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,' and indeed 'Witters,' as compared to Locke, a major, and indeed, Kantotle, the majorest --, a contemporary of Locke (from whom Grice borrowed, if never returned, 'the way of words') 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, for example, quite unlike Bishop Berkeley’s, although, as some of those who discuss Burthoggius point out, there are some remarkable affinities with a 'critical' idealist such as Kant! (Burthoggius also wrote a treatise on reason).
Yet, in some ways, Burthoggius may also be more like empiricist and fellow Englishman Locke than like rationalist Kant.
And in one or two deep ways he 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 interest in Burthoggius is because of his relationship to Locke -- Grice was not a Locke scholar (his tutee Strawson was), but 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.
Burthogge (or Burthoggius) felt 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.
This paper is based on a paper, inspired by M. R. A., delivered as a lecture in memory of Gabriel Nuchelmans, one of the most distinguished historians 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 the philosophy of mind, and to ontology, as well as to philosophical logic.
Nuchelmans's work covers more than two millennia of theory in extraordinary detail, and he wrote as no mere doxographer.
Nuchelmans always sought to get to the philosophical heart of things, and to reveal the patterns within and between philosophical theories.
We are seldom left wondering why any particular recorded view was 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 went to Oxford (oddly, Grice, though a Midlander, went to Oxford via Clifton, West Country).
But Burthoggius, unlike Grice, went to the prestigious All Souls. Grice, as a Midlands scholarship boy, went to Corpus -- even, as he later complained -- all the 'hot things' were going on at All Souls -- notably Austin's Thursday evening playgroup 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 villa near Totnes (Burthoggius's sister was the lady of the manor) in his native Devonshire.
At Totnes he married and took a prominent part in local politics at a time when England's politics was largely C. of E. politics.
He is buried at St. Mary's, Totnes.
Like Locke’s (and unlike Grice's) Burthoggius's epistemology grows out of his politico-religious concerns and scientific interests.
Like Locke, Burthoggius dislikes Quakers and attacks dogmatism and ‘enthusiasm’ in both religion and philosophy.
(Unlike Grice, who loved to defend the under-dogma).
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) 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 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 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, for, 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 had been extruded from their livings by the Act of Uniformity.
This does not mean that Burthogge regards himself as anything but a proud member of the C. of E.!
But when Burthoggius writes in the preliminaries of "Organum Vetus et Novum,"
‘A persecuting furious Spirit
is none of Christ’s; [but] Antichrist’s’,
he is probably having mind, 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, see Mark Goldie, ‘John Locke’s circle and James II’, 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 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.
The immediate purpose of "Organum," however, is to answer critics of Burthogge’s essays in biblical hermeneutics and revealed theology.
These publications are on divine justice, purportedly refuting atheist 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.
"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 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 the senses and imagination, or to the intellect.
As such, any ens cogitationis owes as much to the faculties through which it is apprehended as to the reality that gives rise to it, and of which it is an appearance.
The immediate or proper objects of sense is a 'sentiment,' or sensation, caused by an 'impression' of a 'thing' "without upon the sensories," e. g.: a colour, a sound, a taste, and the like, as Burthoggius perceives each.
The sensation is perceived as existing in the external object, or material thing, although whoever thinks clearly about it 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 certain ways, as a substance, an accident, a power, 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, language: notably, by the general notion or category (although ‘category’ is not really a word used by Burthogge) under which the object is distinguished or characterized:
Faculties and Powers,
Good,
Evil,
Virtue,
Vice,
Verity,
Falsity,
Relations,
Order,
Similitude,
Whole,
Part,
Cause,
Effect, &c. are Notions;
as
Whiteness,
Blackness,
Bitterness,
Sweetness, &c.
are Sentiments:
and the former own no other kind of Existence than the latter, namely an Objective (one)."
‘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 a way of conceiving of a thing.
The important lesson is that we must not ascribe an independent reality to a thing as we conceive of it, to intentional or, as Burthogge is fond of calling it, a ‘cogitable’ being.
"He that looks for Notions in Things,
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 is really the structure of our own thought reflected in, or projected on to, the reality that appears to us.
Kant’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 things as they are Things, but as they are Objects.'
The grounding of a notion on a reality is always via the process of sensation, in which, Burthogge holds, he is aware of a sensation being caused in us by an 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
Burthogge has an idiosyncratic liking for bracketing superfluous words.
notions’ or a ‘notion concerning a notion’ -- "meta-notion," as Grice would call it -- and it may include a categorial concept.
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 of the corresponding term is less immediately evident, so that there is more danger of confusion in abstract thought that employs such a meta-notion than in 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.
At least one Cartesian, Christopher Wittich, was criticizing Spinoza for confusedly making a ‘second notion’ the starting-point of the argument of Ethics despite the fact that such a term as ‘substance’ has a clear and un-arbitrary meaning only as a way of characterizing a formal property shared by the independently identifiable beings, body, 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 essences.
Distinct notions can be achieved by definition, but definition simply gives words fixed senses.
The only definition that can be given of a thing is a description of it 'according to the impressions it makes upon our Faculties, and Conceptions it occasions in them.'
There is thus no possibility of a ‘real’ definition. Cf. Robinson on "Definition," cited by Grice in "Actions and Events."
As Burthogge puts it, ‘An essential definition is non-sense’.
Every genuine definition is merely nominal, and the rest is description.
All this leads up to the theory of judgement, truth, and method.
Judgement has two stages: first, comparing and considering, or reasoning, 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.'
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 his discussion that, since a notion cannot be compared with bare reality, but only with one another
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.
the conception of truth as correspondence with reality, if unexceptionable, is irrelevant to the question of what is shown when ‘truth’ is shown.
So too the scholastic notion of truth as the conformity things have to their archetypes 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 people cheerfully assent to falsehoods.
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 propositions supposed innate, their evident truth, that we assent to them.
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 ‘logical truth’.
This he explains as the ‘objective Harmony’, consistency and coherence ‘of things each with other, in the Frame and Scheme of them in our Mindes’.
That is to say, rather like Donald Davidson, he offers us a coherence 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.
Since no relation that propositions bear to things in themselves 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.
The arguments of the philosophical sceptic supply no reason at all to doubt, even about contingent matters of fact.
Burthogge sees no such problem as Descartes sees with respect to the stability of knowledge.
In effect, he 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 certainty.
He simply dismisses Descartes’s ‘metaphysical’ doubt 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 things in themselves constitute 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’ as we can.
That way we maximize the probability that our notions and beliefs correspond 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 revealed truths are analogies that have spiritual and moral, rather than speculative, meaning.
We cannot expect to understand them individually, or to pick and choose from what are all God’s words, but we should interpret them 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 sentiments that slot easily into the tradition of probabilist pleas for toleration, from Chillingworth to Locke:
'Men are reasonable Creatures, and therefore their 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, 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 formulated his theory, and the direction in which he developed it in his other main philosophical essay, "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
**
He was a Puritan and advocate of toleration, Or other Platonist theory, if we read Geulincx and/or Spinoza as Platonists. possibly an associate of his contemporary Benjamin Whichcote, the guru of Cambridge Platonism.
In 1640 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 it selfe under one, sometimes under another, whereas it is but one Being’.
The diversity lies, not in reality, but in our notions.
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 will lead to confusion, for example if you distinguish substance from accident, or, when ‘you see some things precede others, 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 causes and effects, we discover only our ignorance.
Brooke seems to be positively against the empirical investigation of nature and explanatory hypotheses.
He 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 ‘soare and raise it selfe up to Universall 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. . . .
All particular Sciences 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 work, 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 Soule, Which is One in its Essence, Faculties, Acts; One with TRUTH. Quotations are from pp. 104 and 132.
I would prefer not to call it idealism, if only because Brook 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, he specifically opposes Platonist doctrine.
For example, he expressly rejects the view, held by Brook and other Platonists, that the proper object of intellect is truth, holding instead that it is meaning (Organum, pp. 11 f.).
Brooke, like Spinoza after him, has to deal with falsity in terms of confused perception, whereas Burthogge has no need for such a sidelong 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, he tells us, we would have no sense experience, and without sense experience, we would have no notions at all (Essay, p. 57).
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’ (Organum).
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’.16 Nor does it mean that the object of sensory conception, 13 Burthogge, Organum, p. 110:
‘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.’ 16 Burthogge, p. 61 f.:
‘[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, and attention, he explains, is the application of the mind to ‘objects’—that is to say, to things as experienced, to ‘ideas’ taken objectively.
Burthogge puts it succinctly: ‘Without Attention, no Conception, and without Conception, no Consciousness.’
‘Objects’, moreover, are 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 presentday analytic philosophers who call sense experience ‘transparent’ in that, roughly speaking, to describe the experience just is to describe its external objects as they appear to be.
But whereas some of these philosophers would argue that we can therefore exclude minddependent or subjective qualitative states from the analysis of perception, Burthogge adopts the closely related, but obverse conclusion that sensible things, in so far as they are ‘objects’, are minddependent.
At the same time, sensible objects necessarily appear to us as external, and their 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. (Essay).
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 notions are themselves 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, ‘objects’ appear external because their ‘grounds’ in reality are external, and that appearance, in normal circumstances, is why we can be sure that their grounds are external.
Burthogge holds that, unless objects appeared to us as external, conscious experience and thought of objects, 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 objects other than itself.
But if sensation itself, the bare operation of the senses, can assure us of the existence and character of ‘objects’, and if we can also be assured that such objects correspond to, or are appearances 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 sense perception.
The relevant chapters, on the role of language 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 here contains echoes of Hobbes, and was 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 on the way, 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 it.
'There is nothing of Propositions, Major, Minor, or Conclusion, in the case.'
Burthogge does not suppose, as a Cartesian might suppose, that language is made possible by a prior human capacity to form purely intellectual conceptions.
Burthogge holds that a purely intellectual conception, and indeed propositional thoughts of any kind, is made possible by language. (Cfr. Peacocke, "Thought and language.")
In a key passage, Burthogge explains how the understanding can think of such things as substance, mind, matter, or colour-in-general without (per impossibile) employing images of them:
The only Images it has of these, and of all things else that are purely intelligible and mental, are the Words that signify them:
Ay, the very Ideas the Understanding hath of things, are nothing but its definitive conceptions of them; and definitions as properly they are of Words . . . so they are made by words.
To such a degree, in this respect, are words of use to the understanding, which cannot work without them; a thing so certain, that even the denomination it self of ‘understanding’, at least in part, arises from hence; for the Mind is called (the) Understanding, because it has a power of seeing things under Words that Stand for them; as well as because it has one of perceiving Substances under Accidents.
I will return to this second alleged power of the understanding in a minute.
With respect to the first, the capacity to employ a word or an expression in order to think without images 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 pluralitie (Quine's twelve apostles to use his example in "Methods of Logic") and to do so beyond the possible usefulness of any such images.
The fundamental 'semantic' connection is, for Burthogge, between a word or 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 word or expression, or ‘under’ a word or an expression, as he puts it.
There are different modi concipiendi, ways of conceiving of things, ‘notions’ in a narrow or technical sense.
These constitute the categories of objects of thought, which Burthogge sets out in a table, a modified Porphyrian tree (ibid. p. 78). 19
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).
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, &.
substance accident
‘Aliquid’ seems to be regarded as a wholly (even categorically) indeterminate, wholly comprehensive generic name. Real ‘somethings’ are things in themselves.
Cogitables are ‘objects’, real or chimerical, and all cogitables fall 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, Burthogge says, we ordinarily realize that there is nothing in the thing corresponding to the term under which we consider it.
By contrast, however, people tend to be deluded into supposing that the real, independent world is actually composed of substances and accidents, 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 virtue and vice as real things in a man.
The pervasiveness of the substance–accident relation in our conceptions of things Burthogge seems here to ascribe to linguistic 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 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’ (ibid. pp. 64 f.).20 20
For a slightly less paradoxical presentation of this last view, cf. p. 92:
‘Thus the Notion of Substance is a Reality of Appearance only, but the things we apply it to, are Realities of Existence.’
Thoughts like some of these were fairly commonplace in the philosophy of logic.
The popular Logic of the Polish 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 think, speak, and reason about things.
Nuchelmans, however, draws an illuminating and persuasive connection with certain arguments of Geulincx. Geulincx was lecturing in Leiden at the time Burthogge was there.
He published his "Logic" the year in which Burthogge took his doctoral degree.
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 forms of thought and speech.'
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.
Things themselves are not changed by our thought, but, to quote Nuchelmans’s summary again, ‘we can have knowledge of these things only by assimilating and adapting them to the forms of our understanding and the linguistic categories corresponding to these forms’.
All this gives Geulincx a stick with which to beat the Aristotelians.
He represents them as continually falling into the trap of projecting on to ‘the things themselves those features which they have 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 things.
This general type of explanation of the errors of the Aristotelians, that they mistake logical entities for real ones, was 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 (1618).
Gabriel Nuchelmans, Concept and Proposition from Descartes to Kant, ch. vi, esp. pp. 117–19.
In my comments on Geulincx I am indebted to the whole of this chapter. 23 Gabriel Nuchelmans, Concept and Proposition from Descartes to Hume, p. 116. 24 Ibid. p. 117. 25 Done in Metaphysica ad mentem Peripateticam; see Nuchelmans, Concept and 26 Proposition, pp. 114–16. Nuchelmans, Concept and Proposition, pp. 115–16. 22 ‘real accidents’ 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 was Geulincx who supplied Burthogge with much of the material for his argument.
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 language.
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’ (Essay, p. 58). In its general relation to previous error theory, Burthogge’s epistemology resembles Hume’s.
But Hume draws on previous accounts of how an 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.
He 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.
Language plays an essential role for Hume only in the explanation of a priori thought and knowledge, and even there it does so thanks to a mysteriously effective association of images with words, themselves sensory images (i.e. impressions or ideas).
Rather like Hume and, more significantly, Hobbes, Burthogge takes it that words are images that have meaning through their association with other images or, rather, their association with things through images caused by those things.
But in Burthogge’s story it is the logical forms of judgement, the logical roles of words in propositional thought, that above all systematically shape, and thereby ineluctably distort, our apprehension of the world.
Sense gives us external qualia, which reason interprets as predicable of substances or subjects.
Not much is said directly about the substance–accident relation in Organum, apart from identifying it as a notion.
But there is in that book a somewhat mysterious line of thought relevant to the topic of predication. Burthogge asserts, in effect several times, that for us ‘things are nothing but as they stand in our Analogie’.
As any thoughts of God must employ analogy if they are to go beyond the barren thought of an unknown ‘Infinite Excellency’, so significant thoughts about anything at all must employ analogy.
In making this claim, Burthogge might mean that all predication is a kind of comparison between the things 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, he is deploying a nominalist point against taking attributes as real beings. 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 the natural things we perceive cannot be known as they are in themselves because they can only be known through the application of predicates marking, as it were, mediated glimpses of reality.
By the time of the Essay on Reason Burthogge had read Locke’s Essay, and it shows.
The subject–predicate form of judgement now comes centre-stage as the first notion occasioned by sensation.
It owes its existence to an intuition we have that the qualitative sensory data perceived as external require explanation as manifestations or appearances of things 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 accidents, the things that have them, substances: ‘but what those things, which we do denominate Substances, Are, in themselves, stript 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 substances.
The ‘first reflection’ of the understanding that gives us the idea of ‘subjects, or substances’ is that the apparently external objects of sense (now thought of as qualities or accidents) require support.
The idea of self-subsistence, he 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 ideas of substances:
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 saw 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 he 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).
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 29 World’ (p. 32). Locke, Essay, ii. xxiii. 31.
There is nothing in Locke’s theory of thought or of ‘mental propositions’ that absolutely requires that some of our ideas contain the idea of an unknown subject or substance.
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 natural language.
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 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.
Language 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 ‘accidents’ themselves 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.
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