Franciscan Studies

OCKHAM ON EVIDENT COGNITION My reason for examining evident cognition in Ockham is that it provides the context for intuitive cognition. Evident cognition is assent (to a truth) caused by "the apprehension of terms or things"; intuitive cognition is "the apprehension of terms or things" sufficient to cause evident cognition of contingent fact.1 First, some introductory remarks. Ockham, I believe, takes it for granted that our knowledge about the world, as expressed in true judgements, somehow derives from our experience. Moreover, I hold that Ockham argues from this fact to the need for a special kind of apprehensive act (namely, intuitive), where the major premiss for his argument is the necessity of accounting for assent to propositions by means of apprehensive acts associated with the components of propositions. Causes of assent, as I have urged in an earlier article, should be distinguished from justification for assent.2 And while I do not mean to deny that Ockham is concerned about certainty, I would rëemphasize my earlier claim that the issue is not one of evidence in the modern sense. The relation of intuitive cognition to evident assent is — or is analogous to — the relation of a term (or component of a proposition) to judgment. It is not a relation of individual things to judgments about them or of an inference from one fact to another. 1 An earlier version of this paper was read to the Ohio Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Studies, in March 1976; I am indebted to the discussion there for certain improvements in the paper. I am, of course, assuming in the reader a certain familiarity with the doctrine of intuitive cognition in Ockham; the articles cited below should provide the needed background if that is necessary. The definitions in the first paragraph are from Question 1 of the Prologue to Book One of the Ordinatio: Opera Theologica, Volume I; hereafter cited as OT I; G. Gal and S. Brown (eds.), G. de Ockham: Scriptum in Librum Primum Sententiarum Ordinatio (St. Bonaventure, N.Y.: The Franciscan Institute, 1967), pp. 5-6 and 31-32· 8 "Ockham on Intuition," Journal of the History of Philosophy, 11 (1973): 95-106. 86JOHN BOLER Moreover, whatever the epistemological problems with the theory — and I tend to agree with critics such as T. K. Scott and Marilyn Adams that there are serious ones3 — it seems to me exceedingly unlikely that Ockham intended to maintain (what is commonly ascribed to Descartes) that our cognitive states are essential evidence for what we believe to be the case. On my interpretation, the doctrine of intuitive cognition depends upon an analysis of the structure of thought, an analysis which is controlled directly not by any observation of the parade of cognitive activity but rather by the demands of the analysis of propositions. Those demands are complex, and the issues of epistemology are certainly relevant. But I think Ockham's enterprise would be more fruitfully compared to those recent studies which claim some relation between logical form and linguistic structure, and between these and cognitive psychology.4 The present paper consists of two parts. In the first, I examine Ockham's treatment of "apprehension" and "assent"; and I conclude that the "apprehension of terms or things" of which intuitive cognition is a species is best treated as a postulate dependent on a theory about components of propositions. I am not claiming that Ockham was in full control of such a scheme as I present it; it may even be that he talked himself into thinking that he could actually observe these special acts. But I discuss this problem in the second (and shorter) part of the paper when I examine some aspects of Ockham's argument for the distinction within apprehensions of intuitive and abstractive kinds. PART ONE A. Assent "Judgment," I shall assume, serves Ockham in logical contexts as a general term covering both assent to and dissent from propositions . It is slightly more flexible than they, allowing, for example, 8 T. K. Scott, "Ockham on Evidence, Necessity and Intuition," Journal of the History of Philosophy, ? (1969), pp. 27-49; Marilyn Adams, "Intuitive Cognition , Certainty and Skepticism in William of Ockham," Traditio, 26...