are distinguished from other “human voices” and from other sorts of marks by their specific role in cognition. Names are constituted by the role they play in the act of reasoning. They are imposed on objects, for the sake of recalling conceptions of those objects. Strung together into grammatical sentences, names “register” and “record” the consequences of thoughts through their imposition and their concatenation in the act of reasoning.
“Imposition” is a technical term, which, like “signification,” is borrowed from Scholastic semiotic theory. Hobbesian names function as categorematic terms and not singular terms. To “impose” a name is to establish a convention that fixes the extension of the name. Names “appellate” what they are “imposed on” or that of which they are truly predicable.5 A common name, “as Man, Horse, Tree, [is] the name of divers particular things; in respect of all which together, it is called an Universall” (Hobbes 2012, 52; 1651, 13). Proper names, “singular to one onely thing,” (Hobbes 2012, 52; 1651, 13) are a limiting case. They are also categorematic terms, imposed upon objects for the sake of recalling conceptions of those object, but which apply to exactly one thing as “he that writ the Illiad” (EW I.19) is imposed upon Homer to register the thought that he authored the Illiad or “Appius” and “Lentulus” apply to Appius and Lentulus for “(as Cicero has it) Appiety and Lentulity” (EW I.32). Imposition marks out a class – the class of objects, unified by the fact that each individual member of the class causes a similar suite of sensory appearances in the human organism. As I pointed out above, Hobbes is clear that, prior to the use of language, animals are capable of making perceptual discriminations, selectively attending to features of individual objects, recognizing similarities between individual objects, and remembering these, albeit imperfectly. A name is imposed upon many distinct individuals that resemble one another with respect to some feature. There are no universal properties ex parte rem nor universal mental representations, according to Hobbes’s austere nominalism. Class membership is analyzed in terms of the brute resemblance each individual member of the class bears to the others – the feature in virtue of which the name was chosen as a mark.6
A name allows its user to think about an entire class of objects, without having to think about each one of them individually. Names go proxy in the act of reasoning for the individuals in the name’s extension. Again borrowing from Sellars, we might call the imposition of the name the establishment of “language-entry” rules for the name (Sellars 1954). Imposition fixes the empirical conditions governing the appropriate use of the name. Knowing how to use a universal name is knowing the perceptual stimulus conditions governing its correct application – the conditions an object must meet to count as having the name predicable of it. In this way, although there is no general mental representation of, say, luminosity, only many memories and sensory experiences of lucid bodies, we grasp the universal name “luminous” because we know it applies to things that appear similar to us in a certain, visual way. The name “luminous” is a symbol that goes proxy for the individual luminous things in the act of reasoning.
Reason, “when wee reckon it amongst the Faculties of the mind,” is nothing other than “Reckoning (that is, Adding and Subtracting) of the Consequences of generall names agreed upon for the marking and signifying of our thoughts” (Hobbes 2012, 64; 1651, 18). As several authors have argued (e.g., Abizadeh 2017; Hull 2006; Pettit 2008; Soles 1996), the imposition of names – categorematic terms – introduces universal representations into the cognitive system. The use of names transforms the human mind from a mere Humean representational system into an “Aristotelian” representational system, in Sellars’ sense (Sellars 1981). “By this imposition of Names,” Hobbes writes, “some of larger, some of stricter signification, we turn the reckoning of the consequences of things imagined in the mind, into a reckoning of the consequences of Appellations” (2012, 52; 1651, 14). In imposing names on things to mark our conceptions and then appending names together into sentences, the discourse of ideas – which consists in “the innumerable acts of thinking about individual things” – is registered in language, “and is reduced to fewer but universal theorems … and this is a most useful economy” (Hobbes 1976, 375).
Hobbes’s example of the geometer recording his discovery about the properties of triangles is a nice illustration. Without the use of names in speech, the geometer can construct a triangle and determine that the interior angles are equivalent to two right angles, but he has to put himself to “new labor” and make a new conjecture every time he wants to know whether any new triangle has this property. This necessarily involves “innumerable acts of thinking” about particular triangles, comparing them and noting their similarities. But with the use of words:
[W]hen he observes that the equality was consequent, not to the length of sides, nor to any particular thing in his triangle [i.e. the one he has constructed]; but onely to this, that the sides were straight, and the angles three; and that that was all, for which he named it Triangle; and will boldly conclude Universally, that such equality of angles is in all triangles whatsoever; and register his invention in these generall terms, Every triangle hath its three angles equall to two right angles. And thus the consequence found in one particular, comes to be registered and remembered, as an Universall rule.
(Hobbes 2012, 54; 1651, 14)
Each mental representation is still a conception – and so particularistic and imagistic – but via the symbolic medium of language, thoughts are “registered and remembered.” However, this “registering” is not a simple one-to-one mapping of a name to a conception. The consequences of thoughts – each of which is just a train of mental particulars – are registered as a universal rule, expressed in the structure of a sentence.
As Hobbes defines truth, it is a semantic property – a property of sentences (or “propositions” as Hobbes calls them):
A true proposition is that, whose predicate contains, or comprehends its subject, or whose predicate is the name of everything, of which the subject is the name; as man is a living creature is therefore a true proposition, because whatsoever is called man, the same is also called living creature; and some man is sick, is true, because sick is the name of some man … these words true, truth, and true proposition, are equivalent to one another; for truth consists in speech, and not the things spoken of.
(EW I.35)
“True” is a metalinguistic predicate (a “name of a name” [Hobbes 2012, 1078; 1651, 372]) and applies to those sentences such that, by the imposition rules governing the names composing the sentence, the extension of the subject term is subsumed or contained within the extension of the predicate term (EW IV.23–4). The truth conditions of a sentence are given by the imposition of the component names – the application conditions that fixed the extensions of the names. Thus, the truth conditions of a sentence can be expressed as a rule of inference concerning the names involved in the sentence, capturing their proper use in cognition: The sentence “man is a living creature” is true if and only if all of the objects in the extension of “man” fall within the extension of “living creature” or, “If x is in the extension of ‘man’, then x is in the extension of ‘living creature’.”
According to Hobbes, a propositional attitude is a relation between a language-using animal and a sentence (2012, 98–100; 1651, 30–1; EW IV.2–8). To judge that a sentence of the form “S is P” is true is to accept that “If x is in the extension ‘S,’ then x is in the extension of ‘P’.” That is, propositional judgments involve grasping the truth conditions of sentences. But this implicitly involves semantic ascent, recognizing metalinguistic information expressed in the structure of the sentence; it is tantamount to acceptance of a rule for linking names to one another in reasoning. In order to grasp the truth conditions of a sentence, one must have an understanding of the imposition rules governing the
