Bentham. Michael Quinn
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‘in motion’ or ‘at rest’ and in designation of qualities. In referring to mental operations, we spatialize the mind as the container wherein they occur, and borrow names and images of real entities to designate them (1843: viii. 327–9).4 Abstract nouns are not only useful but essential, they permit the exchange of complex and subtle information relating indirectly to the exterior world, even though they do not designate actually existing objects: ‘A proper substantive, the name of a real entity, is understood immediately and of itself it offers a certain image to the conception. An improper substantive offers no such image. Of itself it has no meaning’ (2016b: 401).
Because fictitious entities are not associated with images that correspond to natural archetypes, they possess no obvious shared meaning. Insofar as propositions including such entities can have any meaning, it is only a connection with real entities that can bestow it: ‘The ideas we have are all ultimately derived from substances: that is, from the several natural bodies that surround us’ (2016b: 200). Fortunately, such connections are available for words like right and obligation, which form the currency of law, and Bentham’s three methods for defining those entities, phraseoplerosis, paraphrasis and archetypation,5 consist in making those connections explicit.
To make sense of a fictitious entity, it is necessary first to include its name in a proposition (phraseoplerosis). Modern philosophers have recognized the importance of Bentham’s insight that analysis of meaning was properly conducted at the level not of individual words, but of the proposition, anticipating later developments in analytical philosophy (Ogden, 1932: xlii–lii; Quine, 1981: 67–70; Harrison, 1983: 64–8). Paraphrasis consists in ‘that sort of exposition which may be afforded by transmuting into a proposition having for its subject some real entity, a proposition which has not for its subject any other than a fictitious entity’ (UC cii. 217 (1843: viii. 246); see also 1983c: 272n; 2016b: 386). In paraphrasis of normative abstractions, the real entities that do the work are the sensations of pleasure and pain (1977: 495n; 2010b: 286).6 Thus a man is under an obligation when he faces pain in consequence of failure on his part to act in a certain way. Harrison notes that a significant difficulty arises concerning the criteria by which we understand that the substituted proposition possesses the same meaning as the original, and concludes that for Bentham it is simply impossible to compare the import of 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