of “man in general,” paints some particular person they feel like painting, whom it is understood will stand as representative of all humankind for being relevantly similar to the rest, so the name “man” signifies “man in general” because, when it is used to express a judgment, “we limit [the extent of the name] not ourselves, but leave them to be applied by the hearer” (EW IV.22). Hobbes’s point is that two people who understand the English term “man” as a universal term recognize that it applies to John, Paul, Ringo, etc., and it does not matter which of the members of the extension an idea is raised, so long as the speaker and hearer raise ideas of members of the same set of objects meeting the same suite of conditions. Another way to put the point is that Hobbes can respond to Descartes’s (1984) objection that (monolingual) French and German speakers will not be able to grasp the same conceptual content when they judge, respectively, that “la neige est blanche” and “Schnee ist weiss” (AT VII:179/CSM II:126). Hobbes’s answer, if the foregoing interpretation is correct, would be that so long as “neige” and “Schnee,” “blanche” and “weiss,” play the same role in the cognitive activity of the French speaker and the German (viz. applied to snow, to recall thoughts of snow; applied to white things to recall that color), then these two words mean the same thing in their respective languages.11
5.5 Conclusion
I have argued that although Hobbes holds that the linguistic meaning of a name is determined by the role of that name in the cognitive activity of a language user. Names arranged in sentences are signs of thought because the syntax of the sentence expresses metalinguistic information concerning the role the names in the sentence play in the cognition of the speaker. A name so-disposed in an asserted sentence can be a sign only to an audience disposed to interpret speech as significative of thought. But to do this, they must possess prior know-how – the audience must know how to use names as cognitive tools for the sake of recording thoughts into judgments and syllogisms.
References
1 Abizadeh, Arash. 2015. “The Absence of Reference in Hobbes’ Philosophy of Language.” Philosophers’ Imprint 15: 1–17.
2 Abizadeh, Arash. 2017. “Hobbes on Mind: Practical Deliberation, Reasoning, and Language.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 55: 1–34.
3 Armstrong, David M.1989. Universals: An Opinionated Introduction. Boulder, CO: Westview
4 Barnouw, Jeffery. 1980. “Hobbes’s Causal Account of Sensation.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 8: 115–30.
5 Berkeley, George. 2008. “A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge.” In Philosophical Writings, edited by Desmond Clarke, 67–150. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
6 Biletzki, Anat. 1997. Talking Wolves: Hobbes on the Language of Politics and the Politics of Language. Dordrecht: Springer.
7 De Jong, Willem. 1990. “Did Hobbes Have a Semantic Theory of Truth?” Journal of the History of Philosophy 28: 63–88.
8 Descartes, René. 1984. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 2, translated and edited by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [CSM II].
9 Duncan, Stewart. 2011. “Hobbes, Signification, and Insignificant Names.” Hobbes Studies 24: 158–78.
10 Grice, H. Paul 1957. “Meaning.” Philosophical Review 66: 377–88.
11 Hacking, Ian. 1975. Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
12 Hobbes, Thomas. 1839–1845a. The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, 11 vols., edited by Sir William Molesworth. London: John Bohn. Cited as EW.
13 Hobbes, Thomas. 1839–1845b. Thomæ Hobbes malmesburiensis opera philosophica, 5 vols., edited by Gulielmi Molesworth. London: John Bohn. Cited as OL.
14 Hobbes, Thomas. 1976. Thomas White’s, De Mundo, Examined, translated by Harold Whitmore Jones. London: Bradford University Press. [Anti-White].
15 Hobbes, Thomas. 1991. In Man and Citizen (De Homine and De Cive), edited by Bernard Gert. Indianapolis, IA: Hackett. [De Homine/De Cive].
16 Hobbes, Thomas. 2012. Leviathan: The English and Latin Texts, edited by Noel Malcolm. Oxford: Clarendon Press. [First published 1651.]
17 Holden, Thomas. 2016. “Hobbes on the Function of Evaluative Speech.” The Canadian Journal of Philosophy 46: 123–44.
18 Hull, Gordon. 2006. “Hobbes’s Radical Nominalism.” Epoché 11: 201–23.
19 Hull, Gordon. 2009. Hobbes and the Making of Modern Political Thought. New York: Continuum.
20 Hull, Gordon. 2013. “Meaning.” In The Bloomsbury Companion to Hobbes, edited by Sharon A. Lloyd, 99–103. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
21 Hungerland, Isabel C.and George R. Vick. 1973. “Hobbes’s Theory of Signification.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 11: 459–82.
22 Hungerland, Isabel C.and George R. Vick. 1981. “Hobbes’s Theory of Language, Speech, and Reasoning.” In Introductory Essay to Thomas Hobbes: Computatio, Sive, Logica, edited by Isabel C. Hungerlandand George R. Vick, translated by Aloysius. P. Martinich. New York: Abaris Books.
23 Leijenhorst, Cees. 2002. In The Mechanisation of Aristotelianism: The Late Aristotelian Setting of Thomas Hobbes’ Natural Philosophy, Medieval and Early Modern Science, edited by Johannes M.M.H. Thijssenand Cristoph Lüthy, vol. 3. Leiden: Brill.
24 Malcolm, Noel. 2002. Aspects of Hobbes. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
25 Ott, Walter. 2003. Locke’s Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
26 Pettit, Philip. 2008. Made with Words: Hobbes on Language, Mind, and Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
27 Ross, George MacDonald. 1987. “Hobbes’s Two Theories of Meaning.” In The Figural and the Literal: Problems of Language in the History of Science and Philosophy, 1630–1800, edited by Andrew E. Benjamin, Geoffrey N. Cantor, and John R.R. Christie, 31–57. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
28 Sellars, Wilfrid. 1954. “Some Reflections on Language Games.” Philosophy of Science 21: 204–28.
29 Sellars, Wilfrid. 1981. “Mental Events.” Philosophical Studies 39: 325–45.
30 Soles, Deborah Hansen. 1996. Strong Wits and Spiders Webs: A Study in Hobbes’s Philosophy of Language. Aldershot, UK and Brookfield, VT: Avebury.
31 Watkins, John W.N.1973. Hobbes’s System of Ideas: A Study in the Political Significance of Philosophical Theories. 2nd edn. London: Hutchinson.
Notes
1 1 Hobbes is self-consciously operating against the backdrop of Scholastic faculty psychology, which he regards as pseudo-explanatory. If there were some cognitive power that could not be explicated as a function of sensation and imagination, this would undercut his argument against the Scholastics, the whole point of which is to establish that it is unnecessary to posit purpose-specific mental faculties to explain different cognitive powers. This comes out clearly in his debate with John Bramhall. For
