Journal of the History of Philosophy

Ockham on Evidence, Necessity, and Intuition T. K. SCOTt THIS PAPERHAS A MODEST and largely expository aim: to delineate as clearly as possible three basic concepts of Ockham's theory of science. A very great deal has been written about each of these concepts, so that I do not suppose that anything very surprising remains to be discovered about them. However, it seems to me that the connections among these concepts have not been fully explored, with the result that each of them has often been misunderstood in itself. Hence I have tried to develop these connections in order to see how the concepts function in Ockham's philosophy in the hope that this will enable us to understand more clearly just in what sense and for what reasons Ocldaam was the father of the "critical" and "skeptical" tendencies of fourteenth-century philosophy. A. The Relation of Evidence to Necessity According to Ockham, science, in the strict sense, is "evident" knowledge of some necessary truth which is "caused by" evident knowledge of necessary first principles and a syllogism concluding from those principles to that necessary conclusion .~Or understood as something had rather than done, science is a collection of "'habits" in the soul enabling one to make such evident judgments? My discussion of this view of science is divided into three parts. In this first section I discuss the nature and formal derivation of the necessary propositions that axe known by one who has a science; in the second and third sections, I attempt to explain just what it means to say that these propositions, or any propositions, are evidently known. The necessary premisses of demonstration are typically derived from true singular contingent propositions that are evidently known. In order to make clear just how this comes about, it is necessary to recall Ockham's distinction between what will be called accident-predication and what will be called (following Expositio super viii libros Physicorum, Prologue: "dicitur scientia notitia evidens veri necessarii nata causari ex notitia evidenti praemissarum nevcssariarum appScatarum per discursurn syllogisticum." Quoted in Ockham, Philosophical Writings, ed. P. Bochner (Edinburgh, 1957). : Ibid.: "scientia vel est quaedam qualitas exJstens subiective in anima vel est collectio aliquarum talium qualitatum animam informantium." [27] 28 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY custom) attribute-predication.' Before proceeding it may be well to emphasize that as used here "accident" and "attribute" are terms of second intention and always signify predicates or concepts and never extra-mental entities of any sort. As is well known Ockham does admit a few real accidents in his ontology; such accidents (the "qualitative contraries") he regards as real entities at least potentially separable from the substances of which they are accidents.' But in what follows "accident" is never used as a term of first intention sitmifying such entities, and it will be a matter of indifference whether any accident term does in fact signify a real accident. An accident is then any term of one of the categories, other than that of substance, predicable contingently of something. That is, it is a term that occurs as predicate in a contingent, non-modal, categorical proposition. Or once again, an accident is a term that, if truly predicated of some particular, can, without contradiction be denied of that thing) Examples of accident-predication would then be "Socrates is white," "This man is tall," "That house is in Rome," "The world is round," etc.' ' "Attribute" is a translation of the Latin passio. There is a temptation to leave passio untranslated, in order to make it clear that it is always and only a mental content or concept , never a "real" (in re) quality of things. 9 The term "attribute" (passio) is not similarly equivocal. An attribute is never anything other than a predicate or mental term. 5 Summa Logicae, Pars Prima, ed. P. Boehner (St. Bonaventure, N.Y., 1957), ch. 25: "Terrio modo dicitur accidens aliquod praexlicabile, quod praedicatur contingenter de aliquo et potest successive affirmari et negaxi de eodem tam per mutationem propriam illius, quod importatur per subiectum, quam alienam." See n. 32 below on the distinction between "separable " and "inseparable" accidents. 6 Such propositions are false either if the terms do not stand for...