signs, to see the sign as significant and to have the right disposition, you must be trained in the convention; that is, you must know how the sign is used.
This is also true of the signification of names in speech. One might think that although signification is a causal relation, nevertheless the linguistic meaning of a term is that which is signified – that of which the expression makes you think, qua sign. But this is not Hobbes’s position. Names in speech signify a speaker’s conceptions. As Hobbes puts it in De corpore:
But seeing names ordered in speech … are signs of our conceptions, it is manifest that they are not signs of the things themselves; for that the sound of this word stone should be the sign of a stone, cannot be understood in any sense but this, that he that hears it collects that he that pronounces it thinks of a stone.
(EW I.17)
Given Hobbes’s account of signification and given that names in speech are “a sign of what thought the speaker had, or had not before his mind,” he is exactly right that the only sense in which the word “stone” can be a sign of stones is that someone hearing the word uttered in a sentence “collects” that the speaker thought of a stone.3 If the only sense in which “stone” signifies anything is that it is a sign that the speaker thought about stones, then the signification of a linguistic expression cannot be the linguistic meaning of the expression.
Linguistic meaning determines, however, the signification of thoughts in speech. In addition to the definition of “understanding” cited in the introduction of this chapter, Hobbes also gives the following, general definition in Leviathan, in which he notes two different senses in which an animal can be said to understand speech or “other voluntary signs”:
The Imagination that is raysed in man (or any other creature indued with the faculty of imagining) by words, or other voluntary signes, is that we generally call Understanding; and is common to Man and Beast. For a dogge by custome will understand the call, or the rating of his Master; and so will many other Beasts. That Understanding which is peculiar to man, is the Understanding not onely his will; but his conceptions and thoughts, by the sequell and contexture of names of things into Affirmations, Negations, and other formes of Speech.
(2012, 36; 1651, 8)
Human and non-human animal understanding of speech are established by distinct routes. The non-human animals “can be taught to grasp what we wish and command in words, [but] they do not do so through words as words, but as signs only” (Hobbes 1991, 37; OL II.88, emphasis added). Though language-competent humans and non-human animals can both understand linguistic expressions as signs, human understanding is a manifestation of linguistic competency. Language-competent humans understand “words as words” – as symbols – whereas the non-human animals can only understand them as (natural) signs, “forced out” by fear, desire, joy, or other passions (Hobbes 1991, 37; OL II.88). It is in virtue of a prior mastery of linguistic expressions that language-competent humans are in a position to interpret human speech as significative of conceptions. But what is it to grasp “words as words” according to Hobbes?
5.2 The Uses of Names
In each of his major discussions concerning the function of language, Hobbes remarks that names are words that serve as marks, “imposed on” objects for the sake of recollecting thoughts or conceptions of those objects. Let us examine these, starting with Anti-White, where Hobbes writes that “a name or appellation is a human sound [vox]. Say a person has something in mind, of which he retains from mind-picture [imagio]. He applies to, or imposes on, the thing the human vocal sound as a “note” enabling him to conjure up a similar mind picture” (Hobbes 1976, 373–4). In the Elements of Law Hobbes writes:
In the number of these marks, are those human voices (which we call the names or appellations of things) sensible to the ear, by which we recall into our mind some conception of the things to which we give those names or appellations. As the appellation white bringeth to remembrance the quality of such objects as produce that colour or conception in us. A name or appellation … is the voice of a man arbitrary, imposed for a mark to bring to his mind some conception concerning the thing on which it is imposed.
(EW IV.20)
In Leviathan:
The generall use of Speech, is to transferre our Mentall Discourse, into Verbal; or the Trayne of our Thoughts, into a Trayne of Words; and that for two commodities; whereof the one is, the Registering of the Consequences of our Thoughts; which being apt to slip out of our memory, and put us to a new labour, may again be recalled, by such words as they were marked by. So that the first use of names, is to serve for Markes, or Notes of remembrance. Another is when many use the same words to signifie (by their connexion and order,) one to another, what they conceive, or think of each matter … for this use they are called Signes.
(Hobbes 2012, 50; 1651, 12–13)
And, finally, Hobbes writes in De corpore: “A NAME is a word [vox] taken at pleasure to serve for a mark, which may raise in our mind a thought we had before, and which, being pronounced to others, may be to them a sign of what the speaker had, or had not, before is mind” (EW I.16).
These definitions characterize names by their function. As Biletzki (1997) and Hungerland and Vick (1981) emphasize, Hobbes’s nominalism and materialism effectively preclude him from adopting any view about the metaphysics of meaning according to which there are entities answering to the “meanings” of sentences. Hence, although names in speech signify thoughts, thoughts must be taken as psychological episodes and not abstract objects (i.e., Russellian propositions or Fregean Sinne), since Hobbes denies such things exist. Furthermore, the signification of a name is not anything denoted by the name. Hobbes very clearly distinguishes that which a name signifies from that which a name denotes, or is “imposed” on (about which I shall say more below).4
These definitions confirm that the pragmatic “use” theory of meaning reading is the correct one. The essence of a name consists in the use to which that name is put. It is a mark, for the sake of recalling thoughts of the objects on which it is imposed; it is an interpersonal communicative sign, when “pronounced to others,” in the context of a sentence, to express thoughts. Although Hobbes has a lot to say about communicative speech acts and the non-cognitive, expressive uses of language (e.g., Hobbes 2012, 94; 1651, 29), and although these feature prominently in his political and ethical theory (Biletzki 1997; Holden 2016; Pettit 2008), it is clear from the foregoing definitions that the cognitive use – registering the consequences of thoughts in declarative sentences – is the primary one.
Both Leviathan and De corpore are straightforward regarding the relative priority of the two uses of names in speech. In Leviathan, the cognitive use is called, explicitly, the first use of names. In both Leviathan and De corpore, Hobbes gives brief arguments justifying the definition of names and both of these imply that the communicative function of names in overt speech as signs of thought derives from the use of names as notes for the sake of remembrance. In Leviathan, Hobbes argues that it is because the general use of speech is to “register thoughts” that the “first use of names” is to serve as notes of remembrance. What speech generally is useful for is registering thoughts; so, then, an individual name primarily is a token for thought. In De corpore, Hobbes argues that, since an individual person – working alone – can construct names for the things he observes and register his thoughts about them, a name is a mark for thought. But, given that he is a social being and dependent upon others for the preservation and enlargement of his knowledge, he must teach his marks to other people, making them into signs of his thought (EW I.14–15). Hence, although names are both marks for private cognition and also signs for communication, “they serve for marks before they be used as signs” (EW I.15) and cannot be signs “otherwise than by being disposed and ordered in speech” (EW I.15). “So that,” Hobbes says, “the nature of a name consists principally