Actual, Potential and Imaginary Double Meanings: Equivocation, Amphiboly, Two Senses of 'Before' and How Premises Cause a Conclusion

Orientation #

He opens with “the next thing to see here”: the division of the places deceiving “from language” that follows the in dictione / extra dictionem division (prev. lecture). He ends: “we’ve got to study equivocation and amphiboly next time.” The handout “Reasoning and the Four Kinds of Argument”, p. 6, is drawn on for the syllogism passage near the end (verified source). The previous class set up the in dictione / extra dictionem division from Aristotle, Alexander, Albert and De Fallaciis; the next treats figura dictionis with digressions into the categories.

The class, in order #

1. Six fallacies from speech reduced to two, then three (“I don’t want your mind to break down”) #

Point: six cannot be understood as six; there must be a division into two or three, subdivided.

• Reading, bottom of p. 4: Locorum igitur sophisticorum sive fallaciae quaedam sunt in dictione, quaedam extra dictionem. In dictione when the principium motivum sive causa apparentiae is ex parte vocis; extra dictionem when ex parte rei.
• Ex parte vocis the moving principle is that one vocal sound signifies many things; this multiplicity is triplex: actual, potential, phantasticum (he renders “imaginative”).
• Actual: a word or speech actually has many meanings, giving two fallacies, equivocation and amphiboly. “Before”, “in”, “being”, “cause” actually have many meanings; De Koninck: every respectable word in philosophy has many meanings.

2. Amphiboly examples from theology: “the word of God is about the word of God” (“Word of God is not a name”) #

Point: a speech (parts signifying by themselves) can carry two connected meanings in one sentence.

• “The Word of God is about the Word of God”: Vatican II’s Dei Verbum is about Scripture; the Bible is the Word of God and is chiefly about the Word of God in the sense of the Son of God, or the Word made man. Two meanings, but Dei Verbum itself draws the likeness: as the Word was made flesh, so the Word of God takes on human language. Hence the Gospels’ primacy: chief witness to the words and deeds of the Word made flesh.
• “The wisdom of nature is about the wisdom of nature” (Shakespeare’s phrase for philosophy of nature; Thomas allows sapientia as synonym for philosophy): wisdom about nature vs. the wisdom nature gives us — Heraclitus: wisdom is to speak the truth and act according to nature, “giving ear thereto.”
• Illustration of nature’s wisdom: Plato and Aristotle say plants and animals reproduce to be like God, immortal in kind; Shakespeare’s sonnets urging marriage (“thy mother’s glass … the lovely April of her prime”); “little Maria” (a granddaughter resembling his daughter); Henry VIII wanting a male heir.
• Aside: fathers wrongly forcing sons into their profession; his own father’s business friend whose son flunked out of Amherst and was set up with a filling station instead.

3. “The knowledge of God” and “the knowledge of reason” (“God knows nothing else except by knowing Himself”) #

Point: amphibolous phrases often have meanings that are connected, like words equivocal by reason.

• “The knowledge of God is a knowledge of God”: the knowledge God has, and what it is knowledge of; God knows all else by knowing Himself.
• “The knowledge of reason is a knowledge of reason”: reason knows the definition of reason — not as with God, since we do not know everything else by knowing reason.
• Observation he is “struck by”: in words equivocal by reason there is connection and order among meanings; in words equivocal by chance, none. Amphiboly sometimes shows the same connection.

4. Three senses of “the wisdom of reason”, and their connection (“wisdom that directs reason”) #

Point: “wisdom of reason” has at least three connected senses.

1. De Anima III: wisdom about the nature of reason. Thomas: rightly called the third book, since here Aristotle starts to investigate reason as distinct from the senses (first clearing away: other outer senses? inward senses?). There Aristotle proves reason is not a body, unlike eye, ear, brain — “quite a thing to prove.” This founds the soul’s immortality: understanding the universal shows something immaterial, so the soul is in the body not as a part of the body.
   • Ethics prelude: whether the soul survives death depends on whether it does anything not in the body; if it can, its existence is not entirely in the body (Descartes’ cogito ergo sum true in that respect).
   • Generation of Animals: the human soul does not come from the parents (a dog’s soul does, from God through the parents); God creates a soul fitting just this body, which the parents began; one soul cannot pass to another’s body — husband and wife are two in one flesh, but not one soul. Poe’s Ligeia (dead wife’s mind taking over the second wife’s body) imagines what cannot take place.
   • Aside: the speaker at the Visitation House, a woman who survived an abortion her mother did not know she survived.
2. Logic, “rational philosophy”: wisdom not about the nature of reason but directing reason’s three acts. Sapientis est ordinare; Thomas: wisdom orders because it is the highest perfection of reason, and reason knows order. So the Organon is the wisdom of reason.
3. First philosophy: the wisdom reason can get by its natural powers. Pythagoras: “Don’t call me wise; God alone is wise”; Aristotle in the same tradition (God alone fully wise; we imperfectly). Philosophy names human natural wisdom, so God’s wisdom is not called philosophy.

• Connection: knowing the soul survives opens the door to separated substances (Thomas: souls, angels) — knowledge with more the character of wisdom than natural philosophy. Logic helps too: wisdom is about being and one (also true and good; truth primarily in the mind, good primarily in things, Metaphysics VI; books VI-IX about being); one main division of being is according to the way one thing is said of another, which belongs to logic; natural philosophy introduces the other division, act and ability [ed.: potency].
• Example of logic leading by the hand in the proof of God: things able to be and not be need something necessary before them; but something can be necessary through another — manifested from demonstration, whose conclusion is necessary because of something else (as distinction is necessarily before order: “nothing is before or after itself”). Hence something necessary through itself, God. Thomas adds: what is necessary through itself must be being itself, since a thing is through being.
• Thomas: Aristotle sometimes leads by the hand from logic (the way one thing is said of another), sometimes from natural philosophy (motion, the act most known to us: “things in motion sooner catch the eye”). The first proof goes from the most imperfect but best-known act to pure act. Metaphysics VII leads from logic, VIII from matter and form. — All this, he says, is not equivocation but amphiboly; Latin amphibologia, “terrible words.”

5. Actual multiplicity subdivided: name vs. speech (“two parts of meaning”) #

Point: equivocation vs. amphiboly rests on the fundamental logical distinction of name and speech.

• Both are vocal sound signifying by agreement; the name has no parts that signify by themselves, speech has at least two.
• “Berquist” (berg, mountain + quist, branch): two parts of meaning, not two meanings — so still a name.
• Common amphiboly example: “the book of Aristotle” / “my book” — the book I wrote or the book I own.
• Aside: Minnesota governors Elmer L. Anderson and Elmer Anderson; Swedish father, Irish mother matching Saint Paul’s Irish mayor and Scandinavian governor.

6. Potential multiplicity: composition/division and accent (“I saw you laying down”) #

Point: a vocal sound with no actual multiplicity of meaning deceives through how it is grouped or pronounced.

• Composition/division: “I saw you laying down” (who is lying down?); “I heard you walking” (was I walking, or did I hear your walking?). He lumps them together, but the text names whichever deceives.
• Accent/pronunciation: a word pronounced differently means differently — “awful” (“God is awful” / “my wife is awful”), “ravish” (positive and negative). Less common than composition/division.
• Order question: in actual, the name (equivocation) is put before speech (amphiboly); in potential, speech (composition/division) is put before the name (accent) — reverse order.
• Reading, top of p. 5: in ratione vero secundum compositionem et divisionem: duo et tria sunt quinque — “two is five, three is five?” Further examples: the man sitting stands up; Christ made the blind see; the dead came to life.
• So potential can be counted as three (composition, division, accent) or two.
• Asides: his brother Marcus’s pronunciation; Jerry Page, “Abdul from Istanbul”; the Chinese lawyer named Sue Me; Latin short and long vowels.

7. Imaginative (fantastic) multiplicity: the categories mixed (“they all have the same ending”) #

Point: no multiplicity actual or potential, but the word appears to mean what it does not because imagination is carried along by grammatical form.

• Walking, running, growing, warming up, cooling off, kicking, understanding, standing all end in -ing, so one is tempted to put them all in action. But: walking is changing place, reduced to where (place under quantity); growing → quantity; warming/cooling → quality; kicking → acting upon (poiein, whence “poet”; paschein = undergoing, being acted upon); understanding → quality (habit or disposition); standing, sitting, lying down → position (order of the parts).
• Aside: nieces and nephews “doing nothing” — being is not doing; being a nuisance is undergoing.
• Summary of the division: actual (two), potential (two or three), imaginative not subdivided — like Thomas dividing the categories, substance one genus, the others subdivided.

8. Albert on order of treatment (“actual multiplicity is before potential”) #

Point: why equivocation first.

• Actual multiplicity is before potential or fantastic; equivocation and amphiboly are actual, the rest potential or fantastic; so treat their paralogisms first. Equivocation is in a name (dictione), amphiboly in speech (oratione): name before speech, so equivocation first. Why the order reverses in the potential kind: “we’ll see.”

9. Equivocation defined; the senses of “before” and causes of each other (“diverse signification of one and the same name”) #

Point: equivocation is the diverse signification of one and the same name; illustrated by “in” (at least eight chief senses) and “before” (four senses).

• De Veritate q. 28, justification of the impious: does repentance come before the infusion of grace? Thomas goes to Aristotle’s senses of before, adding a fifth, cause before effect, and notes something can be before according to one cause and after according to another, since two things can be causes of each other (Aristotle on the four causes: healing, where end causes action and vice versa).
• Learning and knowing: knowing is the end of learning; learning is a maker-cause of knowing — so each is before in a different sense.
• Matter and form: shape makes wood actually a table or chair; but shape cannot exist apart, so matter sustains form — causes of each other.
• End is causa causarum; simpliciter Thomas puts end and mover before, since the mover acts for the end and unites matter and form. Learning is also material-like: disposing the mind to know; and (his guess) some prior knowledge is another disposition needed to learn.

10. Premises as cause of the conclusion; Shakespeare’s night and day (“not because of some third thing”) #

Point: in what sense of cause are premises causes of the conclusion?

• Syllogism defined: speech in which, some statements laid down, another follows necessarily because of those laid down. Every B is A, every C is B → every C is A.
• “To thine own self be true; it must follow as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man” — tested by the fourth tool of dialectic, consideration of likeness. Marriage: consent, i.e. mutual choice, not feelings, marries; being false to a spouse is being false to one’s own choice, so truth to another follows from truth to oneself because of it. But night follows day because of a third thing (the Earth turning), whereas the syllogism’s conclusion follows not because of a third thing but because of the statements. Like in one way, unlike in another — “kind of a beautiful comparison.”
• Premises are cause as matter (the conclusion’s parts C and A are in the premises; all parts are like matter) and, chiefly, as mover or maker through the middle term, which unites A with C but is not a part of the conclusion (the carpenter is not part of the chair). No B is A, every C is B → no C is A: same matter, middle term now the cause of their separation, “their divorce.”
• Close: equivocation and amphiboly next time.

His words #

• principium motivum sive causa apparentiae: the moving principle or cause of appearance of a fallacy
• actual / potential / fantastic (imaginative) multiplicity: the threefold division of multiplicity of meaning in speech
• equivocal by reason vs. by chance: meanings connected and ordered vs. merely coincident
• “wisdom of reason”: (1) De Anima III on the nature of reason, (2) logic directing reason’s three acts, (3) first philosophy
• sapientis est ordinare: it belongs to the wise man to order
• act and ability [ed.: act and potency]: the division of being from natural philosophy
• lead by the hand: Aristotle’s manuductions from logic or from natural philosophy
• name vs. speech: vocal sound signifying by agreement, without / with parts signifying by themselves
• composition and division: potential multiplicity from grouping; accent or pronunciation: from how a word is said
• poiein / paschein: acting upon / undergoing (being acted upon) [ed.: action and passion]
• position: category of the order of the parts (standing, sitting, lying down)
• paralogisms: the fallacious arguments treated
• causa causarum: the end as cause of causes
• fourth tool of dialectic: consideration of likeness
• middle term: what unites (or separates) the extremes; mover-cause of the conclusion

Texts #

Read in class

• De Fallaciis (attrib. Thomas), bottom of p. 4 and top of p. 5 of the class text: division in dictione / extra dictionem; triplex multiplicity; duo et tria sunt quinque
• Albert the Great on the Sophistical Refutations: passage on treating equivocation and amphiboly first
• Handout “Reasoning and the Four Kinds of Argument”, p. 6: definition of the syllogism (verified source)
• Shakespeare, “to thine own self be true … as the night the day” (Hamlet, inferred)

Mentioned

• Vatican II, Dei Verbum; Heraclitus on wisdom; Plato and Aristotle on reproduction; Shakespeare’s sonnets; Thomas on De Anima III; Aristotle, Ethics (prelude on soul surviving death); Generation of Animals; Poe, Ligeia; Descartes, cogito ergo sum; Pythagoras; Aristotle, Metaphysics VI-IX; Thomas, Summa (proof from necessary beings; first proof from motion); Thomas dividing the categories; De Veritate q. 28; Aristotle on the four causes (healing); Aristotle’s senses of “in” and “before”

His questions #

• How many ways will Aristotle distinguish deception from language, and can we understand six? Six; it must be two or three, subdivided — two (in/extra dictionem), then in dictione into three.
• Does “the Word of God” mean the same at the beginning and end of “the Word of God is about the Word of God”? No: Scripture vs. the Son of God — two connected meanings.
• What category would you put walking in? Not action: changing place, reduced to where.
• Why mention composition/division before accent, when equivocation (name) precedes amphiboly (speech)? Left open (“we’ll see”).
• Is learning the cause of knowing, or knowing the cause of learning? Both, in different senses: knowing as end, learning as maker.
• Does night follow day in the same way as truth to others follows truth to oneself? Alike in following necessarily; unlike because night follows day through a third thing.
• In what sense of cause are the premises a cause of the conclusion? Matter (parts C and A in them) and, importantly, mover through the middle term.
• Is the middle term a part of the conclusion? No, as the carpenter is not part of the chair.