My aim in this paper is to show that William Ockham (ca. 1287-1347) succeeds in accounting for a particular kind of self-knowledge, although in doing so he restricts the direct cognitive access to mental acts and states as they occur, in a way similar to the restriction in contemporary debates on self-knowledge. In particular, a considerable number of Ockham-scholars have argued that Ockham’s theory of mental content bears a substantial likeness to contemporary ‘externalist’ approaches, and I will argue for the success of this theory in three steps: first, I show that, although the form of what is judged (‘I am F’) implies the ascription of an act to oneself (as the subject of the act), through ‘intuition’ it suffices to directly cognize the act but not the subject. In Ockham’s conception, intuition is a specific kind of singular cognition. In the second step I show that, according to Ockham’s thesis of mental language, Person is an aspect of mental verbs and not of acts of intuition. Lastly I argue that the correctness of first-person judgments about one’s acts is guaranteed by an ontological fact, and not an epistemological fact. It becomes apparent that this reading is compatible with an epistemological externalism.
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S. Brower-Toland, ‘Intuition, Externalism, and Direct Reference in Ockham’, History of Philosophy Quarterly 24 (2007), 317-336.
Compare C. Normore, ‘The End of Mental Language’, in Le langage mental du moyen âge à l’âge classique, ed. J. Biard (Louvain-La-Neuve, 2009), 293-306, and M. Lenz, ‘Why Is Thought Linguistic? Ockham’s Two Conceptions of the Intellect’, Vivarium 46 (2008), 302-317, as offering two mutually exclusive interpretations of the mental language assumption: whereas Normore has it that for Ockham thought is prior to language, but nevertheless forms a kind of language, Lenz holds that in Ockham’s view thought derives its systematicity from the systematicity of language. It should be noted, however, that Normore’s interpretation is based exclusively on the later Summa Logicae, whereas Lenz refers only to Ockham’s earlier Sentences commentary.
See G.E.M. Anscombe, ‘The First Person’, in Mind and Language, ed. S. Guttenplan (Oxford, 1975), 65. In Latin, the personal pronoun serves only the purpose of emphasis or other rhetorical purposes.
See for instance Yrjönsuuri, ‘The Structure of Self-Consciousness’, 145.
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My aim in this paper is to show that William Ockham (ca. 1287-1347) succeeds in accounting for a particular kind of self-knowledge, although in doing so he restricts the direct cognitive access to mental acts and states as they occur, in a way similar to the restriction in contemporary debates on self-knowledge. In particular, a considerable number of Ockham-scholars have argued that Ockham’s theory of mental content bears a substantial likeness to contemporary ‘externalist’ approaches, and I will argue for the success of this theory in three steps: first, I show that, although the form of what is judged (‘I am F’) implies the ascription of an act to oneself (as the subject of the act), through ‘intuition’ it suffices to directly cognize the act but not the subject. In Ockham’s conception, intuition is a specific kind of singular cognition. In the second step I show that, according to Ockham’s thesis of mental language, Person is an aspect of mental verbs and not of acts of intuition. Lastly I argue that the correctness of first-person judgments about one’s acts is guaranteed by an ontological fact, and not an epistemological fact. It becomes apparent that this reading is compatible with an epistemological externalism.
All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 557 | 78 | 2 |
Full Text Views | 233 | 1 | 0 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 59 | 5 | 0 |