El tejido empresarial como factor dinamizador de la economía

1. Mill versus Hamilton

Let us turn then to Mill’s attack on Hamilton’s philosophy of logic, specifically to his criticism of Hamilton’s theories of conceiving, judging and reasoning. In the mid-nineteenth century, as I said, these were still the central concerns of logical theory, and according to Mill, it is the simple definitions of correct concept, true judgment and valid reasoning that run Hamilton aground. Hamilton, says Mill, takes a concept to “exist as a separate and independent object of thought” and thus defines conceiving as a special grasp of these separate abstractions. (Mill 1872, 402) This is the heart of what Mill calls the “conceptualist” point of view, and it is, in his view, the common theme of all Hamilton’s mistakes; not only about concepts, but about judgment and inference and logic as well.5 Worse yet, says Mill, Hamilton also regularly couches his wrong conceptualist doctrines in formulations which confuse those doctrines with true accounts of the same matters.

Let us look at these briefly in order:

Concepts:

A concept, according to Mill, is a “general notion.” Indeed it is ordinarily an “agglomeration of more general attributes.” But Hamilton adds to this view that claim that a concept is “limited to the thought of what cannot be represented in imagination, as the thought suggested by a general term” (footnote to Hamilton’s edition of Reid; quoted in Mill 1872, 411). This, according to Mill, is a false theory. The truth, as Mill would have it, is that the representation of individuals is always primary. A concept is simply part of the presentation of an independent individual thing, a thing “depicted in imagination” (1872, 391n). As for the general components of a concept, says Mill, “we neither conceive them, nor think them, nor cognise them in any way, as a thing apart, but solely as forming, in combination with numerous other attributes, the idea of an individual object” (1872, 393).

All of this “nominalist” emphasis on the individual is supposed to be antithetical to Hamilton’s conceptualism. Yet, quite inconsistently, Hamilton also ultimately accepts a “nominalist” doctrine which sounds almost identical to this Millian position; for Hamilton states that “we find it

altogether impossible to represent any of the qualities expressed by a concept, except as attached to some individual and determinate object...” (Hamilton, Lectures III, 125, quoted in Mill 1872, 304). So Mill finds Hamilton’s theory of conception to be an unacceptable conceptualism wrapped in an ill-fitting nominalist mantle.

Judgments:

Hamilton holds — again wrongly, says Mill — that judging is entirely a “notional operation, consisting in the recognition of some relation between concepts,” the relation, namely, “that one of the concepts includes the other as part of itself” (1872, 427). It is, in the end, no more than conceptual analysis. Indeed, Mill is quick to remark that under Hamilton’s account of judging all true judgments must perforce be analytic (1872, 427-8). And we

can make only general judgments.

Moreover, Mill notes that in order to allow for any but the most trivial knowledge, Hamilton must also claim that concepts are overfilled with information. He must, for instance, include in the concept of a class “all the attributes which we have judged, and still judge, to be common to the whole class.” How else can he reconcile his conceptualist notion of judgment with the many truths we learn about the world?

In Mill’s opinion, this is a mistake that is built upon a prior mistake. Reality, according to Mill, always outruns our meager ability to define concepts.6 On this point Mill is a forerunner of modern an “anti- descriptivism”: He insists that the components of our judgments denote their objects quite independently of our ability to describe those objects by means of general concepts. And indeed, our judgments may in fact be wrong, and our concepts can miss their mark (see, e.g., Mill 1841, bk.1 chap. 5). Hamilton’s conceptualism, according to Mill, cannot properly accom- modate this possibility.

But, says Mill, once again Hamilton is not merely wrong in his views about judgment and truth, he is also inconsistent; for he defines a judgment “as the result of a comparison of concepts, either between themselves, or with individual objects” (1872, 424; emphasis added). This notion of testing concepts against objects is quite incompatible, says Mill, with Hamilton’s conceptualist stand. Once again we have conceptualist doctrine (in this case about judgment and truth) dressed in what Mill considers to be incompatible referentialist garb.

Inference:

Mill says that Hamilton holds the same variety of contradictory views regarding reasoning: On the one hand, Mill points out that Hamilton’s conceptualism forces him to claim that reasoning is no more than “the

comparison of two notions through the medium of a third,” that is, simple conceptual manipulation. Indeed, he must relegate logic to the narrow study of “pure consistency,” an empty “sportive” use of the intellect. Yet on the other hand, he does admit that “Reasoning is a source from which we derive new truths” (1872, 445).

Because of the generality of his view of inference, Hamilton believes that the laws of logic must be so wide as to apply even to noumena, were there any such things. This is a view which is at best otiose,7 but in fact again, inconsistent.8

So, in the end, Mill complains that “[i]t would hardly be believed, prior to a minute examination of [Sir William Hamilton’s] writings, how much vagueness of thought, leading to the unsuspecting admission of opposite doctrines in the same breath, lurks under the specious appearance of philosophical precision which distinguishes [Hamilton]” (1872, 430).

The first of those “opposite doctrines,” — and the correct semantic theory, according to Mill — is, as I said, a referential theory. Mill himself sums it up as follows:

A concept to be rightly framed must be a concept of something real, and must agree with the real fact which it endeavors to represent, that is the collection of attributes composing the concept must really exist in the objects marked by the class-name and in no others. A judgment, to be rightly framed must be a true judgment, that is the objects judged of must really possess the attributes predicated of them. A reasoning, to be rightly framed, must conduct to a true conclusion, since the only purpose of reasoning is to make known to us truths which we cannot learn by direct intuition. (1872, 430)

This is a straightforward and modern picture: The concepts which compose a judgment refer to objects and to the properties those objects might have. This notion of reference is the quintessential semantic relation. But that judgment is true only if the object denoted by the judgment’s subject term in fact has (ontologically, so to speak) the property denoted by the predicate. No knowledge or cognitive state intervenes. The semantic relation — reference — connects judgments to the world, but it is the ontological properties of the world and its components which ground the truth. The world, we may say, goes about its own business, and our epistemic task is to describe it perceptually and to determine by means of valid arguments the facts that we do not observe.

Moreover, this correct theory, Mill would claim, is opposed at every turn to that subjective “conceptualism” which bases truth upon our cognitive states and to the corollary theory which asserts that cognition somehow determines reality. Hamilton, says Mill, unflaggingly held to the discredited conceptualist view, but perversely refused to admit that this view conflicts with the correct referential picture.

2. Leibniz’s Conceptualism

Let us turn now to Leibniz and let me show you that he espoused conceptualist doctrines quite similar to Hamilton’s views, but that he combined these consistently with an ontological nominalism and a referentialist semantics.

Leibniz had a single governing image which dictated his doctrines about concepts, judgments and logic. He pictured a vast lattice-work of concepts.9 At the top of this conceptual hierarchy is a set of maximally general, primitive predicates.10 One moves “downward”, so to speak, by combining these basic predicates or their negations into increasingly specific compound concepts. The higher, more general, components are “marks” (Merkmale) of the more specific compound concept and are said to be “contained” in it. A simple predicative judgment is just the application of a higher concept to a lower, more specific one.

Singular and General Concepts:

At the very bottom, says Leibniz, are the maximally specific combinations, concepts which are fully determined with respect to each elementary predicate. Serially order these combinations and you get a sequence of “stages,” each complete in itself. That serial arrangement is an individual concept, representing an object (or, as Leibniz calls it, an individual

substance). Such a concept is a vast conjunction containing each predicate or its denial for every state of the object. Nothing further can fall under it; it is the ultimate infimum species. Thus such a concept can only occur in the subject place of a simple predicative judgment. It can never be predicated of anything “more specific”, for there is nothing more specific. But when a judgment does have such a complete concept as its subject, it is a singular judgment.

The only true individuals are those which are described by complete concepts dictating all the properties of the individual at each stage of its development. “It is the nature of an individual substance or complete being to have a concept so complete that it is sufficient to make us understand and deduce from it all the predicates of the subject to which the concept is attributed” (Leibniz, 1686, VIII). This conceptual completeness is the unity that, for Leibniz, marks a true object. To use Leibniz’s famous example, everything about Julius Caesar (from his birth, to crossing the Rubicon, to his assassination on the Ides of March) is coded in his individual concept.11 This is how conceptualism achieves singularity.

A general concept, by contrast, is one which lacks this completeness in one or both dimensions; that is, it leaves some elementary predicate undetermined at some stage. Such a concept, at best, describes a mere compound or “aggregate” and not a true object.

Aggregates have an externally imposed, ontologically inferior, “phenomenal” unity; they are not true objects. Leibniz is an ontological nominalist. “Being,” for Leibniz, belongs only to those truly unified entities which are described by complete concepts.12 Nevertheless, the important point for us now is that the difference between singular and general concepts is a question of degree, not of kind: General concepts are simply less complete than singular concepts. Grasping a concept of either variety simply amounts to having a full awareness of all of its Merkmale. And the general concepts are indeed derivable simply by omitting one or more determinate predicates from a complete singular concept.

Thus, Leibniz does foreshadow the Hamiltonian doctrine that concepts are composed of more “general attributes”, and he does believe that grasping a concept amounts to grasping its collected Merkmale. Moreover, a Leibnizian concept — be it singular or general — does indeed contain all of the information that there is about its object, just as Hamilton will claim for his own notion of concept a century and a half later.

Judgments and Truth:

For Leibniz, a simple predicative judgment is true only when the analysis of its subject concept produces the predicate concept: “All humans are rational” is true because the concept human contains the concept rational. And “Caesar crossed the Rubicon” is similarly true because unpacking Caesar’s full individual concept reveals that to be the case.13 That is, as Leibniz would say, the judgment is true when the subject concept contains the predicate concept.

Leibniz himself described this “containment theory” as an “intensional” theory of predication, because the set of general concepts that are contained in a given concept is called the “intension” of that concept. This is a classic “conceptualist” view of truth; for it is the component concepts of a judgment which ground the judgment’s truth. In this theory, all truths are indeed analytic in quite a strict sense of analyticity.14Once again, we have a clear forerunner of Hamilton’s semantics.

Logic and Ontology:

The great Leibnizian logical principles of the identity of indiscernibles, of

sufficient reason and of excluded middle are actually ontological principles

about the most general properties of objects. The identity of indiscernible follows from the fact that if two individual concepts are alike in all details, their respective objects must be identical. Indeed, though each individual object has its own particular nature, following the scholastics, Leibniz called this the objects “haecceity” yet there is no hidden aspect of the object’s

haecceity beyond what is contained in the individual concept (Leibniz 1686,

changes in an object’s status are already encapsuled in — and thus explained by — the object’s individual concept.

Much the same can be said of the logical principle of excluded middle. It, too, follows from the notion of a complete concept. For any given individual concept and any simple or complex predicate, either the predicate belongs to the concept or its negation does. Since, according to Leibniz, a full individual concept will include the relation of the individual with all other elements and aspects of the universe, the law of excluded middle will hold for all judgments about any aspect of reality. Anyone who grasps or could grasp such a concept could in principle determine the answer to any question about the world.

So Leibniz, just like Hamilton, espouses a conceptualism which governs both his notion of truth and his most general logical principles. But, at the same time, Leibniz also says that the we should “content ourselves, with seeking truth in the correspondence of the proposition in the mind with the things in question” (Leibniz, 1765, Bk. 4, chap. 5, 3). His is thus a referential semantic theory which bases truth on objects and their interrelations. This, of course, is precisely the conception of truth that Mill favored, — and it is the conception of truth that Mill thought to be incompatible with the intensional theory that Leibniz also held.

However, Leibniz’s espousal of a referential theory is not a aberration, nor is it incompatible with this intensionalism. Leibniz can merge these two conceptions of truth because he simply equates what I above called the “ontological” predication with conceptual containment itself. According to Leibniz, this ontological relation which grounds the truth of a judgment is just the relationship “by virtue of which one idea is or is not included within the other” (1765, Bk. 4, chap. 5, 2). For Leibniz it is an “ontological” aspect of an object that its concept be analyzable in the way that it is.

Moreover, Leibniz’s view of the semantic “reference” relation itself — the relation between the components of a judgment and their referents — is equally straightforward. When the component in question is a general concept then the referential relation is in fact simple identity. If the component in question is an individual concept, it is related automatically — indeed isomorphically — to its corresponding object. There is no

haecceity, recall, beyond the information coded in the individual concept.

Thus, in this Leibnizian picture a concept simultaneously can be an agglomeration of general features and the complete representation of a class and even of an individual object. Moreover, truth can be intensional and at the same time referential. All of this is held together by the single premise that there can be no aspect of an object that eludes its individual concept. The intimacy between being and judgment also guarantees for Leibniz, as we have seen, that the laws of logic can be most general and still apply to objects. So these apparently inconsistent doctrines do cohere in a single, consistent, philosophically respectable semantic theory.

Human Perception and Truth:

But, we can hear Mill object, those Leibnizian objects are scarcely the things to which we refer. Leibnizian individual substances are monads, indivisible, unextended, atemporal beings. It is Julius Caesar the monad — and not his body — that is described by his individual concept. And only God can grasp that individual concept, or any individual concept, in all its infinite complexity. That, in fact, is Leibniz’s paradigm of “intuition:” God’s direct grasp of all the components of a concept, no matter how complex that concept might be. (See, Leibniz, 1684.)

Indeed, from Leibniz’s perspective, we humans have almost no direct knowledge of those true individuals.15 We depend on sensory perception which, according to Leibniz, is merely confused thought. Individual perceptions, he held, are concepts, but deeply inferior ones. For an individual perception is always perspectival: it never presents its object all at once, and it is never complete either synchronically or diachronically.

Our human perceptions present only composite (and therefore phenomenal) entities. And empirical concepts, which we create from repeated perceptions, inherit this inferiority. They cannot have more in them than experience has provided. We can have “intuitive” grasp of only the most elementary and most general items, never of a true object.

Mill will complain about this Leibnizian theory — quite as he did of Hamilton — that the logic applies to noumena. Hamilton can take little comfort in this Leibnizian demonstration that conceptualism can coexist with a respect for the individual and with a referential semantics. If this is how we reconcile these semantic poles, by demoting perception to the status of confused thought, by expanding logic to encompass humanly inaccessible monads, by denying ourselves any access to legitimate truth, then both the cognitive and the referential semantics — however theoretically compatible they might be with one another — are of little interest to us.

Here, enters Kant to humanize Leibniz’s semantic views.

3. Kant’s Critical Semantics

The first thing we need to note about Kant is that throughout his career he worked fundamentally within the Leibnizian semantic framework.16 This means in particular that he retained the idea that true objects are complete and a-perspectival.17 And it means that he maintained a cognition-based notion of predication. (An object, Kant says in the Critique of Pure Reason, is subsumed under a concept when the representation of that object is “homogeneous” with the predicate concept [A137/ B176].)

But Kant’s central move in his “Critical” philosophy is anti-Leibnizian. Kant lets the notion of human perception play the role in his own philosophy which God’s grasp of an individual concept played for Leibniz. This means

that our human empirical judgments based upon those perceptions count as genuinely true and that the subjects of those judgments, perceived empirical things, count as legitimate objects.

This new “humanism” dictates Kant’s views on our issues of conception, judgment and logic. I will briefly highlight each of these Kantian views. The result in the end will be a unified theory which meets Mill’s demands, but that still equates cognitive truth and referential truth. Indeed, it will be a theory which foreshadows both the modern reference- based semantics and modern assertibilism. It will be, in the end, a theory challenging not only Mill, but the semantic orthodoxy that has flourished since Mill’s time.