Abstract
This paper examines the pressures leading two very different Early Modern philosophers, Descartes and Locke, to invoke two ways in which thought is directed at objects. According to both philosophers, I argue, the same idea can simultaneously count as “of” two different objects—in two different senses of the phrase ‘idea of’. One kind of intentional directedness is invoked in answering the question What is it to think that thus-and-so? The other kind is invoked in answering the question What accounts for the success of our proper methods of inquiry? For Descartes as well as Locke, the two kinds of “ofness” come apart as a result of strong rationalist commitments. However, I will suggest that even if we reject such commitments, we go wrong if we assume that a single kind of intentional directedness suffices to address both questions.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
I don’t mean to claim that these are the only contexts in which Descartes or Locke use what we might regard as notions of representation. For general discussion of representation in Descartes and Locke respectively, see Simmons (forthcoming) and Lennon (2007).
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
Mori (2012) offers biographical, textual and philosophical evidence that the objector, whose letter Descartes received from Mersenne, was Hobbes.
- 6.
Cf. Perler (1996, 13–14).
- 7.
It may be objected that in the same letter Descartes rejects a distinction between two kinds of ideas, those “expressed by terms” and those expressed “by propositions” (AT 3:396, CSMK 3:186). For my purposes, however, it won’t matter whether we talk about a thought that God is infinite or a thought of God as infinite, as long as this specification immediately determines a truth condition for a possible judgment. Cf. Perler (1996, 257–61) and Nuchelmans (1983, 42–4). For the dialectical context of Descartes’s rejection of the above distinction, see Mori (2012).
- 8.
Elsewhere, I have argued that this sense is essential to understanding one strand of Descartes’s epistemology: his view that we can delineate the natures of things by contemplation of what is contained in our clear and distinct ideas of them (Shapiro 2012, 396–8).
- 9.
Lenz (2010a, 254, my translation).
- 10.
Fodor (1998, 6).
- 11.
The extensive literature on Descartes and material falsity is examined in Shapiro (2012); see also De Rosa (2010) and Naaman-Zauderer (2010). My reading of Descartes’s reply to Arnauld is most influenced by Margaret Wilson, who proposes that Descartes is distinguishing between two “senses of … ‘idea of’,” namely a “presentational” and a “referential” sense (Wilson 1990, 69–70, 73–4). But neither of Wilson’s two senses lines up with either of the two senses I attribute to Descartes (see Shapiro 2012, 401).
- 12.
An exception is Wee (2006, 55–8).
- 13.
For criticism of common readings according to which Descartes agrees with Arnauld that the scenario is incoherent, and denies that it is what he had in mind in the Third Meditation, see Shapiro (2012, 391–3).
- 14.
- 15.
More precisely, I claim that Descartes uses the two locutions interchangeably when discussing the intentional directedness of ideas. I take no position on the contested ontology of objective being in Descartes: i.e. whether or not the act of the intellect that represents some object is really distinct from the object insofar as it is objectively in the intellect, what Descartes elsewhere call an idea “taken objectively” (AT 7:8, CSM 2:7). See e.g. Ayers (1998, 1067–8).
- 16.
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- 18.
For a recent discussion that includes a survey of the literature on Cartesian sensory ideas, see De Rosa (2010).
- 19.
Compare Descartes’s description of the hypothetical materially false idea: “the obscurity of the idea gives me occasion to judge that this idea of the sensation of cold represents some object called ‘cold’ which is located outside me” (AT 7:234–5, CSM 2:164). Though the idea is in fact representationally of a sensation, I may take it to be representationally of its propositional object, namely the quality I called ‘cold’. Even if this mistake doesn’t amount to an explicit judgment (one only a philosopher could make!), it can account for my false judgment about that quality.
- 20.
- 21.
- 22.
See Wee (2006, 56–7).
- 23.
- 24.
- 25.
In Shapiro (1999, 587–90), I proposed that Locke’s distinction between the nominal and real essences of substance kinds coincides with a distinction between kinds of content (cf. Prinz 2000). Here, I follow Shapiro (2010) in explaining that distinction in terms of propositional and representational intentionality.
- 26.
References in this format will be to Locke’s Essay (by book, chapter, section, and page number in Locke 1975).
- 27.
Though Locke insists that his usage of ‘species’ and ‘sort’ is a mere matter of Latin versus English (3.3.12:414, 3.5.9:434), ‘species’ typically expresses a contrast with ‘genus’ less often expressed by ‘sort’ (e.g. not at 3.3.15:417, 3.6.1:439). Locke’s English for ‘genus’ is ‘kind’ (2.32.6:386, 3.1.6:404), though this term too is often used without any intended contrast (2.32.24:393, 4.6.4:580). Here I will use ‘species’ as the Lockean term.
- 28.
Perler (1996, 261n) notes that Locke’s theory of mental proposition has no counterpart in Descartes. This difference needn’t prevent us from isolating a common notion of propositional ofness in both philosophers: see note 7 above.
- 29.
Ott (2012, 1087), stresses the connection between the truth of a Lockean mental proposition (the agreement of its component ideas) and what the ideas in the proposition are of: “whether ideas agree or disagree is a function of … what they are ideas of.” Though Ott’s discussion concerns simple ideas, his “of-ness” thus plays the role of what I am calling propositional ofness.
- 30.
- 31.
There is an explicit cross-reference from the opening sentence of 3.9.12:482 to the opening sentence of 2.31.6:378. In both places, Locke contrasts the inadequacy he has in mind with a second inadequacy: substance ideas also count as inadequate when (inappropriately) regarded as revealing the “real essences” of species.
- 32.
In several of these passages, Locke doesn’t expressly note that he is talking about species rather than individuals. Yet taken together, and in their contexts, they demand the former construal. In once instance, Locke clarifies his intention in the Essay’s fourth edition. Rather than speak of that person who “has the perfectest Idea of any particular Substance” he now speaks of that person who “has the perfectest Idea of any of the particular sorts of Substance” (2.23.7:299).
- 33.
In two striking passages (analyzed in Shapiro 1999, 561–4), Locke complains of how “hard it is” to specify the species of which IDEA1 and IDEA2 are imperfect ideas without “cross[ing his] purpose” by using the word ‘gold’ rather than just mentioning it (3.6.19:449, 3.6.43:465–6).
- 34.
In Shapiro (2010), I argue that the representational ofness of simple ideas diverges from their propositional ofness. For a similar view, see Ott (2012, 1089–93). Ott reserves the label “representation in the strict sense—the of-ness of an idea” for a notion that plays the propositional role (see note 29 above). He distinguishes this “of-ness” of ideas from their “role as marks or signs” that corresponds roughly to what I call Locke’s representational ofness. Since Ott and I recognize that Locke uses ‘represent’ in both ways (Shapiro 2010, 579n23), this difference is chiefly terminological. There remain two substantive differences. First, Ott’s Locke regards color-ideas, unlike shape-ideas, as “blank effects” lacking the “of-ness” that corresponds to my propositional ofness. On my reading, by contrast, color- and shape-ideas each possess both kinds of intentionality. Second, unlike Ott, I argue that Locke takes shape-ideas to be perfect “marks or signs” of powers to produce ideas (Shapiro 2010, 561). Locke doesn’t, implausibly, take these ideas to be perfect marks or signs of the very shapes they are propositionally of.
- 35.
This claim would require serious qualification to be defensible. However, here is all Locke need be committed to: the more we “perfect” a substance idea, the more we may expect that there will be reliable generalizations concerning “coexistence” of the features collected in the idea with additional ones, and this expectation is relevant to induction.
- 36.
- 37.
On Locke’s use of ‘property’ to mean proprium in the sense derived from Porphyry, see e.g. Ayers (1991, vol. 2, 21, 67–74) and Pasnau (2011, 658–60). Contrary to Pasnau, I am arguing that Locke’s embrace of natural kinds in the Essay does “depend on the notion of an explanatory essence” from which a species’ observable properties flow.
- 38.
Anstey (2011, ch. 11); cf. the section “Converging on a real essence” in Shapiro (1999, 576–82). Kornblith (1993, ch. 2) sketches a similar account of Locke’s implicit view of “chemical method,” but claims it contradicts Locke’s “official position.” Several interpreters besides Anstey and myself have argued that Locke officially embraces natural kinds. However, their conceptions differ from the one I intend. According to Conn (2002), what is required for there to be natural kinds is that (a) each set of perceptible features corresponds to some shared internal constitution. As I read Locke, he denies (a). Instead, he holds there to be natural kinds in the sense that (b) some ways of sorting objects by their perceptible features count as more natural than others, by coming closer to corresponding to a shared internal constitution. Though Stuart (1999, 285–91) discusses Boyd and Kornblith, I read him as attributing to Locke a qualified version of (a), not (b). On the other hand, Pasnau (2011, 642–7) attributes an embrace of natural kinds in a very strong sense, for which I find no evidence in the Essay: “there is a unique system of species (and higher genera) that best captures the similarities and differences among individuals.” For an analysis of Locke’s carefully reasoned ambivalence about whether there are any “prefixed Bounds” of species, any boundaries “made by Nature” (3.6.30:457–8, 3.6.43:466), see Shapiro (1999, 582–7).
- 39.
A parallel claim hold for ideas of modes, such as the ideas of a triangle and of injustice.
- 40.
Locke agrees with this claim in the case of simple ideas and ideas of modes. Here the idea serves not just as nominal essence of a species, but also as its real essence (3.3.18:418, 3.4.3:421, 3.5.14:436). To learn what makes an action an injustice or makes a body crimson, it suffices to inspect the respective ideas (provided, in the latter case, that one has learned the general lessons of Essay 2.8 about color-ideas). Of course, such inspection is a far cry from the serious intellectual work Descartes envisions.
- 41.
See the previous note.
- 42.
In conceding that Locke could even make sense of distinct complex ideas that share an object in the propositional sense, I am imagining that he would allow a qualification to (a) of Sect. 2.3.2. Consider the rare case in which distinct substance ideas mutually agree with respect to “necessary connexion,” whence the same objects must conform to each idea. In such a case, I presume, he would count both ideas as being of the same species in the propositional sense.
- 43.
For a defense of sophisticated versions of both Lockean and Cartesian rationalism, based on an entirely different bifurcation of content, see Chalmers (2012).
- 44.
See e.g. Brandom (2008, ch. 6).
- 45.
See especially Brandom (1994, ch. 8).
- 46.
Brandom has recently expressed openness to notions of “representation” that are distinct from the “discursive representational” notions that fall directly out of propositional intentionality (2011, 209–19). However, he doesn’t raise the question whether the same conceptually contentful item might “represent” distinct objects in the discursive and non-discursive senses.
- 47.
Millikan (1993, 363).
- 48.
See also Mark Wilson’s case studies in the history of science (2000, 2006). Wilson advocates “the ‘correlational point of view’: we objectively study how an unfolding reasoning process manages to arrange itself with respect to an independent reality…. This supplies a primitive notion of “truth condition” that is entirely erected upon the correspondences uncovered…” (2000, 384).
- 49.
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Australian National University and the University of New South Wales. For helpful discussion, I would like to thank those audiences as well as the organizers and participants of the Berlin workshop that resulted in this volume, especially Martin Lenz, Antonia LoLordo, Dominik Perler and Anik Waldow. I dedicate the paper to the memory of Joseph L. Camp, Jr., who first made me want to learn from Early Modern theories of intentionality.
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Shapiro, L. (2013). Intentionality Bifurcated: A Lesson from Early Modern Philosophy?. In: Lenz, M., Waldow, A. (eds) Contemporary Perspectives on Early Modern Philosophy. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol 29. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6241-1_2
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