Claude Panaccio

Intuition and Causality: Ockham’s Externalism Revisited

A number of scholars, myself included, have drawn attention in the last few yearson the presence of important externalistic tendencies in late-medieval nominal-ism, especially in William of Ockham1. The occasion for my revisiting the mat-ter here is that this interpretation of Ockham has been challenged recently bySusan Brower-Toland2.

Three main forms of externalism are standardly distinguished in recent ana-lytical philosophy:

– linguistic externalism, which is the thesis that the meanings of words arenot «in the heads» of the speakers (to take Hilary Putnam’s famous phrase);

– mental content externalism, which is the thesis that the very contents of ourthoughts are not uniquely determined by our internal states;

– epistemological externalism, which is – roughly – the thesis that what a cog-nitive subject is justified in believing is not uniquely determined by her inter-nal states.

What Brower-Toland specifically challenges is the interpretation of Ockham

«Quaestio», 10 (2010), 241-253 • 10.1484/J.QUAESTIO.1.102336

1 See in particular C. NORMORE, Burge, Descartes, and us, in M. HAHN / B. RAMBERG (eds.), Reflectionsand Replies. Essays on the Philosophy of Tyler Burge, The MIT Press, Cambridge (Mass.) 2003, pp. 1-14;P. KING, Two Conceptions of Experience, «Medieval Philosophy and Theology», 11 (2004), pp. 1-24, andID., Rethinking Representation in the Middle Ages: A Vade-Mecum to Mediaeval Theories of Mental Repre-sentation, in H. LAGERLUND (ed.), Representation and Objects of Thought in Medieval Philosophy, Ashgate,Aldershot 2007 («Ashgate Studies in Medieval Philosophy»), pp. 87-108; C. PANACCIO, Ockham’s Exter-nalism, in G. KLIMA (ed.), Intentionality, Cognition and Mental Representation in Medieval Philosophy,Fordham University Press, Fordham (N.Y.), forthcoming, and Le nominalisme du XIVe siècle et l’univer-salité des concepts, in P. PORRO et al. (a cura di), Universalità della Ragione. Pluralità delle filosofie nelMedioevo, Acts of the XIIth International Congress of Medieval Philosophy (Palermo, sept. 2007), forth-coming; C. PANACCIO / D. PICHÉ, Ockham’s Reliabilism and the Intuition of Non-Existents, in H. LAGERLUND

(ed.), Rethinking the History of Skepticism: The Missing Medieval Background, Brill, Leiden-Boston 2010(«Studien und Texte zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters», 103), pp. 97-118.

2 Cf. S. BROWER-TOLAND, Intuition, Externalism, and Direct Reference in Ockham, «History of Philo-sophy Quarterly», 24 (2007), pp. 317-335.

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as a mental content externalist, and she does it precisely on the point where thisreading had seemed on most secure grounds: with respect, namely, to intuitivecognition. My focus here, therefore, will be on the intentionality of intuitive actsfor Ockham. I will first briefly recall the usual grounds for interpreting Ockhamas an externalist with respect to the content of intuitions. And I will then discussBrower-Toland’s penetrating objections to this, which, I think, force us to godeeper than we did so far into certain aspects of Ockham’s doctrine, especiallyhis ideas on causality.

Causality is relevant here because the externalist reading of Ockham’s theo-ry of intuitive cognition entirely rests on his repeated insistence that what fixesthe object of a given intuitive act is not similitude but causality. In the Reporta-tio, for example, he has a very nice thought experiment about this. Suppose, Ock-ham says, that an angel could see what is in my mind when I have an intuitivegrasping of some object present in my vicinity. Could the angel tell exactly whichobject it is that I am presently intuiting? Ockham’s answer is the following: theangel could not know which object it is that I am now intuiting simply by scru-tinizing my internal intuitive act and comparing it with the various things heknows to be in my vicinity, especially, Ockham adds, if there were two quite sim-ilar objects around. What the angel would have to know in order to correctlyidentify the object of my intuition is which object caused this particular intuitiveact in me3.

I take it that this is a way of saying that the internal aspect of my intuitive actis not in itself sufficient to determine the object of this particular intuition. Anexternal relation is needed. The distinctive thesis of mental content externalismis that two cognitive subjects could be in maximally similar internal states(states, that is that would be indiscernible from each other for any ideally locat-ed observer), while one of these agents is thinking about something while theother is thinking about something else. Now, this seems to be exactly what wehave in Ockham’s thought-experiment: if there where, say, two very similar eggsin the room, and John is intuiting one of them while Peter is intuiting the otherone, the ideally located angel could not tell which egg is intuited by John andwhich by Peter, simply by comparing the internal features of the relevant intu-itive acts with each other and with the two eggs. The angel would need to be in-formed somehow of the causal connections between the eggs and the cognitive

3 Cf. GUILELMUS DE OCKHAM, Reportatio, II, q. 16, ed. G. Gál / R. Wood, The Franciscan Institute, St.Bonaventure (N.Y.) 1981 («Opera Theologica», 5), pp. 378-379: «[...] etsi angelus videat cognitionemalicuius singularis intuitive, et illud etiam singulare intuitive – ponamus – non tamen videt quod ista esthuius singularis. Quia si sint duo singularia aeque approximata intellectui quorum utrumque angelusvidet, non plus scit quod haec cognitio est ab isto obiecto quam ab illo, maxime si sint similia. [...] Exemplum: si sint duo ignes et appareat fumus causatus, non plus scio quod fumus causatur ab isto ignequam ab illo, quia ab utroque potest indifferenter causari».

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acts. This very much sounds prima facie like a full-fledged form of content ex-ternalism.

A little earlier in the Reportatio, Ockham had been even more explicit:

«I say then that an intellection [the context makes it clear that this is meant to includeintuitive intellections] is a similitude of the object just like a species would if it was ad-mitted, and no more a similitude of one object than of another [similar] one. And there-fore similitude is not the precise cause why the mind intelligizes one object rather thananother [...] for although the intellect assimilates equally to all these individuals in thecase under consideration, nevertheless it can cognize one of them determinately andnot the other one. But this is not in virtue of assimilation, but in virtue of the fact thatevery naturally producible effect is such by its very nature that it is produced by oneefficient cause and not by another [...]»4.

Any phenomenon in nature has a determinate singular cause (sometimes acomplex one, admittedly, but nevertheless singular), and Ockham’s point here isthat in the case of an intuitive act, the determinate singular object of this act isthis singular cause (or some component of it). And the same idea is found againin other passages, most notably in the following one from the Quodlibeta, a workof Ockham’s maturity:

«I say that an intuitive cognition is a proper cognition of a singular, not in virtue ofsome greater assimilation to one than to the other, but because it is naturally causedby one of them and not by the other [...]. Therefore it is not in virtue of similitude thatan intuitive cognition is more a proper cognition of a singular thing than the first ab-stractive cognition is. Rather it is only in virtue of causality, nor can any other reasonbe given»5.

Intuitive acts, admittedly, are said by Ockham to be likenesses of their ob-jects in some sense. This likeness, I take it, has to do with the internal featuresof the intuitive act. Such internal features, however, cannot uniquely determinewhat the proper singular object of a given intuitive act is. Only causality can do

4 Cf. GUILELMUS DE OCKHAM, Reportatio, II, qq. 12-13, ed. Gál / Wood, pp. 287-288: «Dico tunc quodintellectio est similitudo obiecti sicut species si poneretur, et non plus est similitudo unius quam alterius.Et ideo similitudo non est causa praecisa quare intelligit unum et non aliud [...] nam licet intellectus as-similetur omnibus individuis aequaliter per casum positum, tamen potest unum determinate cognoscereet non aliud. Sed hoc non est propter assimilationem, sed causa est quia omnis effectus naturaliter pro-ducibilis ex natura sua determinat sibi quod producatur ab una causa efficiente et non ab alia [...]».

5 Cf. GUILELMUS DE OCKHAM, Quodlibeta Septem, I, q. 13, ed. J.C. Wey, The Franciscan Institute, St.Bonaventure (N.Y.) 1980 («Opera Theologica», 9), p. 76: «[...] dico quod intuitiva est propria cognitio sin-gularis, non propter maiorem assimilationem uni quam alteri, sed quia naturaliter ab uno et non ab alterocausatur [...]. Unde propter similitudinem non plus dicitur intuitiva propria cognitio singularis quam ab-stractiva prima, sed solum propter causalitatem, nec alia causa potest assignari» (with my emphasis).

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that, since causality links the intuitive act with one single determinate cause,while similitude relates it in principle with several similar objects. Ockham’s ac-count of the intentionality of intuitive acts, then, clearly is a causal account, andsuch causal theories of mental content are standardly seen in recent analyticaldiscussions as paradigmatic cases of externalistic approaches in philosophy ofmind. The conclusion to be drawn, it would seem, is that Ockham’s theory of theintentionality of intuitive cognition is plainly externalistic.

Susan Brower-Toland has two different lines of criticisms against this read-ing. One of them – the second one, actually – is specifically meant to challengethe idea that what we have in Ockham is a direct reference theory of intuitiveacts. Susan Brower’s point in this regard is that Ockham usually describes intu-itive cognition «not only as an act of cognizing some singular object, but also ascognizing it in a certain way»6. Intuitive cognitions, in other words, do have someaspectual content to them for Ockham; they are not merely referential.

Since my primary interest here is in the externalistic causal reading of Ock-ham proper, I will not discuss in any detail this part of Brower-Toland’s paper – arather short part anyway. Let me just say very briefly that yes, Ockham does holdthat an intuitive cognition internally incorporates some description of its object.This is what he means, I suppose, when he says that intuitive cognitions are like-nesses or similitudes of their objects, just like abstractive cognitions are7. I haveargued on several occasions indeed that Ockham never renounced the idea thatcognitions are likenesses of their objects8, and this holds for intuitive as well asfor abstractive cognitions. Yet I want to say about Ockham’s intuitive cognitionswhat I have said elsewhere about Ockham’s absolute concepts9, namely that theiraspectual – or descriptive – component, their likeness component in other words,is not part of their semantic content. It is pragmatically required to secure the cor-rect reapplication of the concept or the correct intuitive recognition of a given per-son (as the same one I have seen yesterday, for example), but it does not play therole of a Fregean sense: it does not fix the reference, neither in the case of absoluteconcepts nor in the case of intuitive cognitions. As to the latter in particular, letme simply stress once more that Ockham is very clear in the passages quotedabove that the reference of an intuitive act is fixed only by causality10.

6 Cf. BROWER-TOLAND, Intuition, Externalism cit., p. 329 (with the author’s emphasis).7 See for example the passage from the Reportatio quoted above in n. 4. The passage from the Quodli-

beta quoted in n. 5 also clearly presupposes that an intuitive cognition is a similitude of its object.8 See in particular C. PANACCIO, Ockham on Concepts, Ashgate, Aldershot 2004 («Ashgate Studies in

Medieval Philosophy»), c. 7, esp. pp. 119-125; and Réponses à mes critiques, «Philosophiques», 32 (2005),pp. 453-457.

9 See PANACCIO, Ockham’s Externalism cit.10 See in particular the passage quoted in n. 5.

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What we really have to focus upon now, consequently, is precisely this: arethose ‘causalist’ passages enough to warrant the attribution to Ockham of an ex-ternalistic account of the intentionality of intuitive cognitions? This is whatBrower-Toland challenges in her other line of attack, as developed in section 2of her paper, entitled «Against causal externalism: supernaturally produced in-tuitive cognition»11. As this title makes it clear, Brower-Toland’s argument is en-tirely based on what Ockham says about supernaturally induced intuitions. This,of course, is a bit tricky. One might say: well, as long as we stick to natural cog-nition, Ockham’s account of the intentionality of intuitive acts is clearly of acausal externalistic brand in today’s sense, and this is what is philosophicallyinteresting in his doctrine. If he has trouble combining that with his theology ofGod’s omnipotency, well, so much the worst for his theology! I think that there issomething to this line of answer. Yet some of Ockham’s thought experimentsabout supernaturally induced intuitions do reveal something interesting abouthis properly philosophical understanding of intentionality and causality, and thisindeed is why Brower-Toland’s challenge is so stimulating and certainly worthdiscussing from a purely philosophical point of view.

Brower-Toland considers two different cases of supernaturally induced intu-itions in Ockham, which she labels Case 1 and Case 2. In order to follow the dis-cussion of both of these, Ockham’s oft-repeated definition of what an intuitivecognition is must be clearly kept in mind. Here is a standard formulation of it,drawn from the Ordinatio:

«[...] an intuitive cognition of a thing is a cognition in virtue of which it can be knownwhether the thing exists or not, so that if the thing exists, the intellect judges at oncethat it exists and evidently cognizes that it exists. [...] And in the same way, if a per-fect such intuitive cognition should be preserved by divine power of a non-existentthing, the intellect would evidently cognize in virtue of this incomplex [intuitive] cog-nition that this thing does not exist»12.

Case 1 has to do with a supernaturally produced intuition of something thatdoes exist, but very far away. Ockham writes:

«If an intuitive cognition is naturally caused, then it cannot be the case that the objectis not present in the close vicinity, because there can be such a distance between the

11 Cf. BROWER-TOLAND, Intuition, Externalism cit., pp. 323-329.12 Cf. GUILELMUS DE OCKHAM, Scriptum in librum primum Sententiarum. Ordinatio, Prol., q. 1, ed. G.

Gál / S.F. Brown, The Franciscan Institute, St. Bonaventure (N.Y.) 1967 («Opera Theologica», 1), p. 31:«[...] notitia intuitiva rei est talis notitia virtute cuius potest sciri utrum res sit vel non, ita quod si res sit,statim intellectus iudicat eam esse et evidenter cognoscit eam esse [...]. Et eodem modo si esset perfectatalis notitia per potentiam divinam conservata de re non exsistente, virtute illius notitiae incomplexae evi-denter cognosceret illam rem non esse».

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object and the cognitive faculty that this faculty cannot naturally intuit this object. [...]But if it is supernatural, if God, for example, should cause in me an intuitive cognitionof an object existing in Rome, then having an intuitive cognition of this object, I canjudge at once that this thing that I intuit and that I see exists, just as well as if this cog-nition was naturally produced»13.

The problem Brower-Toland raises about this case is that apparently there isno causal connection at all in this situation between the object in Rome and myintuitive act here in Parma, but that, nevertheless, this thing in Rome – the Pope,let’s say – is the object of my intuitive act. Here is a case, then, where the objectof an intuitive act is uniquely determined, but not, as it seems, by an externalcausal link between this object and the intuitive act in question14.

Now, I do not know how Ockham would have dealt with the problem at the timeof the Reportatio, when he first mentioned this possibility of a supernaturally in-tuition of a far away existing object: his theory of intuitive cognition, then, wasstill in the making. What he should have said, though, by the time of the Ordina-tio – however bizarre this seems to be – is that there is indeed, despite appear-ances, an immediate causal connection in this case between the thing in Romeand my intuitive act in Parma. As far as I can see, this is the only position that isconsistent with the rest of his theses on intuitive cognition in the Ordinatio.

Here is why. As is well known, Ockham insists all along that an intuitive cog-nition, whether naturally or supernaturally produced, always causes in turn atrue judgement: that the thing exists if indeed it exists (this is what happens inthe case under consideration), and that it does not exists if it does not exist. Butan objection occurs to him in the Ordinatio: suppose that you have an intuitivegrasping of some existing thing, which causes you to (correctly) judge that thething exists; since the external object and the intuitive act are two different en-tities, God could, if He so wanted, annihilate the external object without modi-fying in any way the corresponding intuitive act; if He did so, this very same in-tuition which previously caused a true judgement of existence should now cause,according to Ockham’s doctrine, a true judgement of non-existence; but how canthe very same intuitive act be the cause of such contradictory judgements?15

Ockham’s reply to this is the following:

13 Cf. GUILELMUS DE OCKHAM, Reportatio, II, qq. 12-13, ed. Gál / Wood, p. 258: «Nam si [intuitiva cog-nitio] naturaliter causetur, tunc non potest esse nisi obiectum exsistat praesens in debita approximationequia tanta potest esse distantia inter obiectum et potentiam quod naturaliter non potest potentia tale obiec-tum intueri. [...] Si autem sit supernaturalis, puta si Deus causaret in me cognitionem intuitivam de aliquoobiecto exsistente Romae, statim habita cognitione eius intuitiva possum iudicare quod illud quod intue-or et video est, ita bene sicut si illa cognitio haberetur naturaliter» (with my emphasis).

14 Cf. BROWER-TOLAND, Intuition, Externalism cit., pp. 324-325.15 See GUILELMUS DE OCKHAM, Ordinatio, Prol., q. 1, ed. Gál / Wood, p. 56.

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«[...] the intuitive cognition of a thing and the thing itself cause the judgement that thething exists; when the thing does not exist, however, this intuitive cognition withoutthis thing will cause the opposite judgement. And I concede therefore that the causeof those [opposite] judgements is not the same, since the cause of one of them is thecognition without the thing, while the cause of the other is the cognition with the thingas an additional partial cause»16.

When the thing exists, the cause of the judgement that it exists is a complexcause of which the intuitive act is but one component; when the thing does notexist, on the other hand, the intuitive cognition acts alone, causing the (true)judgement that the thing does not exist17.

This being so, according to Ockham, let us come back to the case of the dis-tant thing. If God manages to produce in me an intuitive cognition of this thingsomehow, but the thing itself plays no causal role whatsoever in the process (asBrower-Toland assumes), then what this intuitive act should cause in me, ac-cording to the reply just stated, is the judgement that the thing does not exist,since the intuitive act in such a case will act alone, without (ex hypothesi) thecollaboration of the external thing. But this judgement in the circumstances is afalse judgement since the thing does exist, albeit far away. And this is not whatOckham wants: as we have seen earlier, what he holds is that the judgement pro-duced in me by my supernaturally induced intuitive act when the thing exists ata remote distance, should be the true judgement that this thing exists. As far asI can see, the only way he can have that that is consistent with what he says inthe Ordinatio, is to maintain that however distant it is, the thing itself does havea causal effect upon the judgement in this situation. This is something Ockhamcan say, since he does admit the possibility of action at a distance18. The causeof the judgement, then, would not be the intuitive act alone, but the intuitive actand the distant object acting together.

Admittedly, Ockham says in the passage of the Reportatio quoted above19,that the distant thing in this thought experiment would be too far away to natu-rally cause an intuitive act by itself. But that might be because intellectual in-tuitive acts in human beings are normally dependent upon sensitive cognitionand sensitive cognition naturally requires the proximity of its objects. The dis-

16 GUILELMUS DE OCKHAM, Ordinatio, Prol., q. 1, ed. Gál / Wood, p. 71: «[...] notitia intuitiva rei et ip-sa res causant iudicium quod res est; quando autem ipsa res non est tunc ipsa notitia intuitiva sine illa recausabit oppositum iudicium. Et ideo concedo quod non est eadem causa illorum iudiciorum, quia uniuscausa est notitia sine re, alterius causa est notitia cum re tamquam causa partiali».

17 See on this PANACCIO / PICHÉ, Ockham’s Reliabilism cit.18 On action at a distance in Ockham, see in particular M. MCCORD ADAMS, William Ockham, Uni-

versity of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame (Indiana) 1987, pp. 827-852.19 See above n. 13.

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tant object, therefore, could not naturally bring about an intellectual intuitiveact in me because it normally needs the collaboration of sensitive cognition todo so. Yet this does not prevent the natural causal powers of a remote materialthing to reach my intellect, however distant it is. That would usually be of no no-ticeable consequence since the material object alone cannot cause any intellec-tual intuition or judgement without sensitive cognition acting as a partial causein the process20. But if God decides to bypass the usual natural process, He couldplay the causal role that sensitive cognition normally plays and collaborate withthe external thing in jointly producing an intellectual intuition or a judgement ofexistence. The main point here is that given what Ockham says in the variouspassages I have quoted, if my judgement in the case of the distant object, is thetrue judgement that the thing exists, as Ockham wants it, then the thing, howev-er distant it is, must have played a causal role in the production of that judge-ment21. Nothing prevents it therefore from having played its natural causal rolewith respect to the intuitive act itself, and this alone actually can account, ac-cording to Quodlibeta I, 1322, for this intuitive act having this particular thing asits object. This is a bizarre theory, admittedly, and a rather implausible one, butit is the only one, as far as I can see, that Ockham could consistently endorse inthe case of the distant object. And if we do attribute it to him, as we are invitedto by the requirements of consistency, then Brower-Toland’s Case 1 is not a gen-uine counterexample to the externalist causal account of the intentionality of in-tuitive acts: the object of my intellectual intuition turns out, in this case as in theothers, to be the external thing that naturally acted as the relevant partial causeof this intuition.

Case 2, in my view, is more interesting. It is that of the Ockhamistic intuitivecognition of a non-existent object, with the consequent true judgement that thething in question does not exist. In such cases, of course, the object cannot playany causal role, since it does not exist! How, then, is the object of such intuitivecognition fixed? Causality, apparently, cannot do the trick.

20 See GUILELMUS DE OCKHAM, Quodlibeta Septem, I, q. 15, ed. Wey, p. 86: «[...] dico quod visio sensi-tiva est causa partialis visionis intellectivae». That sensitive vision is said to be only a partial cause ofthe intellectual intuition (or vision) implies, I take it, that the external object itself is also a partial causeof the intellectual intuitive act. The picture, therefore, is not that the object causes the sensitive cogni-tion, which in turn causes the intellectual intuition, but that the object and the sensitive cognition joint-ly cause the intellectual intuition, which requires, as it seems, that the material object itself be naturallycapable of reaching the intellect without the mediation of sensation, even if it normally have no notice-able effect on it unless sensation acts along.

21 God, of course, could directly cause my judgement that the thing exists (or does not exist, for thatmatter). But this is not what is supposed to be happening in Brower-Toland’s Case 1: God’s effect on myjudgement, there, is supposed to be mediated somehow by an intuitive act in me (see again the passagequoted in n. 13 above).

22 See the passage quoted in n. 5 above.

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Ockham’s answer, nevertheless, does mention causality, but merely counter-factual causality. To understand this answer, it must first be recalled that an in-tuitive cognition of a non-existent thing is something that is not naturally possi-ble for Ockham23. It can happen only through a special divine miraculous inter-vention. In the natural order, the object of an intuitive act is always what caus-es it (in the relevant way). Yet Ockham does admit the possibility of supernatu-rally caused intuitive cognitions of non-existent objects24. The efficient cause insuch cases is God himself. But God, of course, is not the object of such intuitivecognitions. Here is, then, a real split between the cause and the object of the in-tuitive cognition. How much of a problem is this for the causal externalistic ac-count of the intentionality of the intuitive acts?

Ockham actually raises the question himself in various places of how the ob-ject is determined in such miraculous cases. And his answer remains the samefrom the Reportatio to the Quodlibeta. Here is what he says on the point in theReportatio:

«I answer in the following way: any intention of a creature which is caused by God canpartially be caused by a creature even though it is not in fact so caused. And thereforewhat is cognized by such an intention is this singular being by which it would have de-terminately been caused if it had been caused by a creature; what we get in this way isone singular being and not another one»25.

The object of a supernaturally produced intuition of a non-existent being isthe (possible) thing that would have caused this very intuition if it had been nat-urally caused.

Susan Brower-Toland’s point here is that counterfactual causality is not realcausality. If the identity of the one thing that would have caused this intuitive cog-nition if it had been naturally caused, is uniquely determined although it is not infact naturally caused, this should be because of some internal feature of the intu-itive cognition itself26. The object of the intuitive cognition, in this interpretation,

23 See GUILELMUS DE OCKHAM, Quodlibeta Septem, VI, q. 6, ed. Wey, p. 606: «[...] naturaliter cognitiointuitiva non potest causari nec conservari, obiecto non existente».

24 GUILELMUS DE OCKHAM, Quodlibeta Septem, VI, q. 6, ed. Wey, p. 604: «[...] cognitio intuitiva potestesse per potentiam divinam de obiecto non existente».

25 Cf. GUILELMUS DE OCKHAM, Reportatio, II, qq. 12-13, ed. Gál / Wood, p. 289: «Respondeo: quaeli-bet intentio creaturae causata a Deo potest a creatura causari partialiter, licet non causetur de facto. Etideo per illam intentionem cognoscitur illud singulare a quo determinate causaretur si causaretur a crea-tura; huiusmodi autem est unum singulare et non aliud, igitur etc.» (with my emphasis). This account re-mains unchanged in the Quodlibeta. See Quodlibeta Septem, I, q. 13, ed. Wey, p. 76: «Si dicis, potest [in-tuitio cognitiva] causari a solo Deo: verum est, sed semper nata est talis visio causari ab uno obiecto cre-ato et non ab alio; et si causetur naturaliter, causatur ab uno et non ab alio, nec potest [ab altero] causari».

26 See BROWER-TOLAND, Intuition, Externalism cit., pp. 327-328.

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would be uniquely determined by some internal feature of the intuitive cognition.Every natural created thing, for Ockham, even what is miraculously caused byGod, is such that it can be naturally caused, and that if it is naturally caused, it iscaused by one given thing and cannot be caused by any other. In Brower-Toland’sreading, this is due to the internal nature of each singular effect.

As to me, however, I am struck in reading these passages from the Reporta-tio and the Quodlibeta by the salient fact that even in the case of the miracu-lously produced intuitive cognitions, Ockham still insists that their objects areto be accounted for by some recourse to causality alone. In Quodlibeta, I, 13,most notably, the possibility of a miraculous divine causation occurs originallyas an objection to his purely causal account of the intentionality of intuitive acts;and his insistent answer is that the object of such supernaturally produced intu-itions, nevertheless is determined not by similitude, but only by causality (solumpropter causalitatem)27. I take this explicit rejection of any similitude account inthis context to mean precisely that the object of intuition is not determined bysome internal feature of the intuitive cognition itself. The question, then, whichis put to me by Brower-Toland’s objection is this: How can it be that no internalfeature of a thing uniquely determines what its singular cause is, but that nev-ertheless for any possible singular thing in the created world – including intu-itive cognitions – the natural cause of this thing is uniquely determined?

When the question is so formulated, the answer seems plain. What in gener-al uniquely fixes what the singular cause of a thing is, is not an internal featureof the thing itself, but something else: namely, the natural order as designed byGod. Two things, then, could be internally indiscernible from each other, evenfor an angel: yet, in the natural order, one of them would be caused by one thingand the other one by another thing. Ockham’s picture, as I see it, is this: God hascreated a natural order, not by promulgating general laws and then letting theselaws apply to singular cases in accordance with the internal features of the sin-gular things involved, but by connecting singular causes with singular effectsone by one so to say. This He usually does, of course, in such a way that maxi-mally similar – or cospecific – things should produce similar effects, since oth-erwise, the world would not be a manageable place to live in. But insofar as Godhas created an orderly world, for each naturally producible thing, there is one in-dividual thing – at least one possible individual thing – that is its only possiblecause in this natural order. This is precisely how Ockham’s idea of God’s orderedpower (potentia ordinata) is to be understood28.

27 See the text quoted in n. 5 above.28 On Ockham’s distinction between God’s absolute power and his ordered power, see MCCORD ADAMS,

William Ockham cit., pp. 1186-1207, and A. MAURER, The Philosophy of William of Ockham in the Light

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Ockham’s general idea of a natural efficient cause is a modal idea. An im-portant component of it is that, everything else being equal, the effect cannot nat-urally exist if the cause is not posited, but it can exist if the cause is posited29.Ockham wants it that natural causes naturally necessitate their effects. His veryidea of causality thus calls for some counterfactuals to be taken into considera-tion. Causal connections, otherwise, could never be known30; and he takes it thatthey are known. Yet the counterfactuals that have to be taken into considerationin order to pinpoint any given causal connection are very nearby counterfactu-als so to say, possible worlds that are very close to this one, differing from it on-ly by the existence or non-existence of one or two singular things (or groups ofsingular things). This is exactly what is to be done in the case of a miraculouslyproduced intuitive cognition: in order to get its object right, we have to turn tothe closest possible world where this very same intuitive cognition is naturallyproduced. This is not to say, though, that there is some naturally discernible in-ternal feature of the intuitive cognition in question that uniquely determines itsobject. As I read him, this is precisely what Ockham denies: no general knowl-edge of any thing could lead an intellectual observer to infer what the singularcause of a given thing is, on the basis of the internal properties of that thing.Someone who knew all there is to be known about the internal structure and theinternal features of a given thing, and about the general laws of the Universe,could not infer what the singular cause of that thing is, unless he took into con-sideration some external information, some information, namely, about the envi-ronment of the thing or about its precise place in the natural order that God hasdecided upon. In the case of a supernaturally produced intuitive act, then, itwould often be impossible for us – or even for an angel for that matter – to knowwith certainty which determinate object it has, on the sole basis of its internalfeatures, since the intuitive act in question would always resemble several pos-sible things31. Yet it does have a single object, according to Ockham, which isfixed by God’s unique way of ordering the world.

of Its Principles, The Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto 1999 («Studies and Texts», 133),pp. 254-265.

29 See e.g. GUILELMUS DE OCKHAM, Expositio in Libros Physicorum Aristotelis, II, 5, ed. V. Richter / G.Leibold, The Franciscan Institute, St. Bonaventure (N.Y.) 1985 («Opera Philosophica», 4), p. 283: «Etpotest per hoc sciri an aliquid sit causa efficiens alterius, puta si sine ipso non potest res esse primo etcum ipso potest exsistere» (with my emphasis).

30 See GUILELMUS DE OCKHAM, Scriptum in librum primum Sententiarum. Ordinatio, d. 45, q. unica, ed.G.I. Etzkorn / F.E. Kelley, The Franciscan Institute, St. Bonaventure (N.Y.) 1979 («Opera Theologica»,4), pp. 664-665: «[...] istud sufficit ad hoc quod aliquid sit causa immediata, scilicet quod illa re absolu-ta posita ponatur effectus, et ipsa non posita, – omnibus aliis concurrentibus quantum ad omnes condi-ciones et dispositiones consimiles –, non ponitur effectus. [...] Quia si non, perit omnis via ad cognoscen-dum aliquid esse causam alterius immediatam» (with my emphasis).

31 When Ockham says in a passage of Reportatio, II, q. 16, quoted above (n. 3) that a given smoke

could indifferently be caused by one fire or by another, what he means in effect is that for all we know,this particular fire could be caused by one fire or by the other: this is an epistemological thesis as the con-text makes it clear (otherwise, this would squarely contradict Ockham’s repeated assertion that ontologi-cally speaking any given thing can have only one determinate cause in the natural order). The relevantfeature, here, is that not even an angel could, simply by internally looking at the smoke and the sur-rounding fires, tell which fire it is that caused this particular smoke.

252 Claude Panaccio

As far as I can see, the reason why Ockham insists that any given singularthing can have only one singular cause, is that he wants it both that a singularcause should necessitate its effect, but that, nevertheless, the causal relation beno extra thing in the world besides the cause and the effect. Given these con-straints, he has to hold that in any possible world compatible with the actual nat-ural order, the singular cause of a given thing is always the same, if the thing isnaturally caused. Which is not to say, by the way, that God could not have cre-ated a different natural order where this very same thing (this very same intu-itive act, for example) would have been naturally caused by some other thing.Ockham, it seems to me, is committed to accepting such remote counterfactualsinsofar as they involve no logical contradiction. It is simply that these remotecounterfactuals are not relevant when we want to pinpoint the natural cause ofsomething within the actual natural order.

Despite Susan Brower-Toland’s objections, then, the externalistic causal in-terpretation of the intentionality of intuitive cognition in Ockham’s philosophyof mind can, and should, be maintained. Brower-Toland’s questions, however,appropriately force us to reach for a deeper understanding of Ockham’s view ofwhat the natural causal order of the world amounts to.

Intuition and Causality: Ockham’s Externalism Revisited 253

Abstract: Content externalism, as defended by Hilary Putnam, Tyler Burge and severalothers, is the thesis that the content of our thoughts at a given moment is not uniquely de-termined by our internal states at that moment. In its causalist version, it has often beenpresented as a deep revolution in philosophy of mind. Yet a number of medievalists (e.g.Peter King, Calvin Normore, Gyula Klima, and myself) have recently stressed the pres-ence of significant externalist tendencies in late-medieval nominalism, especially inWilliam of Ockham. Now this interpretation has been cleverly challenged in the case ofOckham by Susan Brower-Toland in 2007, with arguments focusing upon Ockham’s the-ory of intuitive cognition (precisely where the externalist reading had seemed to be themost secured). The present paper is a reply to this challenge. I first summarize the casefor seeing Ockham’s theory of intuitive cognition as a causal and externalist approach, andthen critically review Brower-Toland’s arguments against it. The whole discussion, as itturns out, sheds new light upon Ockham’s conception of causality and natural order.Key words: William of Ockham; Externalism; Intuition; Causality.

Mailing address:Department of Philosophy, University of Quebec at Montreal590 Lac des ErablesSt-Mathieu-du-Parc, QC (Canada) G0X 1N0panaccio.claude@uqam.ca