is just what it is to “understand a name”: “to remember, by means of a name, those things which have to be considered in some matter, and for which the name has been imposed … the name ‘man’ is understood when this word brings to mind not only a human shape, but also its reasoning-capacity” (Hobbes 1976, 52).
The relationship between a language user and the sentences she judges to be true is a kind of causal relation, insofar as names play a functional role in the thought patterns of a language user. A name is a mark and, as a mark, it plays a role in the cognitive activity of the user. It causes the user, who has internalized the rule governing its application, to recall those ideas for which it was set up (Abizadeh 2015). As the buoy causes the sailors to think about the submerged rock when they see the buoy, so a name causes the person who grasps the “imposition” of the name to recall conceptions of the objects on which the name is imposed. A sentence read or heard or “tacitly thought” (EW V.197), causes a person to recall a chain of conceptions, corresponding to the impositions of the names concatenated together into the sentence. This is what Hobbes refers to as “remembering the use of names.” Conceptions are raised upon the hearing or reading of a sentence insofar as there is an associative habit to use a name as a mark for the sake of recalling conceptions. So, when I read the sentence, “red tomatoes are ripe,” the name “red tomato” causes me to think about some tomato and to selectively attend to its color. Then, there is a train of thought that takes me to various memories of ripe tomatoes, with that color. I recall that “ripe tomato” is applied to tomatoes for the sake of this gustatory appearance and judge that the sentence “red tomatoes are ripe tomatoes” is true (cf. EW I.23–4). So, while Archie and I can expect to experience the sensation ripeness from this red tomato on the basis of memory and the associative connections between conceptions, and thereby evince possession of the general concepts of tomatoes and ripeness, only I am able to grasp these concepts through a universal representation, preserved in the sentence I judge to be true. Returning to the case of the geometer, while he can see that two figures are triangles because they resemble one another in respect of having three sides (because he can selectively attend to their shape), with the use of the name “triangle” he is able to make and retain a universal judgment about all triangles, that is, everything within the extension of “triangle”.7
5.4 Understanding Linguistic Signs
With the foregoing in mind, let us return to Hobbes’s account of understanding linguistic signs. Language-competent humans understand “words as words” because they know how to use names in sentences to register thoughts. In the first part of Elements of Law, there is another brief comment on the distinction between human and non-human animal understanding of language that helps illuminate Hobbes’s views on linguistic meaning. Knowledge necessarily involves both truth and evidence, which Hobbes defines as “the concomitance of a man’s conception with the words that signify such conception in the act of ratiocination” (EW IV. 28). Hence, someone who merely speaks the words of the propositions composing a valid syllogism – perhaps by rote, “as it is with beggars, when they say their paternoster” (EW IV.25) – will “make always true conclusions” so long as he begins with true propositions, but he will not have knowledge of the conclusion of his syllogism, as “his conclusions [are not] evident to him, for want of the concomitance of conception with his words” (EW IV.28). Evidence, in Hobbes’s sense, is necessary for the possession of knowledge for,
[I]f the words alone were sufficient, a parrot might be taught as well to know truth, as to speak it. Evidence is to truth, as the sap to the tree, which, so far as it creepeth along with the body and branches, keepeth them alive; where it forsaketh them, they die: for this evidence, which is meaning with our words, is the life of truth.
(EW IV.28; emphasis added in second set of italics)
As I understand Hobbes’s point, although there would be formal truth-conditions for a sentence uttered by a parrot, the parrot would not be able recognize the truth-conditions of what he utters; hence, he would not understand the meaning of what he says. To understand the meaning of a sentence is to grasp the conditions under which it would be true. To know the truth-conditions of a sentence he utters, the parrot would need to know the empirical conditions for which the impositions of the component names were fixed – as Hobbes puts it in De cive, “to know a truth is the same as to remember that it was made by ourselves by the very use of names” (Hobbes 1991, 374; OL II.419).8 Hence, although Hobbes distinguishes the truth-conditions of a sentence from its verification conditions, the latter constitutes “meaning with our words” and grasping meaning is matter of knowing the application conditions of the names out of which a sentence is composed.9
Sentences are signs of thought because they express propositional judgments. “Is” is a sign of judgment, used to “shew the Consequence, or Repugnance of one name to another; as when one saith, A Man is a Body, hee intendeth that the name of Body is necessarily consequent to the name of Man; as being but severall names of the same thing, Man” (2012, 1078; 1651, 372; also, 2012, 1080; 1651, 372). By displaying how she uses names in the syntax of her affirmation, a speaker who asserts “S is P” conveys her judgment that S is P by expressing her assent to the linguistic rule that “If x is ‘S’, then x is ‘P’.” A language-competent human interprets another person’s utterance as a sign of thought “by the sequel and contexture of names” into sentences. In other words, the syntax of a sentence carries significance for humans who understand speech, but carries no special significance for those non-human animals who do not. The placement and “contexture” of the word “biscuit” in the sentence, “These biscuits are dry and flavorless,” and the sentence, “Don’t eat the dog’s biscuits,” is of no consequence to Archibald. To him an utterance of “biscuit,” whatever the sentential context, is a sign that someone will get up and give him a treat – everything else is just another noise humans make. But to members of the English linguistic community, it is easy to see that these sentences can be used to express different things and perform different speech acts. There is, of course, a sense in which Archie understands the linguistic meaning of “biscuit,” since, when he hears that word, he expects to be fed a biscuit and not to be given a bath; however, Archie clearly cannot see that the name has a semantic value, which, in part because of its placement within a sentence, it contributes to the meaning of the sentence as a whole. That contribution has to do with the use of “biscuit” as name, a placeholder in the sentence, standing for biscuits. Hence, the linguistic meaning of names – their use in individual cognition, to register thoughts – determines the signification of names in speech. An utterance of “biscuit” as a sign that the speaker thought of biscuits only when the hearer is in a position to interpret the sentence in which the name is deployed as a sign of thought.
Communication between members of a language community succeeds when, as Hobbes says, “the same marks or notes be common to many” (EW I.14).10 Given that each conception is a mental particular and, indeed, a discrete physical event, no two speakers can literally share the same conceptions. The sense in which speakers “share notes” in common must not be that the same names raise precisely the same conceptions in the minds of each member of the community, but rather that the names they use as marks play the same role in the cognitive activity of the speakers in the linguistic community. Sharing a common linguistic habit – using the same names as marks for the sake of thought – the speech of members of the community causes them to recall the thoughts for which the names are deployed as marks. The name “stone” in the sentence “no man is a stone,” signifies that the speaker conceived of a stone because that is function of the name “stone” in the cognitive activity of the members of English language community. The communication of the content of the propositional judgment that no man is a stone succeeds via the common recognition of the manner in which the names “man” and “stone” (and so on) are deployed in thought. This is a matter of knowing the rules of imposition demarcating the extensions of the names concatenated together into a sentence. Hobbes’s
