let us return to Hobbes’s account of understanding linguistic signs. Language-competent humans understand “words as words” because they know how to use names in sentences to register thoughts. In the first part of Elements of Law, there is another brief comment on the distinction between human and non-human animal understanding of language that helps illuminate Hobbes’s views on linguistic meaning. Knowledge necessarily involves both truth and evidence, which Hobbes defines as “the concomitance of a man’s conception with the words that signify such conception in the act of ratiocination” (EW IV. 28). Hence, someone who merely speaks the words of the propositions composing a valid syllogism – perhaps by rote, “as it is with beggars, when they say their paternoster” (EW IV.25) – will “make always true conclusions” so long as he begins with true propositions, but he will not have knowledge of the conclusion of his syllogism, as “his conclusions [are not] evident to him, for want of the concomitance of conception with his words” (EW IV.28). Evidence, in Hobbes’s sense, is necessary for the possession of knowledge for,
[I]f the words alone were sufficient, a parrot might be taught as well to know truth, as to speak it. Evidence is to truth, as the sap to the tree, which, so far as it creepeth along with the body and branches, keepeth them alive; where it forsaketh them, they die: for this evidence, which is meaning with our words, is the life of truth.
(EW IV.28; emphasis added in second set of italics)
As I understand Hobbes’s point, although there would be formal truth-conditions for a sentence uttered by a parrot, the parrot would not be able recognize the truth-conditions of what he utters; hence, he would not understand the meaning of what he says. To understand the meaning of a sentence is to grasp the conditions under which it would be true. To know the truth-conditions of a sentence he utters, the parrot would need to know the empirical conditions for which the impositions of the component names were fixed – as Hobbes puts it in De cive, “to know a truth is the same as to remember that it was made by ourselves by the very use of names” (Hobbes 1991, 374; OL II.419).8 Hence, although Hobbes distinguishes the truth-conditions of a sentence from its verification conditions, the latter constitutes “meaning with our words” and grasping meaning is matter of knowing the application conditions of the names out of which a sentence is composed.9
Sentences are signs of thought because they express propositional judgments. “Is” is a sign of judgment, used to “shew the Consequence, or Repugnance of one name to another; as when one saith, A Man is a Body, hee intendeth that the name of Body is necessarily consequent to the name of Man; as being but severall names of the same thing, Man” (2012, 1078; 1651, 372; also, 2012, 1080; 1651, 372). By displaying how she uses names in the syntax of her affirmation, a speaker who asserts “S is P” conveys her judgment that S is P by expressing her assent to the linguistic rule that “If x is ‘S’, then x is ‘P’.” A language-competent human interprets another person’s utterance as a sign of thought “by the sequel and contexture of names” into sentences. In other words, the syntax of a sentence carries significance for humans who understand speech, but carries no special significance for those non-human animals who do not. The placement and “contexture” of the word “biscuit” in the sentence, “These biscuits are dry and flavorless,” and the sentence, “Don’t eat the dog’s biscuits,” is of no consequence to Archibald. To him an utterance of “biscuit,” whatever the sentential context, is a sign that someone will get up and give him a treat – everything else is just another noise humans make. But to members of the English linguistic community, it is easy to see that these sentences can be used to express different things and perform different speech acts. There is, of course, a sense in which Archie understands the linguistic meaning of “biscuit,” since, when he hears that word, he expects to be fed a biscuit and not to be given a bath; however, Archie clearly cannot see that the name has a semantic value, which, in part because of its placement within a sentence, it contributes to the meaning of the sentence as a whole. That contribution has to do with the use of “biscuit” as name, a placeholder in the sentence, standing for biscuits. Hence, the linguistic meaning of names – their use in individual cognition, to register thoughts – determines the signification of names in speech. An utterance of “biscuit” as a sign that the speaker thought of biscuits only when the hearer is in a position to interpret the sentence in which the name is deployed as a sign of thought.
Communication between members of a language community succeeds when, as Hobbes says, “the same marks or notes be common to many” (EW I.14).10 Given that each conception is a mental particular and, indeed, a discrete physical event, no two speakers can literally share the same conceptions. The sense in which speakers “share notes” in common must not be that the same names raise precisely the same conceptions in the minds of each member of the community, but rather that the names they use as marks play the same role in the cognitive activity of the speakers in the linguistic community. Sharing a common linguistic habit – using the same names as marks for the sake of thought – the speech of members of the community causes them to recall the thoughts for which the names are deployed as marks. The name “stone” in the sentence “no man is a stone,” signifies that the speaker conceived of a stone because that is function of the name “stone” in the cognitive activity of the members of English language community. The communication of the content of the propositional judgment that no man is a stone succeeds via the common recognition of the manner in which the names “man” and “stone” (and so on) are deployed in thought. This is a matter of knowing the rules of imposition demarcating the extensions of the names concatenated together into a sentence. Hobbes’s comparison between the use of “man” as a term with universal signification and a painter, asked to paint a picture of a man – any man – illustrates the point. Just as a painter who is asked to a paint a picture of “man in general,” paints some particular person they feel like painting, whom it is understood will stand as representative of all humankind for being relevantly similar to the rest, so the name “man” signifies “man in general” because, when it is used to express a judgment, “we limit [the extent of the name] not ourselves, but leave them to be applied by the hearer” (EW IV.22). Hobbes’s point is that two people who understand the English term “man” as a universal term recognize that it applies to John, Paul, Ringo, etc., and it does not matter which of the members of the extension an idea is raised, so long as the speaker and hearer raise ideas of members of the same set of objects meeting the same suite of conditions. Another way to put the point is that Hobbes can respond to Descartes’s (1984) objection that (monolingual) French and German speakers will not be able to grasp the same conceptual content when they judge, respectively, that “la neige est blanche” and “Schnee ist weiss” (AT VII:179/CSM II:126). Hobbes’s answer, if the foregoing interpretation is correct, would be that so long as “neige” and “Schnee,” “blanche” and “weiss,” play the same role in the cognitive activity of the French speaker and the German (viz. applied to snow, to recall thoughts of snow; applied to white things to recall that color), then these two words mean the same thing in their respective languages.11
5.5 Conclusion
I have argued that although Hobbes holds that the linguistic meaning of a name is determined by the role of that name in the cognitive activity of a language user. Names arranged in sentences are signs of thought because the syntax of the sentence expresses metalinguistic information concerning the role the names in the sentence play in the cognition of the speaker. A name so-disposed in an asserted sentence can be a sign only to an audience disposed to interpret speech as significative of thought. But to do this, they must possess prior know-how – the audience must know how to use names as cognitive tools for the sake of recording thoughts into judgments and syllogisms.
References
1 Abizadeh, Arash. 2015. “The Absence of Reference in Hobbes’ Philosophy of Language.” Philosophers’ Imprint 15: 1–17.
2 Abizadeh, Arash. 2017. “Hobbes on Mind: Practical Deliberation, Reasoning, and Language.”