signify by their “connexion,” it sounds as though Hobbes is suggesting a distinctly unattractive “encoding” theory of meaning and “decoding” theory of communication – as if by a kind of mental transduction.
The purpose of this chapter is twofold. First, to provide a general overview of Hobbes’s views on language; second, to argue that Hobbes holds an inchoate, but recognizable, version of an inferential role or functional role semantics. On Hobbes’s theory of language use and linguistic meaning, the meaning of an expression is the functional role of that expression in cognition. Linguistic competency – manifested in the capacity to understand names in speech as signs of thought – is a matter of knowing how to deploy names to recall thoughts, make judgments, and syllogistic inferences.
In the first section, I provide a broad overview of Hobbes’s views on the mind’s natural cognitive powers. In that section, I analyze signification and signs, arguing that signification is a causal relation and not a semantic one, so that the signification of a linguistic expression is not that expression’s linguistic meaning. In the third and fourth sections, I describe Hobbes’s account of the use of names in cognition – names are marks, applied to objects, for the sake of recalling thoughts of those objects. I argue that this use of names is the fundamental one; the communicative use of names in speech to signify thoughts is derivative of this latter, principal use. Finally, I turn back to Hobbes’s account of linguistic understanding. I argue that the understanding of linguistic expressions characteristic of mature, fully language-competent humans is determined by the ability of language-competent humans to deploy names in reasoning. To understand words in speech – to take them as signs of thought – presupposes a grasp of linguistic meaning and this is a matter of knowing how to reason and calculate with names: “For words are wise mens counters, who do but reckon by them” (Hobbes 2012, 58; 1651, 15).
5.1 Cognition and the Signification of Signs
According to Hobbes, the mind – unconditioned by the use of language – is, to adopt an expression from Sellars, a “Humean representation system” (Sellars 1981). “Singly,” Hobbes writes, conceptions, ideas, or thoughts – terms he uses interchangeably – “are every one a Representation or Appearance, of some quality, or other Accident of a body without us” (2012, 22; 1651, 3) and the “Originall of them all, is that which we call Sense” (2012, 22; 1651, 3). Sensory experiences are states of an animal’s brain – motion caused by the activity of physical bodies in that animal’s environment (Hobbes 2012, 22–4; 1651, 3–4; EW I. 391–4; EW IV.2–9; see also Barnouw 1980). These informational states are retained in the brain after sensory stimulation has ceased. Over time they “decay,” becoming informationally impoverished. Hobbes compares the effect of time on ideas to the effect of distance on a visual image: coarse-grained information can be recovered, but the “details” are lost (EW IV.12–13; 2012, 28; 1651, 5). Hence, Hobbes defines “imagination” as “decaying sense” (think “force and vivacity”). Further, since all conceptions are “totally, or by parts … begotten upon the organs of Sense” (2012, 22; 1651, 3) he holds that conceptions are also memories, in the sense that they are derived from sensory stimulation (2012, 28; 1651, 5; see also EW I.396–7).
Conceptions are not concepts, for they are mental particulars, representing the accidents and qualities of the individual bodies that caused them in sensory experience (see e.g., EW V.197). However, in virtue of the role played by conceptions in their overall behavioral and psychological economy, animals are capable of possessing some concepts. Hence, while Hobbes holds that organisms lacking linguistic competency are not capable of the full range of cognitive powers enjoyed by adults humans – they are unable to form concepts, such as justice or number, the possession of which constitutively depends on language mastery – non-human animals and humans without linguistic competency (such as very young children) do have the ability to think and deliberate, contrary to that which is sometimes asserted (Hull 2006, 2013; Pettit 2008).1 Hobbes holds that a wide variety of cognitive activity is explicable in terms of transitions between conceptions, which Hobbes calls “the discourse of the mind” (EW I.399) and “the Tryane of thought” (2012, 38; 1651, 8). Hobbes allows that an animal can abstract features of a conception by a Berkeleyan mechanism of selective attention (e.g., EW I.34 and EW I.394; cf. Berkeley 2008, 72).2 In its most basic form, thinking is a matter of attending to and comparing features of “the phantasms that pass” through the imagination; an animal is thinking when it “taketh notice of their likeness or unlikeness to one another” (EW I.399). The connections between the ideas in the train of thought – their “consequence,” one to another – are determined by their association in sensory experience (EW IV.2; 2012, 38; 1651, 8). Hence, the natural cognitive powers are sufficient to enable an animal to form concepts, in the sense that they can develop an ability to make discriminations that regulate expectations and behavior.
For example, Archibald J. Dog’s cognitive system does not contain any general representations of red or tomato, but he is capable of attending to the color of a tomato, he can distinguish between red and green tomatoes and, with repeated experience, he forms a preference for the red tomatoes, and will pluck them from the vine when he finds them. Archie learns to associate visual sensations of red tomatoes and gustatory sensations of ripe tomatoes. This association, in the form of a train of thought, guides his behavior and, from the sight of the red color, he expects a tasty ripeness in a tomato, as he “compareth the phantasms that pass” (EW I.399). He comes to learn that tomatoes similar to one another in respect of their redness are likely to be similar to one another in respect of ripeness. Hobbes calls Archie’s ability to make perceptual discriminations and to project regularities on the basis of associative learning natural “prudence” – an ability to make conjectural inferences on the basis of signs “taken by experience” (EW IV.17; 2012, 44; 1651, 10).
Regularly connected events are signs of one another, “when the like Consequences have been observed before” (2012, 44; 1651, 10). Only those who have learned from experience to associate “antecedents” with their regular “consequents” are “trained to see” them as signs, indicating what they signify (Hobbes 1976, 371). The repeated experience of the sign followed by its significate conditions an organism, forming in it a disposition to expect the significate of the sign. Signification, then, is a species of causal relation – the signification of signs is constituted by the functional role played by signs in the cognition and behavior of animals.
This account of signification applies equally well to conventional signs. Hobbes only ever provides one definition of “sign” – the definition (in its different expressions) quoted above. A sign makes an interpreting animal think about its significate, in the sense that the sign determines a train of thought that terminates in an idea and expectation of the significate. There is no alternative definition for the signification of specifically artificial signs and, so, we are invited to conclude that the signification of artificial signs is a causal relation after the manner of natural signification – a conventional sign makes you think about the thing it signifies, when you have had the appropriate conditioning (indeed, this is exactly what the definition of “understanding” would indicate, as we will see). This is supported by the fact that immediately after the definition of “sign” in De corpore, Hobbes provides examples of both natural and artificial signs. He gives the example of dark clouds signifying rain (as he usually does), but then he comments:
And of signs, some are natural …, others are arbitrary, namely, those we make choice of at our own pleasure, as a bush hung up, signifies that wine is to be sold there; a stone set in the ground signifies the bound of a field; and words so and so connected, signify the cogitations and motions of our minds.
(EW I.15)
Given that the definition of “sign” supplied in that paragraph is the one according to which a sign is that which is commonly observed and remembered to be the antecedent of the significate, such that the observation of the sign provokes thoughts of the significate, the signification of conventional signs must also be a relationship of this kind. The difference between natural signs and conventional signs is that the regularity grounding the associative connection between