the two, since the first proposition, like the term, has no meaning: ‘The options are either nonsense or taking it to mean what the analysis says: there is no separate way of understanding it’ (1983: 72).
Nothing has no properties. A fictitious entity, being . . . a mere nothing, can not of itself have any properties: no proposition by which any property is ascribed to it can therefore be in itself . . . a true one, nor therefore an instructive one: whatsoever of truth is capable of belonging to it can not belong to it in any other character than that of the . . . supposed equivalent of . . . some proposition having for its subject some real entity. (UC cii. 217 (1843: viii. 246))
Postema criticizes Schofield for insisting that unless successfully paraphrased, fictitious entities had no meaning, arguing that Bentham’s goal was not to produce meaning where none existed, but to fix meaning, in just the way that Hobbes’s sovereign fixed meanings (1991: 120, 124–5), albeit in a more interactive, democratic way (Postema, 2019: 21; Schofield, 2006: 34). There is, however, considerable textual evidence to support Schofield’s interpretation (2016b: 401; 1983b: 74). Yes, Bentham sought to fix meanings to provide a basis for unambiguous communication and guidance of action, but the reason fictitious entities lacked such meanings was that, in themselves and until paraphrased, they had no determinate meaning, so that either they meant nothing, or they meant anything we chose. ‘It is impossible to speak correctly, unless we think correctly; and it is impossible to think correctly whilst words are employed for registering our ideas, which words are so constituted that it is not possible to form them into propositions which shall not be false’ (1843: iii. 171).
Bentham cautioned that correspondence between perception and reality will rarely be complete; we often err in interpretation of sensory data, since interpretation depends not purely on passive perception but on inference therefrom, on ‘judgment, ratiocination, which is liable to be erroneous’ (UC ci. 118 (1843: viii. 224)). Fictitious entities are essential to all but the most basic communication, and, since language is the medium for thought, to all but the most basic thought. No discussion of mental acts can occur without this substantification of the mind, and the pretence that fictitious entities (e.g. judgment, motive) are really existing objects (1983c: 371–2). Language may be ‘an instrument for the communication of thought from one mind to another’ (UC cii. 456 (1843: viii. 329)), but language, because of the unavoidable resort to employing names of fictitious entities as if they were real entities, necessarily misdescribes.
Although all experience is subjective, successful communication depends on the capacity to agree on meanings by attaching the same import to the same words. Bentham fell back on the regularities of experience and the broad equality among human agents, each equipped with the same sensory organs and, generally speaking, possessed of sufficient cognitive competence to process similar sensory inputs in similar ways. Cohen calls this premise universal cognitive competence (1983), and without this assumption communication and co-ordination among human beings in general would be difficult if not impossible. Yes, sensory and cognitive capacities vary along a broad continuum but, even allowing for such differences, the possibilities of inter-subjective communication are sufficient to permit almost universal access to knowledge of the external world through sensation and reflection on it. This universalized inter-subjectivity entails that we can (and should, aided by inductive empirical science) draw the same inferences from the same sensory inputs.
In consequence, although Bentham recognized the subjectivity of experience, he also asserted that opinions and the judgments underlying them were capable of objective assessment. For instance, individual assessments of the probability of an event’s having occurred are, for Bentham, simply statements of the individual’s degree of persuasion or belief that the event did occur. As reports of the internal state of the individual’s mind, they are infallible, at least if the individual is being honest. However, this does not imply that every individual’s assessment of probability is equally valid, because assessments of probability depend upon evidence, and evidence is ‘any matter of fact, the effect . . . of which, when presented to the mind, is to produce a persuasion concerning the existence of some other matter of fact’ (1843: vi. 208). The introduction of facts – ‘the existence of any expressible state of things, or of persons . . . at any given point or portion of time’ – provides an essential escape route from terminal subjectivity. We cannot simply choose to believe whatever we like, since, given proper attention and cognitive competence, the faculty of understanding is governed by evidence.
Now, what is in man’s power to do, in order to believe a proposition, and all that is so, is to keep back and stifle the evidences that are opposed to it. For, when all the evidences are equally present to his observation, and equally attended to, to believe or disbelieve is no longer in his power. It is the necessary result of the preponderance of the evidence on one side over that on the other. (1843: x. 146 [emphasis added]; see also 1843: vi. 18n)
For Bentham, a belief ‘is an act of the Judgment’ (2016b: 155), while judgments about facts admit of objective assessment. Although absolute certainty is incompatible with human existence, what Bentham calls ‘Practical certainty, a degree of assurance sufficient for practice’ (1843: vii. 105), is not. How can we approach practical certainty? How but by relying on the basis of all knowledge: experience, observation, experiment and reflection?
Postema argues that fictitious entities, or at least the assemblage of them which populate the human construction of world-manipulating logic, are just as real as real entities (2019: 13–14, 23). There are indeed passages in which Bentham sounds as if this is what he wants to say (1983c: 266, 271n, 272n). However, if this were his considered position, he would have dissolved the distinction between real and fictitious entities on which he hangs so much. True, Bentham considered many psychical entities ideas to be real entities; they are directly perceptible to sense by introspection. Yet he was also clear that by no means every idea names a real entity. We can make sense, for instance, of the idea of a golden mountain, by synthesizing our ideas of a mountain and of gold respectively. Yet ‘golden mountain’ was one of his favourite examples of a ‘fabulous entity’, fabulous precisely in the sense of being unreal, of not corresponding with physical reality (UC ci. 347 (1843: viii. 267); UC ci. 417). As Bentham noted in a passage where he asserted that the names of logical wholes or genera name real entities, such logical wholes include not only all plants that ever have existed or will exist, but ‘all plants that, without existing, shall be but conceived to exist’ (1983c: 265n). Real ideas, for Bentham, were present to memory, that is, were formed by recalling copies of images or impressions deposited by real entities. If all ideas capable of producing ‘mental images’ are real entities, every conceivable creation of human imagination would qualify as a real entity.
It is true that central elements of human well-being depend on the proper deployment of the fictitious entities rights and obligations, but that doesn’t make all conceivable rights or obligations into real entities. Can fictitious entities have real effects? Certainly: the legal judgment that I have breached my legal obligation is followed by punishment.7 Even the sham law delivered by judgments of Common Law judges had undeniably real consequences in distributing pleasures and pains, thanks to belief on the part of those charged with executing those judgments that the judge acted within her prerogative in making them. Doubtless then, the maximization of happiness demands a rational ordering of the constructivist domain of fictitious entities, which is exactly what Bentham thinks paraphrasis supplies.
Bentham’s logic contains tensions between realist and pragmatic or fictionalist perspectives, between the view that use of propositions containing fictitious entities was only legitimate insofar as they were replaceable by propositions referring to real entities, and the view that the sole criterion of legitimacy for use of fictional constructs was a pragmatic one, namely the degree to which their use generated accurate predictions (1983c: 346–8, 371; UC cii. 466; 1843: viii. 331; and see Quinn, 2012a). An introductory book is no place to attempt categorization of Bentham in terms of modern approaches in logic (Tarantino, 2018; Postema, 2019: 9, 15–16; Milnes: 2020). Such attempts may have limited value and involve unavoidable anachronism, since modern debates were unknown to him, he did not locate himself in
