Summa Theologiae I, Q.17 aa.1–2: Falsity in Things and in the Senses (fool's gold, likeness and deception, proper, common and accidental sensibles)

Orientation #

He opens straight into Question 17 on falsity, after Question 16 on truth, and closes saying they will not get to whether falsity is in the understanding and how true and false are opposed (aa. 3–4), and not next week either, “because I’ll be in London.” Verified sources place the class in Summa I q. 17 aa. 1–2, with a stretch read from his handout “The Matter and Order of Wisdom”, p. 11. The previous class finished q. 16 (aa. 7–8, eternity and immutability of truth) and the next takes up q. 17 aa. 3–4.

The class, in order #

1. Question 17: four things asked (“four kinds of opposite”) #

Point: the question on falsity asks whether it is in things, in the senses, in the understanding, and how true and false are opposed.

• On the fourth: there being four kinds of opposite, which kind are true and false? The same question can be put about good and bad, one and many, something and nothing, being and unbeing—“and they may not be opposed in the same way,” which “turns out” to be somewhat unusual.

2. Article 1, objections and sed contra (“it seems that falsehood is not in things”) #

Point: three arguments that falsity is not in things, one that it is.

1. Augustine, Soliloquies (an early work, “around the time of his conversion”): if the true is what is, the false is what is not; so no falsehood in things. (He admits he doesn’t quite follow the Latin grammar.)
2. Augustine, On True Religion: the false is said from deceiving; things do not deceive, showing nothing but their own form.
3. Truth is in things by comparison to the divine understanding (said above); each thing, insofar as it is, imitates God—“I am who am”—so each thing is true without falsity. “I’m convinced now, aren’t you? Especially that last argument, I like.”

• Sed contra, Augustine, On True Religion: every body is a true body and a false unity, since it imitates unity and is not unity; likewise everything imitates the divine goodness and falls short; so there is falsity in all things. (Brief exchange with students checking whether the passage says “unity” or “goodness”—both occur.)

3. Body of a.1: false simply vs. false in some way (“opposites are about the same thing”) #

Point: falsity is first where truth is first, in the understanding; in things only by order to an understanding, and simply only to the understanding on which they depend.

1. True and false are opposed, and opposites are about the same thing, so falsity is first found where truth is first found: the understanding. (In logic he says: where do you find truth? Where you find falsity—in statements, maybe not the same statement.)
2. What belongs to a thing as such names it simply; what belongs by happening names it only secundum quid (“the old distinction we’ve met again and again”).
3. So a thing is false simply in comparison to the understanding it depends on per se; to another understanding, only secundum quid.
4. Natural things depend on the divine understanding as artificial things on the human. Artificial things are called false simply when they fall short of the form of the art: an artist makes a “false work.” Example: the father-in-law’s home-made wine that tasted like vinegar—“That’s not really a bottle of wine… Not living up to the requirements of the art.”
5. Things depending on God cannot be false in comparison to the divine understanding, since whatever happens proceeds from its ordering—except perhaps voluntary agents, who can lead themselves out from under that order; this is the evil of guilt, and so sins are called falsities and lies in Scripture (Psalm 4: “Why do you love vanity and seek a lie?”); “the sinner’s life is a lie.” Conversely virtuous operation is called “the truth of life” (John 3:21, “who does truth comes to the light”)—he notes the unusual use of the word truth here.
6. In order to our understanding, to which natural things are compared by happening, things are false not simply but in two ways:
   • by way of the signified: what is signified by a false speech or understanding; so anything can be false as regards what is not in it. Examples: “the diameter is falsely commensurable with the side” (Aristotle, Metaphysics V); the tragedian is a false Hector (Augustine, Soliloquies)—the actor weeping real tears, “what’s Hector about him?” Contrariwise anything is true according to what is fitting to it.
   • by way of cause, “a more common sense”: a thing apt to make a false opinion about itself. False teeth: well made, they seem the real thing. Reason: it is innate to judge things by what appears outside, since our knowledge begins from the senses (“the natural road,” discussed before), and the senses bear first and per se on outward accidents. So things that in their exterior accidents resemble other things are called false by them: false honey (fel/“fell” [unclear in recording]), tin (stannum) a false silver, fool’s gold (“I’m rich, I’m rich!”), the stone that looks like a diamond (name not recalled; a student offers “rhinestone”)—the swapped ring “and then there’s all kinds of problems.”
7. Augustine (Soliloquies): we call false what has a likeness to something else; “the philosopher” (antonomasia for Aristotle), Metaphysics V: false things are apt to appear either as they are not or what they are not. So too a man is called false who is a lover of false opinions and speeches—the travel agent making the Lithuanian airline sound incredible; people who like to say false things and make them credible.
   • Story: at Laval a priest told him on April Fool’s Day that his old teacher (Kasurik [unclear name]) was going to Russia, with De Koninck’s supposed remark “I hope he keeps his mouth shut more over there than here.” He half fell for it because it was exactly what De Koninck would say—later it turned out he really was going. The point: the lie is credible because it is like what would happen.
   • Aristotle names a virtue in the Ethics, truthfulness: a man shows himself in words and deeds as he is.
8. Not, however, because he is able to imagine falsities—else the wise would be called false, as said in Metaphysics [ASR “seventy-fifth book”; likely V]. “So Thomas has made those distinctions.”

4. Replies to a.1 (“some non-being”) #

• Ad 1: a thing compared to the understanding is called true according to what it is, false according to what it is not; hence the true tragedian is a false Hector (Soliloquies II). Since in things that are there is found some non-being, in them is found some notion (ratio) of falsity.
• Ad 2: things as such do not deceive but give the occasion of deceiving [paralogizans], insofar as they bear the likeness of things whose nature they lack—“so there really is fool’s gold.”
• Ad 3: compared to the divine understanding things are not false (that would be false simply); compared to ours, false in some way—“no false teeth in God’s mind… no fool’s gold for God.” This was already made in the body; a sign he was drawing the distinctions there.
• Ad sed contra: a deficient likeness or representation does not induce the notion of falsity except insofar as it gives occasion of a false opinion; not every likeness makes a thing false, but a likeness apt to make a false opinion—“not to anyone, but for the most part.”

5. Digression: likeness as the cause of deception (“very easy to deceive people”) #

Point: likeness deceives, in stones, in arguments, in words equivocal by reason.

• Aristotle opens the Sophistical Refutations with likeness as a cause of deception; Plato in the Sophist (“I believe”) says likeness is a slippery thing. Aristotle’s examples: some men look strong who are not; women make their figures appear more than they are; one stone resembles another. So an argument can appear good and fail.
• Students are most easily deceived by the fallacy of equivocation. His set-piece from Physics I: Aristotle says the general is before the particular (we know confusedly before distinctly), yet knowledge begins from the senses, which know only particulars—“so Aristotle has contradicted himself?” They all think so. Resolution: “general before particular” means more universal before less universal; “particular before general” means singular before universal. “Socrates is a particular man” (individual) vs. “the dog is a particular kind of animal” (less universal). Even after explanation some students on the exam won’t distinguish.
• Second set-piece: is the whole always more than the part? Man is more than an animal (his mother disliked “man is an animal”; “I don’t mean he’s just an animal”), so animal is only a part of man; but animal includes dog, cat, horse, elephant—so the part is more than the whole? Two senses: the composed whole (the definition, composed of animal and rational) vs. the universal whole (said of its parts). In any one sense the whole is always more than the part—made up of more, or said of more.
• Boundary case: a word equivocal by chance does not deceive—“Roger Maris hit 61 with a bat; a bat is a flying rodent”—everyone laughs. A word equivocal by reason has likeness and proximity among meanings, “and that’s why you can be deceived.”
• Aside: the news of a tomb with someone named Jesus, a Mary, a Joseph—“so they must be the same guy”; the priest laughed about it at Mass; the names were common (Jesus ben Sirach, three Marys at the crucifixion). Likewise Toynbee’s picture linking the Eucharist to Greek grain worship. “Very superficial… likeness between them.”

6. Article 2, objections and sed contra (“whether there is falsity in the senses”) #

1. Augustine, On True Religion: if the senses announce as they are affected, what more can we demand? So we are not deceived by the senses.
2. Aristotle, Metaphysics IV (“the fourth book of wisdom… after the books of natural philosophy”): falsehood is proper not to the senses but to the imagination.
   • Digression on imagination as “a great source of falsity”: two witnesses of an accident agree more if they write it down at once than a week later, when imagination takes over; returning to a thing not seen for a while, “I’ve been imagining it other than it is.” Thomas often says false imagination is the main cause of deception on the side of the knowing powers. Two cases: imagining a thing other than it is; and trying to imagine what cannot be imagined (God—so one must transcend imagination; but also ability [ed.: potency]: Weizsäcker says what we imagine we make actual, so imagining ability falsifies it—“a difficulty with Anaxagoras and with the students of the elementary particles”). C.S. Lewis arriving in a part of England and his uncle asking “what right did you have to think” it would be so; his own high school → college → graduate school → teaching, none as imagined—“nothing in this life seems to be the way you think it’s going to be.” Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream on imagination and falsity. In the commentary on St. Paul Thomas adds that on the side of the will the chief cause of deception is pride.
3. In incomplex things there is no truth or falsity, only in complex ones—“unicorn” alone is neither; “unicorns are in the woods around here” is false, “unicorns are in fiction” is true (a student: “my granddad’s got a pet unicorn”). Composing and dividing does not belong to the senses; “they don’t make statements.” “Good argument.”

• Sed contra, Augustine, Soliloquies: it appears that we are deceived in all the senses by a likeness (similitudo).

7. Body of a.2: three ways a likeness is in the senses (“do I really see you?”) #

Point: falsity is in the senses only as truth is—a true grasp, i.e. grasping things as they are; and the likeness of things is in the senses in three ways (Aristotle, On the Soul II).

• Everyday people miss the distinction: do I see you, or your colour and shape? I see your colour and shape as such; you, by happening. Something else in me recognises you alive from your moving, talking, smiling.
• Sensible as such (per se) vs. sensible by happening (per accidens); and among per se sensibles, the private/proper (colour, only by the eye) vs. the common (shape, by eye and hand). Thomas’s three: (i) first and per se—colours and other private sensibles (“proper” often translated; he prefers “private”); (ii) per se but not first—shape and magnitude, the common sensibles; (iii) neither first nor per se but by happening—a man, not as man but as this coloured thing happens to be a man.
• His use of the distinction: philosophy and theology may know the same thing but not in the same way—already seen in the senses: eyes closed, he knows the shape of the cup by how far the hardness extends; by sight, by how far the colour extends; colour only by the eye, hardness only by touch.
• Aside: Einstein, as a scientist, makes the accidental sensible a hypothesis—so his wife’s existence is a hypothesis explaining sounds and smells; “twelve grandchildren, twelve hypotheses.” Claude Bernard’s Introduction to Experimental Medicine: hypothesis, deduce consequences, verify by experiment; so the philosopher has “two of the three,” the believer one—each judges others by his own way of knowing.

8. Where the senses are deceived (“the important thing to see”) #

Point: “This is the important thing to see.”

1. About private sensibles the senses are not falsely knowing except by happening and rarely (in paucioribus), from indisposition of the organ, which does not receive the sensible form suitably—as a corrupted tongue makes sweet things taste bitter to the sick. Examples: his mother’s “eat your orange before your candy”; his morning orange; wine tasting spoiled by fancy or hot dips, candy, lemon drops—“you don’t really taste the wine as it is.” Otherwise sweet tastes sweet, salty salty, rough feels rough.
2. About common and accidental sensibles there can be false judgment even in a rightly disposed sense, because the senses do not refer to them directly but by happening (fool’s gold: you sense the colour, not the gold), or because common sensibles are known through the private ones. Example: optical illusions—two lines of equal length, add the end-marks, and the bottom looks shorter; an exhibition (at Assumption) of the many ways discovered over time to make lines look longer, shorter, bent. “An art of deceiving the eyes, just as in logic there’s an art of deceiving reason”—Aristotle’s thirteen ways, six in speech, seven outside.

• Moderns who attack the senses do not make this threefold distinction. I see your colour, shape, and you—sensible in different ways; shape is seen because the colour extends so far (gases in the room have no colour, so no seen boundary); the table’s shape known by sight without feeling all round it.
• When you know one thing through another you know it less well; the senses do not reason (reason is the ability for discourse, knowing one thing through another)—the eye doesn’t reason from colour to shape—but in a way it knows one through the other, “a little bit like reason,” and reason is more deceived in conclusions than in beginnings.

9. Reply to the first, and close (“how they’ve been affected”) #

• Ad 1: for the senses to be affected is to sense; so in announcing as affected they are not deceived in the judgment by which they judge themselves to sense. But since they are sometimes affected otherwise than the thing is, they announce a thing other than it is—deceived about the thing, not about the sensing. Example: “How do you feel?” “Kind of cold in here”—“I don’t feel cold”; one who sat still has cooled, the other has been working; at Laval after Msgr Dionne’s five o’clock class, out into the Quebec cold, then the swim and hot shower.
• Restated: more deceived by accidental and common sensibles than by private ones; but even private sensibles can be deceived through the organ—smoking before wine at the Christian Brothers’ faculty dinners, worse for a non-smoker; “a regular smoker adjusts for that.”
• Stops at 4:30; aa. 3–4 (falsity in the understanding, opposition of true and false) not next week—London.

His words #

• falsehood / falsity — his rendering of falsitas; used interchangeably.
• the book on talking to himself — Augustine’s Soliloquies.
• secundum quid — “in some way,” opposed to “simply.”
• false work — the artist’s product falling short of the art.
• truth of life — virtuous operation under the divine order; he flags the unusual usage.
• by way of the signified vs. by way of cause — the two ways things are false relative to our understanding.
• the natural road — our knowledge beginning from the senses (recalled from before).
• the philosopher — antonomasia for Aristotle.
• truthfulness — the Ethics virtue of showing oneself in words and deeds as one is.
• paralogizans — things give the occasion of deceiving.
• equivocal by chance vs. by reason — the latter has likeness among meanings and deceives.
• composed whole vs. universal whole — the two senses of whole in the man/animal puzzle.
• book of wisdom — Metaphysics [ed.: Metaphysics], “after the books of natural philosophy.”
• false imagination — imagining things other than they are, or imagining the unimaginable.
• ability — [ed.: potency]; imagining it makes it actual and falsifies it.
• sensible as such / per se vs. by happening / per accidens; private sensibles [ed.: proper sensibles] vs. common sensibles.
• in paucioribus — “rarely.”
• reason — the ability for discourse, knowing one thing through another.

Texts #

Read in class:

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 17, prologue, a. 1 (whole), a. 2 (objections, sed contra, body, ad 1).
• Berquist handout, “The Matter and Order of Wisdom”, p. 11 (verified source; content not separable in the transcript).
• DHB Vol. III, The School of Aristotle, p. 460 (verified source).

Mentioned:

• Augustine, Soliloquies (bk. II), On True Religion.
• Aristotle, Metaphysics V (false things; diameter and side), Metaphysics IV (falsehood proper to imagination), Metaphysics [book unclear] (the wise not called false), On the Soul II (kinds of sensible), Sophistical Refutations (likeness; thirteen fallacies), Physics I (general before particular), Ethics (truthfulness).
• Plato, Sophist (likeness a slippery thing).
• Psalm 4; John 3:21; Jesus ben Sirach.
• Thomas, commentary on an epistle of St. Paul (false imagination, pride).
• Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream; C.S. Lewis (an autobiographical passage); Claude Bernard, Introduction to Experimental Medicine; Weizsäcker; Toynbee; Einstein.

His questions #

• Where do you find truth? In statements—the same place you find falsity.
• What do we call false teeth, and why? Because well made they seem the real thing—false by way of cause.
• Was the tragedian weeping really Hector? No—a false Hector, false by way of the signified.
• Has Aristotle contradicted himself on general and particular? No—“particular” means less universal in one place, singular in the other.
• Is the whole always more than the part? Yes, in any one sense of whole—composed of more, or said of more.
• Is “unicorn” true or false? Neither alone; “unicorns are in fiction” is true, “in the woods” false.
• Do I really see you, or your colour and shape? Colour and shape as such; you by happening.
• Can two powers know the same thing in different ways? Yes—eye and touch both know the cup’s shape.
• Don’t the two lines look the same length, then the bottom shorter? Yes—deception about a common sensible known through colour.
• What does the doctor mean, “how do you feel”? The senses report their affection truly; they can be affected otherwise than the thing is.