Are Intermediaries Needed in Cognition?

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,[1] the Bible tells us in the opening verse of the first book of Genesis, which narrates the literal genesis of the universe. In another book of the Bible, the Gospel of John, written thousands of years later to chronicle the epochal event of the Christian faith, the life of Jesus, a similar phrase was used, no less poetic and awe-inspiring but somewhat more opaque: In the beginning was the Word.[2] What was the relationship between God, his Son and the Word? Augustine of Hippo answers this question in De Trinitate. According to Panaccio, Augustine’s main idea is that in order to understand the Trinity, the human mind needs to be examined since human beings are made in God’s image,[3] and hence the “spiritual part of man must be the best image there is among all creatures of the Divine essence.”[4] For Augustine, the relation between God and his Son is like the relation of the mind and the mental word. The mental word is expressed externally by the spoken word, just like how the God is expressed to the world by an incarnation which is Jesus. [5]

Another major influence in the time of the early medieval philosophers is Aristotle. His De Anima was newly discovered in the 13th century. It contained his idea of the intelligible species and this needed to be reconciled with Augustine’s conception of the mental word. This was what Thomas Aquinas set out to do by first equating the mental word with intelligible species. This view is problematic because the intelligible species has a more permanent nature as habitual knowledge than the mental word which occurs only during the process of conscious thought.[6] Hence, Aquinas proposed that following the Aristotelian process of abstraction, there is a further act of the possible intellect to produce the mental word. In this model, consistent with Augustine, spoken words are signs of mental words. Later medieval thinkers such as Peter John Olivi disagree that spoken words refer to mental entities but instead refer to the “things-in-themselves.”[7]
According to Panaccio, a key debate among medieval thinkers was whether specific mental operations always require a distinct internal product […] whether a special mental object of intellection is to be posited as intermediate between the cognitive act and the external thing, or whether the external thing itself is to be seen as the proper and immediate object of cognition.[8]

This debate is important because it tries to resolve whether intellectual cognition is about mental or extramental things. This paper will contrast Aquinas’s and Olivi’s positions, explain why intermediaries are needed in Aquinas’s model, why they seem extraneous in Olivi’s, the benefits and disadvantages of either position and draw a conclusion on the relative merits of either model.

Aquinas’s Cognitive Theory

Aquinas considers material things to be comprised of form and matter. He posits that human beings have two processes of cognition – sensory and intellectual (see figure 2). Sense is actualised through our sensory organs, which cognise the particular forms of individual physical objects.[9] Our external sense faculties comprise sight, smell, hearing, touch and taste, while the internal sense faculties are located in the brain and include imagination and memory, according to Brower et al.’s account of Aquinas’s cognitive theory.[10] Sensory cognition ensues when the sense organs receive a sensible species. A sensible species is not “that which is sensed, but rather that by which sense senses.”[11] It is a material representation of the object which possesses sensations such as colour or taste. Brower et al. adds: “Because the reception of such [sensible] species involve a change or alteration in physical organs of the body and because such organs are acted on by particular material objects, Aquinas holds that the content of sensory representations is likewise particular.”[12]

Sensory cognition has two operations. The first operation is completed when it receives an impression from a sensible object. The second operation is completed when the imagination forms an image or phantasm of an absent or a fictitious object. These two operations of sensory cognition are combined within the intellect.[13] The intellect is a power of the immaterial soul and not of a material bodily organ. Aquinas assumes that the immaterial can only interact with the immaterial and the material only with the material.[14] Hence, the intellect, being immaterial can only understand immaterial things and does this through phantasms,[15] which is an immaterial likeness of a particular thing, an image or a representation.[16] A particular sensible species, which is material, is cognised as a phantasm in our imagination in the second operation of the sensory cognition.

The process of intellectual cognition can now begin, starting with abstraction to get universal forms of the extramental object. The active intellect illuminates the phantasms in the imagination, causing intelligible species to occur in the possible intellect. Intelligible species are the “nature of the species without the individual conditions,” that is, the universal form of the thing.[17] The intelligible species is the product of the process of abstraction. Just as sensible species is not what is sensed but the means by which the senses can carry out the operation of sensing, intelligible species are not what is understood but the means by which the intellect can understand.[18] This distinction is important because the aim of cognitive powers is after all not to understand things within the soul but the extramental world, and so the aim of cognition is not to understand the intelligible species but to use the intelligible species as an intermediary to cognise the extramental world.

Aquinas explains:

In order to cause an intellectual operation, it is not enough, on Aristotle’s view, to have the impression of sensible bodies. Instead, something loftier is required, given that ‘that which acts is loftier than that which is acted on,’ as he says. […] That higher and loftier agent that Aristotle calls the agent [or active] intellect […] makes phantasms drawn from the senses be actually intelligible, by way of a certain abstraction.[19]

Aquinas assumes, due to Aristotle, that what is active is superior to what is passive and hence sensible cognition being a passive process is insufficient for us to cognise things in our intellect. He also assumes that a cognitive act needs to produce an object.[20] Hence the active agent, the active intellect, is needed to carry out the act of abstraction on phantasms to produce intelligible species.

After the intelligible species is formed, the intellect can form the mental word, which has the same content as the intelligible species. The mental word is an internal word of the soul and is what is signified by the spoken word. To understand the mental word, we need to look at the spoken word as we only have access to the spoken word. Aquinas writes: “So if we want to know what the internal word of the mind is, we should see what is signified by what external speech expresses.”[21] 

He posits that the intellect has three components: the intellect itself, the intelligible species, and the operation of the intellect which is understanding. The mental word is formed by the operation of understanding, which happens in two ways. When something that is indivisible is understood, a definition is formed and when the intellect needs to compose or divide things, a statement is formed.[22] “The mental word, therefore is viewed by Aquinas as endowed with an internal logical structure,” comments Panaccio.[23] These definitions and statements are mental words which can be signified through spoken words. Panaccio notes though that the spoken word is in an interpersonal language while the mental word is not but is purely spiritual.[24]

 

While intelligible species are the means by which the intellect understands, the mental words are what the intellect understands. “It relates to the intellect not as that by which the intellect understands, but as that in which it understands. For in that expressed and formed word, it [the intellect] sees the nature of the thing understood,” writes Aquinas.[25] To understand things, the intellect forms mental words. The mental word is the product of an intellectual act or operation where the intelligible species is the input, and it is distinct from the act (see figure 1). It is the primum intellectum, the primary object of intellection, which means the extramental thing is cognised only indirectly through it and not directly.

The mental word is formed only after the intellect goes through a process of investigation, being “tossed this way and that.”[26] When it finally understands the nature of the extramental thing, it can then form a complete word. Since this investigation takes time, this means that the mental word can occur when the object is absent. The mental word only exists as long as it is thought.[27] However, once the mind’s attention moves away from this object of thought, the mental word, this mental word “drops out of existence.”[28] However, the knowledge remains available, in the form of the intelligible species which is impressed on the possible intellect.[29] This implies that the mental words will then have to be formed again when the mind wants to think about the object, once again through an act of intellectual cognition on the intelligible species.

To better grasp the notion of human mental words, Aquinas compares them to angelic and divine words as Augustine did, since the ideas parallel one another. As Panaccio describes: “The inner word is generated by the mind inside itself just as the Divine Word is internally generated by God, and, just like Christ, it can also incarnate itself in an external body.”[30] Just as there are three kinds of intellectual natures, there are three kinds of words: human, angelic and divine. While human and angelic words are made, since human beings and angels are made by God, the divine Word is not made. John writes: “The Word was with God, and the Word was God […] all things were made by him.”[31] Since the Word was God and since all things were made by God, so all things were made by the Word, which itself is hence not made. This has important implications. Aquinas cites Augustine, who states that before our word is formed, it has the potential to be formed. As earlier explained, mental words are accounts of things that have been understood. Understanding does not happen instantly but takes place through a process of reasoning or investigation. In this way, human mental words are potential before they become actual. In contrast, “the Word of God is always actual,” asserts Aquinas.[32] God does not have to go through the flux of reasoning, and so he does not have to ‘think’ to form mental words and then spoken words, but can immediately speak since the Word of God is already in existence and actual.
Another difference is that the human word is incomplete while God’s Word is complete. Man is unable to express all conceptions through a single word – we form many words to separately express our many ideas. For God, he understands everything including himself by a single act and through his essence, and so one Word suffices to express everything. That single Word is complete and there is hence “just one Word.”[33] This divine Word has the same nature as God, whereas man’s word is not the same nature as man. The understanding which we achieve through the mental word is not the same as the nature of our soul. It does not belong to the essence of our soul but is accidental to it.

Olivi’s Cognitive Theory

Responding to Aquinas, Olivi makes important contributions to our understanding of cognition. He begins by noting that ‘Word’ is logos in Greek, which means word, cause, notion, number or computation.[34] Hence he thinks that ‘Word’ in John 1.1 refers to the mental word since the mental word is the “cause and causal notion behind things that are made artificially or by design.”[35] The mental word is the starting point for the spoken word and also the artefacts made by human beings. While the spoken word is similar to the mental word, the mental word is even more similar to the Word of God. He agrees with Aquinas that we could learn something about it by comparing the Divine Word and the human mental word.

Olivi outlines an argument made by other thinkers on the nature of the mental word. These unnamed thinkers believe that the mental word is a product of an act of thought about an external object. Once the word is produced, the external thing can be clearly understood in it. The mental word hence becomes the primum intellectum, while the external thing becomes the intellectum secundum, or the secondary object of the intellect.[36] Since such an act of thought is the cause of the mental word, they account for it through the following mechanism: the external thing, either in itself or as a phantasm, is first conceived through a “simple apprehension.” The intellect then forms the mental word. When the thing is absent, the intellect thinks of it the way it would see a reflection in a mirror, not as the thing directly but as a representation. This mechanism is a simplification of Aquinas’s model as presented above, evidenced also by Aquinas referring to the mental word as primum intellectum.[37]

Olivi believes this account is wrong. He cites Augustine who writes: “Our word is our actual thought […] to say within oneself is the same as to think.”[38] According to Augustine, “through the knowledge that we hold in memory a word is born that is of entirely the same kind as that knowledge from which it is born.”[39] Words are thoughts and have the same nature as knowledge, having originated from knowledge. In addition, Olivi thinks that Aquinas’s account has contradictions. Logically, the mental word according to that account is something that must either be present in the mind after the act of each thought or is there only during the thought. For the former, Olivi says it is no different from a memory species, which is what is retained in memory after the act of thought.[40] Memory species explains how we remember concepts over time but are not themselves objects of intellect.[41] Hence the mental word in the first horn of the dilemma would be superfluous. For the latter, there is a contradiction since the word can only be formed after thought, so it could not be there already during the thought.[42] How then can we think since the word is suppose to be the primary object of the intellect?

Olivi thinks that extramental objects that are present can be cognised in a direct way by the intellect, that the primum intellectum is the external thing and not the mental word, contrary to Aquinas’s model. He asserts:

So regardless of whether the things and their relationships are present to intellect in themselves or are themselves absent but are presented to intellect through memory species, there is no necessity for another mirror serving as object in which the external things are presented to intellect itself. Instead, that would be an impediment.[43]

There is no need to postulate intermediaries such as intelligible species or the mental word as a separate entity from the act, since they are superfluous, an extra step or a “veil”[44] separating us from the extramental thing. Aquinas’s use of intermediaries is also not trouble-free. In addition to the contradictions noted above, to represent a species to the cognition, according to Pasnau’s account of Olivi’s criticism of Aquinas, the cognition needs to “attend” to it, which means it needs to focus on the species. Hence species must already be apprehended making them the object of cognition and not an intermediary, leading to a contradiction in Aquinas’s account.[45]

Nonetheless, Olivi foresees two ways defenders of Aquinas’s model would continue to argue for the need for intelligible species:
1) In our experience, we form new concepts which remain in us, which we can return to later, as if they are reflected in a mirror.

2) We abstract universals from particular objects, that is, we form intelligible species.

His response to the first objection is that the thing being cognised is conceived in the act of cognition itself. Both the object and the act of cognising are conceived together. To know the thing, the intellect makes an act of cognition which is the conception of the object – in the act itself, the object is formed together with the act and is indistinguishable from it. The object “exists intentionally or representatively in that act,”[46] not requiring an intermediary. After the act is over, the memory of the act and its object remains in us through memory species stored in the “matrix of our memory.”[47] Olivi however contends that this memory species is not the word, as it is only the form or representation of the object.

Likewise, his response to the second objection is that in the process of abstraction, no new object is formed that differs from the act of cognition itself. It does however create a memory species which we can use later to recall the thing when it is absent. In both cases, “nothing serving as an object is really abstracted or formed that differs from the act of consideration already mentioned.”[48] Pasnau explains Olivi’s idea as thought having a

representational content, and in virtue of that content one can speak of the object itself as existing intentionally in the thought […] thought can have content without having an internal object to determine that content. For Olivi, such talk of intentionality is not a way of reintroducing internal objects of thought. […] Intentionality is simply a way of referring to representational content.[49]

 

Olivi’s model of cognition is a simpler one compared to Aquinas’s, with the external object directly cognised as in Figure 2. Olivi is able to arrive at such a simpler model because he is not beholden to the three assumptions Aquinas has made:
1) The immaterial can only interact with the immaterial, and the material with the material.
2) What is active is superior to what is passive.
3) A cognitive act must produce an object.
Therefore, in his model,
1) The external object can interact with the intellect.
2) There is no need for a superior active agent, the active intellect.
3) In the act itself, an intentional object can be formed together with the act.
Pasnau summarises Olivi’s position: “A mental word is simply an act of thought. (…) Conceptual thought does not require the formation of a mental word; the thought itself is the mental word.”[50]

Conclusion

The key difference between Aquinas’s and Olivi’s theory of cognition is that for Olivi, intermediaries such as sensible and intelligible species are impediments to understanding how our cognition works, while for Aquinas, intermediaries are necessary as they are key steps in the cognitive process leading to the mental word. Olivi’s breakthrough is recognising that “mental representations require no representational object, because an act of cognition by itself has representational content.”[51] The extramental object can exist intentionally or representatively in the act, requiring no separate existence in the form of an intelligible species.

While Aquinas’s theory made quite explicit precisely how cognition works, it relies on what Panaccio called a “mind-made screen of representations between cognition and reality,”[52] with the objects of thought being mental objects rather than external things. Olivi cut these intermediaries out, thereby simplifying the cognitive process from a four-step process into just one,[53] by making the acts of thought themselves the mental word. His process is ontically stronger since it does not require Aquinas’s assumptions, the additional entities of phantasms, and the sensible and intelligible species. Nor does it require the intellect to comprise the possible and active intellect. Conversely, Aquinas’s model of cognition may be considered epistemically stronger, as the greater number of entities with specific roles can be clarifying. The reason why Aquinas’s theory of cognition has these entities was because he was building on Aristotelian doctrines such as the process of abstraction using the possible and active intellect, and the sensible and intelligible species. These doctrines are described as “dark and difficult”[54] by Brower et al., and indeed the entities postulated pose contradictions and difficulties as outlined by Olivi, and also face his charge of being superfluous. Moreover, Aquinas’s theory is ontically weaker, relying on intermediaries which ontic status is unproven and perhaps unprovable.
Olivi’s theory mark an important change in how cognition is understood. He is a forerunner of a move away from the mental objects being the primary objects of the intellect ‘back to the things themselves,’ a realist drive occurring in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century.[55] This is an important shift, with the merit of being more intuitive since when we think, it is intuitive to think that we are thinking about the extramental thing directly. With less steps and entities required, it has the virtue of simplicity. All things considered, Olivi’s model is the better model compared to Aquinas’s.

Bibliography
Aquinas, Thomas. Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate. Translated by Robert Mulligan. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1952. https://dhspriory.org/thomas/QDdeVer.htm.
———. “Summa Theologiae 1a (ST).” In The Treatise on Human Nature, edited by Robert Pasnau. Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co, 2002.
Brower, J. E., and S. Brower-Toland. “Aquinas on Mental Representation: Concepts and Intentionality.” Philosophical Review 117, no. 2 (2008): 193–243.
Cross, Richard. Duns Scotus’s Theory of Cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Olivi, Peter John. “Lectura Super Iohannem.” In The Cambridge Translations of Medieval Philosophical Texts: Volume 3, Mind and Knowledge, edited by Robert Pasnau. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. doi: 10.1017/CBO9780511606243.
Panaccio, Claude. “From Mental Word to Mental Language.” Philosophical Topics 20, no. 2 (1992): 125–47.
Pasnau, Robert. Theories of Cognition in the Later Middle Ages. Vol. 92. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

[1] Genesis 1.1, King James Version (KJV).

[2] John 1.1, KJV.

[3] Genesis 1.27.

[4] Claude Panaccio, “From Mental Word to Mental Language,” Philosophical Topics 20, no. 2 (1992): 126, doi: 10.5840/philtopics199220219.

[5] Ibid., 126.

[6] Ibid., 127.

[7] Ibid., 132.

[8] Ibid., 132.

[9] Thomas Aquinas, “Summa Theologiae 1a (ST)” in The Treatise on Human Nature, ed. Robert Pasnau (Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co, 2002), 158, line 38-41.

[10] J. E. Brower and S. Brower-Toland, “Aquinas on Mental Representation: Concepts and Intentionality,” Philosophical Review 117, no. 2 (2008): 201. doi: 10.1215/00318108-2007-036.

[11] ST. 162, line 20-21.

[12] Brower and Brower-Toland, “Aquinas on Mental Representation,” 201.

[13] ST. 164, line 106-111.

[14] Ibid., 163, line 71-72.

[15] Ibid., 153, line 20-22.

[16] Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate, trans. Robert Mulligan (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1952), 2.6, https://dhspriory.org/thomas/QDdeVer.htm.

[17] ST. 161, line 156-157.

[18] Ibid., 162, line 19-23.

[19] Ibid., 151, line 77–85.

[20] Richard Cross, Duns Scotus’s Theory of Cognition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 110.

[21] Ibid., 403, line 11–13.

[22] Ibid., 403, line 30-32.

[23] Panaccio, “Mental Word to Mental Language,” 129.

[24] Ibid., 126.

[25] ST, 404, line 37-40.

[26] Ibid., 405, line 81.

[27] Aquinas, QDV, 4.1.

[28] Panaccio, “Mental Word to Mental Language,” 129.

[29] Ibid., 127.

[30] Panaccio, 126.

[31] John 1.1, 1.3, KJV.

[32] ST. 405, line 87.

[33] Aquinas, 405, line 105-106.

[34] Peter John Olivi, “Lectura Super Iohannem,” in The Cambridge Translations of Medieval Philosophical Texts: Volume 3, Mind and Knowledge, ed. Robert Pasnau (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 138, line 8-10. doi: 10.1017/CBO9780511606243.

[35] Ibid., line 11-12.

[36] Ibid., 141, line 23-29.

[37] Robert Pasnau, Theories of Cognition in the Later Middle Ages, vol. 92 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 271. Pasnau does note that Aquinas mostly does not claim that objects are cognised in the mental word as in a mirror, having done so only in De natura verbi intellectus which might not be a work of Aquinas’s.

[38] Olivi, “Lectura Super Iohannem,” 142, line 18.

[39] Ibid., 143, line 18-19.

[40] Ibid., 144, line 26–31.

[41] Pasnau, Theories of Cognition, 92:273.

[42] Olivi, “Lectura Super Iohannem,” 144, line 35 to 145, line 4.

[43] Ibid., 147, line 25-30.

[44] Pasnau, Theories of Cognition, 92:236.

[45] Ibid., 237–38.

[46] Olivi, “Lectura Super Iohannem,” 148, line 9.

[47] Ibid., 148, line 16-17.

[48] Ibid., 148, line 31-33.

[49] Pasnau, Theories of Cognition, 92:275–76.

[50] Pasnau's introduction to “Lectura Super Iohannem,” 137.

[51] Pasnau, Theories of Cognition, 92:276.

[52] Panaccio, “Mental Word to Mental Language,” 132.

[53] Compare figure 1 and 2.

[54] Brower and Brower-Toland, “Aquinas on Mental Representation,” 195.

[55] Panaccio, “Mental Word to Mental Language,” 132.