Thomas Hobbes's Doctrine of Meaning and Truth

Dorothea Krook

doi:10.1017/S0031819100036974

Thomas Hobbes's Doctrine of Meaning and Truth

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 February 2009

Dorothea Krook

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Dorothea Krook: Affiliation:
Newnham College, Cambridge.

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It is generally acknowledged that Hobbes's radical scepticism is intimately connected with his nominalism, and that his nominalism in turn rests upon the doctrine of meaning and truth set out in its best-known version in Chapters 4 and 5 of Leviathan.

Type: Articles
Information: Philosophy , Volume 31 , Issue 116 , January 1956 , pp. 3 - 22

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0031819100036974 [Opens in a new window]
Copyright: Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1956

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¹ The references are to the following editions of the texts: (i) Elements of Law (E.L.), Tönnies' edition, Cambridge, 1928; (ii) Leviathan (L.), Michael Oakeshott's edition, Basil Blackwell, 1946; (iii) Of Logic and Computation (L.C.), Book I of De Corpore, Vol. I of Sir William Molesworth's 11-volume edition of Hobbes's English Works, 1839. All italics in passages quoted indicate my emphasis, except where it is stated that they are Hobbes's own.Google Scholar

^{page 4 note 1} L.C., 3.9.

^{page 5 note 1} L., Ch. 3.

^{page 5 note 2} L., I. 4 (“Names, proper and common”).

^{page 5 note 3} E.L., I. 4.11.

^{page 6 note 1} L.C., 3.2.

^{page 6 note 2} L., I. 4 (p. 21).

^{page 6 note 3} E.L., I. 5.10. Hobbes's emphasis.

^{page 6 note 4} L., I. 4 (p. 21).

^{page 7 note 1} L., I. 4 (p. 20).

^{page 7 note 2} L.C., 6.16.

^{page 7 note 3} E.L., I. 6.1.

^{page 8 note 1} This useful distinction is used by Professor Moody in connexion with Aristotle's philosophy in his book The Logic of William of Ockham (Sheed and Ward, 1935).

^{page 8 note 2} L.C., 3.9.

^{page 8 note 3} Ibid., 3.8.

^{page 8 note 4} Carré, Meyrick A., Phases of Thought in England. (Oxford, 1949), pp. 162–3 et al.Google Scholar

^{page 9 note 1} Mr. Max Black speaks of Russell's ‘uneasy nominalism’ in a critique of his treatment of the problem of ‘vagueness.’ (Black, “Vagueness: An Exercise in Logical Analysis,” in Language and Philosophy, p. 32, n. 12).

^{page 9 note 2} Mr. Moody discusses this in his book The Logic of William of Ockham, pp. 44 et al.

^{page 10 note 1} Aristotle, Topics, 102a, 9; Post. An., 72b, 20–25; Topics, 157a, 25–30, and the whole discussion of the Principle of Contradiction in Metaphysics, Book P, Chs. 2–5).

^{page 10 note 2} It is perhaps significant that the passage does not reappear in the corresponding sections of Leviathan.

^{page 11 note 1} L.C., 2.10.

^{page 12 note 1} L., Ch. 5.

^{page 12 note 2} L., Ch. 4.

^{page 12 note 3} L., I. 4 (pp. 22–3).

^{page 12 note 4} Ibid., I. 5 (p. 26).

^{page 12 note 5} Ibid., I. 4 (p. 22).

^{page 12 note 6} L., Ch. 4. Hobbes's emphasis.

^{page 13 note 1} L.C., 6.1.

^{page 13 note 2} Salusbury's, Thomas translation of Galileo's “System of the World,” in Mathematical Collections (London, 1661), p. 320. Professor Oakeshott, in his Introduction to his edition of Leviathan (p. xxii), rightly observes that “... one of the few internal tensions of his [Hobbes's] thought arose from an attempted but imperfectly achieved distinction between science and philosophy... between a knowledge (with all the necessary assumptions) of the phenomenal world and a theory of knowledge itself.” Our discussion of Book I of De Corpore will confirm this observation. Yet it is not inaccurate to describe Book I of De Corpore as a theory of physics, or 'science’ in the modern sense, since this, at any rate, is what Hobbes intended it to be; and the details of the attempt are, in any case, worth attention.Google Scholar

^{page 14 note 1} I wish here to acknowledge a general debt to Professor F. Brandt's full and close discussions of the First Book of De Corpore in his book Thomas Hobbes' Mechanical Conception of Nature (1928). Though my own analysis differs in important points from his, it was his work on this difficult portion of Hobbes's doctrine of science that first drew my attention to it, suggested the central problem that it raises, and gave many invaluable hints towards its understanding.

^{page 14 note 2} L.C., 6.1.

^{page 14 note 3} L.C., 6.10.

^{page 15 note 1} L.C., 6.2.

^{page 15 note 2} L.C., 6.12.

^{page 16 note 1} It has been no part of my purpose here to criticize Hobbes's theory of science in De Corpore, but only to elucidate that theory and to show its connexion with his doctrine of meaning and truth. The direction in which such a critique might perhaps most profitably be pursued may, however, be indicated. This direction is set if we remember that for Hobbes definition is always nominal. That, perhaps, is the ultimate source—or one way of describing the ultimate source—of the difficulties that must be felt about his view of physics as science. For to characterize all definition as ‘nominal’ is proper (and true) when one is concerned with the ‘logic of science,’ when (to employ a modern distinction) one is engaged in a ‘meta-linguistic’ analysis of the language of physics ('scientific discourse’). But when one is concerned with the science, physics, itself; when one is seeking to discover particular physical truths, or—in terms of the same distinction—seeking to create an ‘object-language,’ as distinct from defining the terms, expressions, etc., of such an object-language in a meta-language—then another kind of definition is required: the kind that has traditionally been called ‘real’ definition, and has been so called because it purports to define things, not words; and though not necessarily the ‘essence’ of a thing, yet those of its properties that distinguish it from other things and are in that sense definitive; but are in any case properties of the thing, not the name of that thing. The whole question of ‘real’ and ‘nominal’ definition, however, is too large to be pursued here. It has received some attention in recent years, and among the most illuminating of these recent discussions is Morris Weitz's, in his essay “Analysis and the Unity of Russell's Philosophy” (in The Library of Living Philosophers, Vol. V, pp. n o ff.). It could serve as a useful startingpoint for a critique of Hobbes's theory of science in the First Book of DeCorpore.

^{page 16 note 2} L.C., 6.4.

^{page 17 note 1} Thus Hobbes, in the passage at L.C. 6.4.: “... If we can find out the causes of these [i.e. the ‘universal properties of square’] we may compound them altogether into the cause of square.”

^{page 17 note 2} L.C., 6.5.

^{page 18 note 1} A full and fascinating account of the history of the resolution-composition distinction in Western speculation on the philosophy of science may be found in a series of three articles by Dr. A. C. Crombie published in Discovery (Nov. and Dec, 1952, Jan., 1953). Dr. Crombie's invaluable researches into the origins of the Galilean view of science, stretching back through Ockham and Robert Grosseteste to Ptolemy and Archimedes and, ultimately, to Aristotle, place in their full historical perspective Hobbes's discussions in Book I of De Corpore. For Galileo, one remembers is the source of much of Hobbes's wisdom in De Corpore, by his own explicit and unusually generous acknowledgement; and it is not unlikely that he was acquainted also with the writings of at least some of the ‘pre-Galilean’ philosophers of science, especially those at Padua in the fifteenth and earlier sixteenth centuries.

^{page 20 note 1} E.L., II. 8.13.

^{page 20 note 2} E.L., II. 10.8.

^{page 21 note 1} E.L., I. xi.i. The profane wit of the equivocal allusion to the sacrament of the Eucharist in this passage (“when we take into our mouths the most sacred name of God”) would have done little, one suspects, to render more acceptable to Hobbes's Christian contemporaries his account of Christian worship.

^{page 22 note 1} E.L., I. xi.2.

^{page 22 note 2} Ibid., I. xi.12.

^{page 22 note 3} Oakeshott, Introduction to Leviathan (Basil Blackwell's Political Texts), p. lxii.

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