William of Ockham · Philosophy
Ockham’s theory of knowledge: all knowing begins with <em>intuitive cognition</em>, a direct acquaintance with the individual thing that lets us judge whether it exists. From this contact with singulars, <em>abstractive cognition</em> and general concepts are drawn. It is a medieval root of modern empiricism.
Having emptied the world of universals, Ockham owed an account of how we come to know anything at all - for if only individuals exist, then knowledge must somehow start with individuals. His answer inverts a long tradition. Many medieval thinkers held that the intellect grasps universals first and reaches the individual only obscurely, through the senses. Ockham reverses this: the very first and most basic act of knowing is a direct, immediate acquaintance with a particular existing thing. He calls this intuitive cognition (in Latin, notitia intuitiva). When you see this page, feel this warmth, watch this flame, you are in direct cognitive contact with an individual, and that contact is what lets you judge, evidently and with certainty, that the thing exists and has the features it has. All the rest of knowledge - memory, concepts, science - is built up afterward, out of what this primal contact with singulars first delivers.
Against intuitive cognition Ockham sets abstractive cognition (notitia abstractiva). The names can mislead, so hold them carefully. Abstractive cognition is not defined by dealing with universals; it is defined by abstracting from existence. In abstractive cognition the thing is present to the mind as content, but the cognition leaves open, and cannot settle, whether the thing actually exists here and now. When you remember your absent friend, or think about a lion without one before you, or entertain the concept ‘triangle,’ you have abstractive cognition: the object is before your mind, but its present existence is not given in the act. Intuitive cognition alone carries the mark of ‘this exists, now’; abstractive cognition brackets that question. General concepts and scientific knowledge belong on the abstractive side, but so does simple memory of a particular. The dividing line is not particular-versus-universal; it is existence-given versus existence-abstracted-from.
Intuitive cognition is Ockham’s guarantor of certainty about the world: when it is working normally, it delivers evident knowledge of contingent facts, knowledge you cannot reasonably doubt because the thing itself is present to you. But Ockham, ever the theologian of divine omnipotence, immediately raises a shadow over his own foundation. God, he reasons, can do anything that does not involve a contradiction. It involves no contradiction for God to preserve in you an intuitive cognition of a thing after the thing has ceased to exist - to give you the vivid, first-hand awareness of a star that is no longer there. In the ordinary course of nature this never happens; intuitive cognition is caused by, and testifies to, a present object. But the bare possibility that God could produce the experience without the object opens a gap that later philosophy would drive a wedge into. Ockham himself does not despair over it, but he has, almost in passing, formulated the sceptical worry that Descartes would make famous three centuries later.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Ockham grounded knowledge in intuitive cognition - a direct, evident awareness of an existing individual that lets us judge that it exists - and distinguished it from abstractive cognition , which prescinds from existence and underlies memory, concepts, and general knowledge. Explain the distinction,…
Leads to John Locke.
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