and evident it is.'

'It is in Science as it is in Arch-work, the Parts uphold one another.'

In reading ‘The Book of Nature’, then, we should aim at a coherent and comprehensive interpretation, fitting all the pieces together as ‘harmoniously’ (or coherently) as we can. 

That way we maximize (as Davidson would put it) the probability that our notion or our belief corresponds in some way to the real order of things. 

We should adopt the same method, Burthogge argues, in reading ‘The Book of God’, at the same time recognizing that a revealed truth is an analogy that has spiritual, moral, or practical, rather than speculative, alethic meaning. 

We cannot expect to understand a revealed truth individually, or to pick and choose from what are all God’s words, but we should interpret every revealed truth together in whatever way makes them as consistent with one another as possible. 

His critics, Burthogge concludes, instead of dogmatic denial and appeal to prejudice must ‘produce a frame and scheme of thoughts more Congruous and Harmonical than mine, [to] account for those Phaenomena which I [have] essay’d to solve’. 

So the work ends with a sentiment that slots easily into the tradition of probabilist pleas for toleration, from Chillingworth to Locke. 

'A man is a reasonable creature, or a reasonable beast, as Hobbes has it, or a and therefore his religion must be reasonable.'

This general truth ‘is evident in the Natural reasonings of Plain and Illiterate, but Understanding men; who not having other Logick but of that kinde, to verifie their Tales, desire but to have them heard out from end to end; and who no otherwise confute their Adversaries, than by telling over again in their own way the whole Relation, that both may be compared.'

Assent follows evidence, and, by implication, cannot be forced. 

In our search for truth, we must prefer the best available interpretation of the ‘phenomena’, or data, whether natural or revealed, but recognize with humility that it is always liable to replacement by something better. 

All interpretation remains, in principle, alla Popper, open to correction. 

Philosophical scepticism can be dismissed, it seems, because it does nothing to replace the best available account with something better. 

It would appear, then, that, after all, ‘manifest’ truth is not that manifest, or is not necessarily truth. 

Burthogge sometimes seems aware of this problem. 

One of his definitions of truth is 

'universal and exact agreement or harmony,' 

a definition that would make truth an ideal to which we aspire, rather like C. S. Peirce’s notion of the ideal description of the world that would be arrived at, if scientific inquiry continued long enough. 

Cf. H. P. Grice, "Lectures on C. S. Peirce," Oxford. 

But what really matters to Burthogge, perhaps, is not so much what ‘truth’ is, as what reasonable judgement, reasonable procedure, and reasonable debate may be, in science and in religion, given our strictly mediated access to natural and spiritual reality. 

Does all this add up to idealism? 

It is, I think, relevant to this question, if only to clarify what ‘idealism’ might best be supposed to be, to consider further the context within which Burthogge formulates his theory, and the direction in which he develops it in "An Essay upon Reason, and the Nature of Spirits."

"An Essay upon Reason, and the Nature of Spirits," dedicated to Locke, restates Burthogge’s epistemology, with some differences of emphasis. 

This time it is the preface to a speculative rather than a hermeneutic enterprise, the exposition of a somewhat wild, but not uninteresting, dualist panpsychism in various ways reminiscent of Neoplatonism, of Geulincx, and, as Burthogge recognizes, of Spinoza. 

But Burthogge’s epistemology itself may also owe something to the two Dutch philosophers, as well as to Platonist theory.

**

BROOKE'S TRUTH

** 

As for Platonist theory, an essay likely to have been known to Burthogge is by Robert Greville, Second Baron Brooke, a leading and very successful Parliamentary commander in the early stages of the Civil War who is fatally shot in the eye after winning the Battle of Lichfield. 

Brooke is a Puritan and advocate of toleration,  possibly an associate of his contemporary Benjamin Whichcote, the guru of Cambridge Platonism. 

Or other Platonist theory, if we read Geulincx and/or Spinoza as Platonists. 

Lord Brooke published an elegantly written essay on truth.

This is Platonism taking the form of a strong monism with more than a touch of idealism.

‘All being is but one’, Lord Brooke tells us, ‘taking various shapes, sometimes discovering itself under one, sometimes under another, whereas it is but one being’. 

The diversity lies, not in reality, but in our notion. 

Time and place are unreal appearances.

'All things did exist in their being with God ab omni aeterno and this succession is but to our apprehension’. 

Any approach that divides unitary reality leads to confusion, for example if you distinguish a substance from an accident, or, when ‘you see some thing precede another thing, call the one a 'cause,' the other an 'effect.''

We have to acquiesce in the appearance of such distinctions in ordinary life, but in going beyond ordinary experience in our search for a cause and an effect, we discover only our ignorance. 

Brooke seems to be positively against the empirical investigation of nature and explanatory hypotheses. 

Brooke offers us a vision of a unitary science, with a platonic way up and way down, but not much help towards achieving it. 

If your soul would ‘soar and raise itself up to universal being and unity’, he tells us, and so see how ‘all things are but one emanation from power divine’, so shall you with certainty descend to knowledge of existences, essences, when you shall rest in one universall cause: and Metaphysics, Mathematics, and Logick will happily prove one."

Each particular Science will be subordinate and particular applications of these and the face of the divine Beauty shall be unveiled through all. 

This mystical, but rationalistic vision is not that far from Spinoza’s, allowing for differences of style and Spinoza’s explicit identification of God and nature. 

In Spinoza’s metaphysics the quasi-idealist element is less obtrusive, if it is there at all. 

Some have thought that it is.

Whether or not Burthogge did know Lord Brooke’s platonist treatise on truth, he comments at length on the resemblance between his own theory and the views of Plato and The Academy 

Brooke, The Nature of Truth: Its Union and Unity with the Soul, Which is One in its Essence, Faculties, Acts; One with TRUTH. 

I would prefer not to call it idealism, if only because Brooke seems to envisage a science of things in themselves, subordinating diversity to unity. 

A key passage is Spinoza’s definition of attribute.

'By attribute I understand what the intellect perceives of a substance, as constituting its essence’, which seems open to an ‘idealist’ interpretation. 

(Essay), and makes informed reference to Spinoza.

Nevertheless, Burthogge specifically opposes Platonist doctrine. 

For example, Burthogge expressly rejects the view, held by Brooke and other Platonists, that the proper object of intellect is truth, holding instead that it is meaning.

Brooke, like Spinoza after him, has to deal with falsity in terms of confused perception, whereas Burthogge has no need for such a side-long approach. 

What is clearly meaningful may well be false, and clearly false. 

A more fundamental or, at least, more striking difference lies in Burthogge’s empiricism. 

Without the body, Burthogge tells us, we would have no sense experience, and without sense experience, we would have no notions at all. 

That, in a way, is Spinoza’s view too.

But for Burthogge sense experience not only comes first, but cannot be transcended. 

It is more secure than any general speculation, however harmonious. 

As Burthogge puts it, echoing Hobbes:

'Assent on Evidence by the testimony of our own Senses rightly circumstanced and conditioned, is as firm as can be, and is called Knowledge.' 

Burthogge simply dismisses the idea of rising to a God’s-eye view of things, an apprehension of reality sub specie aeternitatis, the essential starting-point of the Platonic way down.

Like Locke, Burthogge illustrates the authority of the senses over theory by the example of trans-substantiation, the example previously offered in the Port-Royal Logic to the opposite effect 

In "An Essay upon Reason," Burthogge develops a sophisticated analysis of sense perception to rival those of Locke and, explicitly, Descartes. 

Sensation, Burthogge states, never occurs without conception, the proper object of which is the image or idea.

Without ‘conception’ (cf. Grice, "The conceptION of value, not the concept!") it seems, sensation would not be sensation, a form of consciousness. 

This does not mean that a faculty distinct from sense, namely intellect, is required for consciousness. 

Contrary to Descartes’s view, sense is itself ‘a cogitative or conceptive power’.

Nor does it mean that the object of sensory conception.

‘In this action [i.e. false belief], there are two things.'

'There is the seeing a Being, and the seeing it under a confused notion.’

Cf. Locke, Essay, ii. xxiii. 17

A. Arnauld and P. Nicole, Logique, iv. xii. 15 

Burthogge, Essay, p. 4: 

‘Conception properly speaking, is of the Image, or Idea.’ 

‘Descartes denies that Sensation is Knowledge, and consequently, excluding both Conception and Consciousness from the Idea of it, must the image or idea, is a blank internal datum, as a sensation seems to be for Descartes (and, at least sometimes, a ‘simple idea’ seems to be for Locke).'

‘Apprehension, Knowledge, or conscious Perception’, Burthogge tells us, ‘is of the Object, by means of that Idea, or Image’. 

Indeed, it seems that the ‘idea or image’, perceived as external, is the ‘object’ as we perceive it, the ‘immediate’ object, the ‘thing’ in so far as it is an ‘object’. 

An essential aspect of conscious perception, Burthogge claims, is attention.

Attention, Burthogge explains, is the application of the mind to an ‘object’ — that is to say, to a thing as experienced, to an ‘idea’ taken objectively. 

Burthogge puts it succinctly: 

‘Without Attention, no Conception, and without Conception, no Consciousness.’ 

An ‘objects’, moreover, is necessarily conceived as external to the faculty. 

In other words, a conscious sensation, in being conscious and in being sensation, is intrinsically intentional. 

The point is close to the point made by some present-day analytic philosophers who call sense experience ‘transparent’ (rather than opaque, or intensional) in that, roughly speaking, to describe the experience just is to describe its external objects as its appears to be. 

But whereas some of these philosophers would argue that we can therefore exclude mind-dependent or a subjective qualitative state from the analysis of perception, Burthogge adopts the closely related, but obverse conclusion that a sensible thing, in so far as it is an ‘object’, is mind-dependent. 

At the same time, a sensible object necessarily appears to us as external.

Its perceived externality is prior to any judgement, theory, or intellectual notion.

The immediate Objects of Cogitation, both the Sensitive, and the Intellectual, are, in appearance, external to their several faculties in appearance, they are either the very ultimate Objects themselves of those faculties, or, at least, do Exist in them for Whiteness seems to the Eye to be in snow, or in a white wall; and Sound to the Ear, to be in the Air. 

The combination of a defeasible-coherence theory of the criterion of truth with a thesis of the intrinsic intentionality and independent authority of sense experience, not to speak of the view that our clearest and most basic notion is itself drawn directly from sense experience, may seem straightforwardly incoherent. 

It invites also deny, that Sense is a Cogitative or Conceptive Power. 

But then, it is hard to say, what that Idea is, that [he has] of sensation.’ 

These remarks succeed, I think, in at least indicating what is wrong with Descartes’s various accounts of sensation. such criticism as Donald Davidson (who taught with Grice at Berkeley -- cf. their mutual influence) has brought against W. V. O. Quine’s empiricist conception of ‘the tribunal of experience’ in favour of his own coherentist (holistic) view that sensation cannot ground perceptual belief or supply it with content, but can at best cause belief.

Vide Avramides on 'symmetric' and 'asymmetric' interpretations of Grice's reduction of 'to mean' to 'to intend.' -- a D.Phil under P. F. Strawson.

There are remarks of Burthogge’s that can seem like those passages in Locke’s "Essay" that suggest that the intentionality of sensation (to use G. E. M. Anscombe's happy phrase) is reducible to our awareness that our blank simple ideas are being caused by something independent of us.

But in Burthogge’s account the appearance of externality is intrinsic to the sensation, and kept strictly distinct from the perceiver’s consciousness of being sensorily affected by something ‘really’ external, although the two are intimately related. 

In general, an ‘object’ appears external because its ‘grounds’ in reality is external, and that appearance, in normal circumstances, is why we can be sure that its grounds are external. 

Burthogge holds that, unless an object appears to us as external, conscious experience and the thought of the object, not to speak of thought about their ‘grounds’, would be impossible. 

The appearance of externality ‘arises from the very nature of cogitation itself’, presumably because cogitation needs an object other than itself.

But if sensation itself, the bare operation of the senses, can assure us of the existence and character of an ‘object’, and if we can also be assured that such an object corresponds to, or is an appearance of, a grounding reality, Burthogge might seem to have gone too far down the empiricist-realist road to leave himself room for a coherence theory of truth. 

I will return to this question of the internal coherence of Burthogge’s epistemology. 

**

BURTHOGGE'S "ESSAY UPON REASON"

AND GRICE'S LOCKE LECTURES ON REASONING

** 

But, first, I want to consider what more Burthogge says, in "An Essay upon Reason," about what a notion is and how it is related to a sense perception. 

The relevant chapters, on the role of expression in thought, pursue with some subtlety the proposal of "Organum" that a notion" is a meaning.

Burthogge starts from the position that ‘reason or understanding’ allows us to know an external object, that is, to have it in mind, without an image of it. 

Burthogge distinguishes between the sensible apprehension of a sentence and the intellectual apprehension of its meaning. 

A non-human animal is capable only of the former. 

A non-human animal may sagaciously employ perceived means to means, but does not, for Burthogge, reason or, even judge (o 'judicate, as Grice prefers).

Not that Locke’s theory is free from all ambivalence. 

For discussion, see M. R. Ayers, "Locke: Epistemology and Ontology," London, Routledge. 

Burthogge’s discussion contains echoes of Hobbes, and is perhaps provoked by Book iii (on the Way of Words) of Locke’s Essay concerning Humane Understanding. 

A hound follows the scent of the fox.

A hound does not employ such a disjunctive premise, as he reaches a fork of a path, as 

‘The fox is gone either this way -- or that way’. 

If a hound fails to find the scent on one path, and immediately follows the other, it will be scent, not inference, that guides the hound.

'There is nothing of propositions, major, minor, or conclusion, in the case.'

The example of the allegedly syllogising hound is traditional.

Grice adapts it to the hawk who THINKS(dove or rabbit) from above.

For Grice, DISJUNCTIVE thinking needs behavioural manifestedness: the lion that lurks and thinks (ZEBRA OR CRANE).

Burthogge does not suppose, as a Cartesian might suppose, that expression is made possible by a prior human capacity to form a purely intellectual conception. 

Burthogge holds that a purely intellectual conception, and indeed a propositional thought of any kind, is made possible by expression. (Cfr. Peacocke, "Thought and language.")

In a key passage, Burthogge explains how the understanding can think of such thing as substance, mind, matter, or colour-in-general without (per impossibile) employing an image of them. 

The only image the understanding has of these, and of all things else that are purely intelligible and mental, are the expressions that SIGNIFY them. 

Ay, the very idea the understanding hath of a thing is nothing but its definitive conceptions of it; and a definition as properly it is of an expression, so they are made by expressions. 

To such a degree, in this respect, are expressions of use to the understanding, which cannot work without an expression.

A thing so certain, that even the denomination itself of ‘understanding’, at least in part, arises from hence.

For the Mind is called the 'under-standing,' because it has a power of seeing a thing under an expression that stands for it; as well as because it has one of perceiving Substances under Accidents. 

I will return to this second alleged power of the 'under-standing' in a minute. 

With respect to the first, the capacity to employ expression in order to think without an image of what we are thinking about is illustrated by our capacity (as previously explained by Locke as well as by Hobbes) to employ a numeral in order to think of a number without the image of a plurality (Quine's twelve apostles to use his example in "Methods of Logic") and to do so beyond the possible usefulness of any such an image. 

The fundamental 'semantic' connection is, for Burthogge, between an expression and the world, but it is the world not only as perceived, but as variously considered or abstractly conceived of with the aid of an expression, or ‘under’ an expression, as he puts it.  

There are different modi concipiendi, ways of conceiving of things, ‘notions’ in a narrow or technical use.

Each 'modus concipiendi' constitutes some category of an object of thought, which Burthogge sets out in a table, a modified Porphyrian tree. 

aliquid: something, is either real

cogitable, and this is either

mere cogitable

real cogitable

cogitable, as a thing

something about a thing

as cause, effect, etc.

substance accident

The ‘aliquid’ seems to be regarded as a wholly (even categorically) indeterminate, wholly comprehensive generic name. 

A real ‘something’ is a thing in itself. 

A cogitable is an ‘object’, real or chimerical, and a cogitable falls into one of two classes.

The first includes substances and accidents, the second (as Burthogge’s point might perhaps be expressed) includes things considered in terms of certain roles or relations that are irrelevant to their identity (cause, effect, part, whole, etc.). 

With respect to the second class of the 'cogitable,' Burthogge says, we ordinarily realize that there is nothing in the thing corresponding to the expression 'under' which we consider it. 

By contrast, however, people tend to be deluded into supposing that the real, independent world is actually composed of this or that substance and this or that accident, notions which ‘are the first steps we make towards a distinct Perceivance and knowledge of things’. 

Even ‘unlearned plain men’ are liable to reify substance and accident as real and independent terms of a real and independent relation. 

For example, they think of a virtue and a vice as, each, a real thing in a man. 

The pervasiveness of the substance–accident relation in our conceptions of a thing Burthogge seems here to ascribe to expressive necessity, in effect to the fact that, in order to form a judgement or propositional thought, it is necessary to identify a 'subject' and say something, a 'predicate,' about it, at least to oneself.

There [is] no such thing in the World as a Substance, or an Accident, any more than such a thing as a Subject, or an Adjunct; and yet we apprehend not any thing but as one of these.

‘Thus the Notion of Substance is a Reality of Appearance only, but the thing we apply it to, is a Reality of Existence.’

Thoughts like some of these are fairly commonplace in the philosophy of logic. 

The popular Logic of the Jesuit Martin Smiglecki, for example, used at Oxford in Burthogge’s time, starts with the assertion that all the objects of logic are entia rationis, since logic deals with the conceptions or categories under which we speak about a thing.

Nuchelmans, however, draws an illuminating and persuasive connection with certain arguments of Geulincx. 

Geulincx was lecturing in Leiden at the time Burthogge is there. 

Geulincs publishes his "Logic" the year in which Burthogge takes his M. D.

A theme of Geulincx’s Logic, as Nuchelmans puts it, is 'that a thing as it exists in the world cannot possibly be an element of an affirmation.

The naked thing has to be clothed, as it were, in the appropriate form of expression.

The substantival expression by which we refer to something in the world expresses a way of conceiving of it such that it can stand as 'subject,' while a 'predicate' expresses a different way of conceiving of it. 

This point is now extended to epistemology. 

The things itself not changed by our thought, but we can have knowledge of the thing only by assimilating and adapting it to the form of our understanding and the categories of expression corresponding to these forms’.

All this gives Geulincx a stick with which to beat the Aristotelians.

Geulincs represents the Aristotelians as continually falling into the trap of projecting or spreading onto ‘the thing itself that feature which it has only in relation to the modes of our thinking by which they are made present to the mind’.

Good philosophy, on the other hand, will allow for these modes of thinking in its understanding of a thing. 

This general type of explanation of the errors of the Aristotelians, that they mistake a 'logical entity' for a real one, is not, of course, peculiar to Geulincx. 

Bacon accuses Aristotle of ‘fashioning the world out of the categories’, and criticism of scholastic belief in Martinus Smiglecius, Logica. 

Gabriel Nuchelmans, Concept and Proposition from Descartes to Kant.  

Done in Metaphysica ad mentem Peripateticam.

A 'real accident’ is commonly in the same spirit. 

A general formulation of the criticism occurs in Malebranche’s Recherche, in the chapter on errors of the intellect, ‘the mind’s disordered abstractions’.

But Nuchelmans’s speculation is probably correct that it is Geulincx who supplies Burthogge with much of the material for his argument. 

IS BURTHOGGE AN IDEALIST?

One way, then, and very possibly the most illuminating way, of viewing Burthogge’s ‘idealism’ is as a certain kind of theory of philosophical error, owing much to a philosophy of logic and incorporating the new philosophers’ view of ‘the prejudices of the senses’ but extended to the whole of human belief, actual and possible, and to all possible concepts. 

For Burthogge, what we think of as knowledge — and indeed is knowledge, in ordinary terms — is necessarily distorted by the forms of perception and thought. 

Error theory becomes idealism when it is held, in effect, that error is normal, and that there is no conceivable way of allowing for the distorting veils of sensation and of conception or expression. 

This incorrigible distortion, Burthogge emphasizes, is not a contingent consequence of human nature, but follows ‘from the very Nature of Cogitation in general (as it comprehends Sensation as well as Intellection) since that the Understanding doth Pinn its Notions upon Objects, arises not from its being Such a particular kind of Cogitative Faculty, but from its being Cogitative at large.' 

In its general relation to previous error theory, Burthogge’s epistemology resembles Hume’s. 

But Hume draws on previous accounts of how the irrational faculty of the imagination is a main source of error, not to say of madness, and brings them to bear, exuberantly modified and extended, on normal belief. 

Hume presents the human world-view, including the belief that there is an independent world at all, as an irrational, contingently structured, logically incoherent but nevertheless natural and useful product of the imagination. 

Expression plays an essential role for Hume only in the explanation of a priori thought and knowledge.

And even there, expression does so thanks to a mysteriously effective association of an image with an expression, itself a sensory image (i.e. an impression or an idea). 

Rather like Hume and, more significantly, Hobbes, Burthogge takes it that an expression is an image that has meaning through its association with another image, or, rather, its association with a thing through an image caused by that thing. 

But, in Burthogge’s story, it is the logical form of a judgement, the logical roles of an expression in propositional thought, that above all systematically shape, and thereby ineluctably distort, our apprehension of the world. 

Sense gives us an external quale, which reason interprets as a predicable of substance or a subject. 

Not much is said directly about the substance–accident relation in Organum, apart from identifying it as a notion. 

But there is in "Organum" a somewhat mysterious line of thought relevant to the topic of predication. 

Burthogge asserts, in effect several times, that for us ‘a thing is nothing but as it stands in our Analogy’. 

As any thought of God must employ analogy if it is to go beyond the barren thought of an unknown ‘Infinite Excellency’, so a significant thought about anything at all must employ analogy. 

In making this claim, Burthogge might mean that all predication is a kind of comparison between the thing falling under the predicate in question, and he certainly emphasizes the need for ‘comparing thing with thing’ in constructing a coherent ‘scheme of things’. 

On that interpretation, Burthogge is deploying a nominalist point against taking an 'attribute' as a real being. 

In context, however, his talk of ‘our analogy’ seems to have the more general, quasi-idealist point that, as our knowledge of God is necessarily shaped by human ways of thinking, so is our knowledge of anything. 

Yet it is specifically the attributes of God that are in question, which are, he says, ‘but as so many aspects’ from a human point of view. 

So, on either interpretation, the suggestion seems to be that even a natural thing we perceive cannot be known as it is in itself because it can only be known through the application of a predicate marking, as it were, a mediated glimpse of reality. 

By the time of "An Essay on Reason," Burthogge has read Locke’s Essay, and it shows. 

The "subject"–"predicate" form of judgement now comes centre-stage as the first notion occasioned by sensation. 

This form owes its existence to an intuition we have that the qualitative sensory data perceived as external require explanation as a manifestation or an appearance of a thing whose nature is unknown. 

We are immediately presented in sensation with ‘odors, colours, sapors, figures, &c.’, but when we think of them we ‘at the same time conceive, that besides these [things] there must be others that have them, in which [they] are’. 

The things that are had, we call, each, an accident; the things that have them, each, a substance: ‘but what those things, which we do denominate Substances, Are, in themselves, stripped of all their Accidents, is no wise known.'

'All we know of any substance is, that it is the 'subject' of such and such Accidents; or that it is Qualified so or so; and hath these, and the other Qualities.'

It is a mistake, Burthogge argues, and specifically a mistake of Spinoza’s, to suppose that self-subsistence is the fundamental or defining metaphysical property of every substance. 

The ‘first reflection’ of the understanding that gives us the idea of a 'subject,' or a 'substances’ is that the apparently external object of sense (now thought of as qualities or accidents) requires support. 

The idea of self-subsistence, Burthogge asserts, is constructed simply to avoid an infinite regress, the idea of a subject which is not itself in a subject. 

It is a notion that tells us nothing about ultimate subjects, Burthogge argues, echoing Locke on our idea of a substance: 

We have no Ideas of any substances, but such as are Notional and Relative. 

For what Idea have we of 'earth,' but that it is something material, that it is fixed and tasteless? 

What of 'salt'? but that of something sapid, and easily soluble in water? 

And what idea have we of 'water'? but that it is something material, moist, and fluid in such a degree, and the like. 

Burthogge accordingly rejects the Cartesian view that the idea of extension constitutes ‘a Real, a Positive Idea of Substance’, one reason being that ‘I can no more conceive any Real Extension, than I can any Motion, but as a thing that belongs to another’. 

Such borrowings or echoes suggest that Burthogge sees Locke as saying what he himself had been trying to say about substance and accident. 

That might be taken as evidence that Burthogge’s epistemology, at least in intention, falls short of idealism, aiming at nothing more radical than the kind of general epistemic humility about the natural world that is espoused by Locke. 

Some of Burthogge’s comments in expounding the Porphyrian schema just discussed might suggest the same. 

In particular, the class of real somethings, i.e. mind-independent things in themselves, is not, as one might expect, left without example.

Yet what example could a self-respecting idealist give of a thing in itself? 

We are told that ‘such a [real] thing is matter, and every Affection, and every System of matter; and such a thing also is Mind’. '

This might seem to be a sort of arm-waving concession that the reality that gives rise to sensory appearances is no doubt something like what corpuscularian dualism claims it is.

Even though, as soon as we try to say or think anything specific about it, the very mode of conceiving of reality that we necessarily employ ensures that we remain within the realm of ‘cogitables’. 

Some of the notorious ‘realist’ passages in Hume look like similar arm-waving towards an unknowable natural material world.

Burthogge’s own pan-psychist speculation is frankly and firmly presented as an application of what he calls the ‘Refracted, Inadequate, Real-Notional way of conceiving’. 

It is not presented as insight into things as they are in themselves. 

It is simply the most coherent story we can tell. 

A similar interpretation is possible of Burthogge’s treatment of space and time: namely, that they are independent realities, but realities of which we can have only a coarse and distorted knowledge. 

In "Organum" Burthogge enjoins us not to analyse our notions too closely, attempting to know them in their realities, in which [we] cannot; as in Quantity the common Notion of it, how evident is it! 

‘Tis evident to all men, and none but knows what is meant by it; and he that looks on Quantity but so, observes a due distance; but whosoever looks nearer . . . is confounded with the composition of the Continuum (and well he may that takes a Phaenomenon, a Spectrum, an Appearance for a Reality). 

To echo Bradley!

This could be taken to go all the way with Lord Brooke and Kant on the unreality of space. 

Time and place are specifically included in a main list of intentional entities in "An Essay upon Reason."

On the other hand, Locke too argues that difficulties over infinite divisibility are a mark of our lack of a clear idea of extension, and Locke does not draw the conclusion that nothing is extended.

It is perfectly possible and, I suspect, right to take Burthogge to mean that space and time have to be conceptualized, made into notional entities, so to speak, in order for us to think and reason about them, and measure them determinately. 

The problems of infinite divisibility reflect our conceptualization, not the pure, unknowable nature of real quantity. 

It is surely true that Locke, like other ‘New Philosophers’, shared Burthogge’s view that the substance–accident relation has no existence in independent reality. 

And both held that our conceiving of reality in terms of the substance–accident relation reflects our limited epistemic access to reality. 

Yet there seems to be an important difference.

In "Organum," Burthogge suggests that if we try to think of the world in purely mechanical terms, we simply end up with ‘an Empty, Dry, and Barren Notion of the World’

Locke, Essay, ii. xxiii. 31. 

There is nothing in Locke’s theory of thought or of a ‘mental proposition’ that absolutely requires that some of our ideas contain the idea of an unknown subject or substance. 

A propositional thought is simply the perception or presumption of a relation between ideas. 

For Locke, I take it, the substance–accident relation that is embodied in our ideas of substances as things which have qualities reflects our ignorance of what those things are in themselves. 

But this does not mean that our ignorance is in principle irremediable, an inevitable consequence of the inevitably propositional form of thought. 

Burthogge, on the other hand, seems to be arguing both that the subject–predicate form arises as a result of the nature of sensation, which ‘occasions’ the notion of there being something more to things than their observable qualities, and that all judgements are necessarily of subject–predicate logical form and therefore, distortingly, bring the world as we conceive of it under that form. 

This combination may look problematic, but it raises interesting questions about the role of material or ‘substantial’ objects as the fundamental subjects of predication in expression. 

The present point, however, is that Burthogge at least wants to have proved that our ignorance of things in themselves is in principle irremediable, a consequence of the very nature of ‘cogitation at large’. 

That difference from Locke, I would suggest, tips his cognitive humility over into 'idealism.'

Whatever the differences between them, both Locke and Burthogge face a cogent line of objection. 

Both can be taken to hold that sense perception gives us only what have to be conceived of as accidents belonging to an unknown je ne sais quoi substance or subject. 

In other words, a substantial thing or a body is not perceived as such, but only this quality or that quality.

Yet Locke talks of ‘sensitive knowledge’ of the ‘co-existence’ of different qualities in the same substance, and both Locke and Burthogge include spatial properties such as shape among the qualities perceived. 

What is it to perceive the coexistence of qualities in a physical thing, if not to perceive a body as variously qualitied, and how could we do that, or perceive a body’s spatial properties in the way we do, without the body being perceived as a body? 

How is it, too, that a sensation presents colours and other qualities, as Burthogge puts it, as ‘external’ and ‘in things themselves’, unless we perceive the things as existing in space, and indeed as affecting us visually? 

One way the argument could go here, of course, is further in the direction of Kant and, indeed, many present-day conceptualists. 

I would myself prefer to move in a quite different and realist direction by stepping right out of the idealist web in which Burthogge and those conceptualists have enmeshed themselves, while acknowledging the questions that Burthogge’s empiricist idealism raises as to the relation between a sensory content and logical form (Cf. Peacocke, "Sense and content.")

My proposal is that the primitive objects of sense are not qualia, whether experienced as external or as internal, but bodies or matter disposed in space. 

The fundamental debt that logical form owes to the way we perceive the world consists, roughly speaking, in the fact that the senses pick out physical structure, distinct elements of which serve as potential objects of reference. 

Expression plays no role in the individuation of some such object. 

In particular, a discrete, edged body is the naturally, physically unitary individual that is pre-conceptually picked out by Burthogge in sense experience itself, the sensorily given subjects of primitive propositional thought and utterance. 

An 'accident' is first ascribed to them — that is to say, a predicate is applied to them — according to the various ways they strike us, salient points of resemblance and differences between them. 

The possibility of reference to an ‘accident’ itself is (to simplify somewhat) a function of the 'nominalization' (or category shift, or subjectification) of a predicate. 

An event, or a relation, or any other such individual is similarly sliced out by ways of talking, (as Grice puts it in his description of the metaphysical construction routine he calls a 'category shift), by a linguistic category.

A speculative explanatory theory gives us further objects of reference (a 'proton,' a 'neutrino,' and the like), and here, indeed, we must aim towards universality and coherence, while accounting for the experienced phenomena. 

As I have said, this approach, unlike the others, involves a clear step out of the idealism, or conceptualism, of such as Burthogge. 

For it holds that the senses give us access to the physical structure of reality, to physical structure in the most literal sense. 

It must also insist on a firm, but not necessarily sharp, boundary between 'observation' and 'theory,' as Ramsey, whom Grice cites, denies. 

However that may be, the historical lesson that I have tried to draw from the consideration of Burthogge’s philosophy is to the effect that the source of modern idealism cannot be identified with one decisive factor, such as (as some have argued) the epistemological problems raised by extreme scepticism of the senses (cf. Grice, "Some remarks about the senses," in Butler, "Anaytic Philosophy," Blackwell). 

Platonic monism, as we have seen, is an important factor. 

Error theory, from Bacon to Malebranche, is also important. 

The question of scientific method, and of the possibility of scientific knowledge, is important. 

Hermeneutics and toleration theory are important. 

And, as Gabriel Nuchelmans argues so effectively, the theory of logical form is crucially important. 

When all this is taken into account, it becomes apparent that what is centrally characteristic of the idealist tradition is radical conceptualism, rather than the kind of anti-materialism or phenomenalism propounded by Bishop Berkeley.