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Aristotle on Learning from Experience Torrey Wang

Introduction

Deflationism is an increasingly influential take on where Aristotle stands on the spectrum of

views about what the sources of our knowledge of first principles and universals are.1 Explaining

their provenance is crucial to explaining concept and knowledge acquisition, since our inability to

validate, say, the sources of our knowledge of universals, may count as permanent defeaters of our

knowledge claims about first principles, which seem to be constituted by our prior grasp of universals.

As such, Aristotle’s account of scientific inquiry in the Posterior Analytics, in which he articulates a

method of science by which we grasp universals and first principles, has been a rich locus of debate

for supporters and opponents of deflationism.

Often, this debate has been cast in terms of what for Aristotle is the relation that human

experience (empeiria)2 bears to reason (logos) and, in particular, nous, and whether experience in some

sense positions agents to grasp universals. Due to the amount of attention Aristotle pays to

perception as a source of knowledge of universals, and perhaps due also to the influence of

essentialism, which earned many followers in the 1960’s and beyond, many exegetes have cast

Aristotle as an empiricist3 whose externalism allows for a simple explanation as to how experience

                                                                                                                         1 For the purposes of this paper, I am assuming that concepts are universals, or, at any rate, that all universals must be representable in terms of a lexical concept, roughly, singular semantic units e.g., the concept DOG or COLLEGE, that denote, i.e., refer to, actual things named by the parts of a definition, which Aristotle restricts to substantial forms and universals (Metaphysics VII.11, 1036a28). Aristotle in many places suggest that this is his notion of universals. Witness his remark in Metaphysics VII.10: “But only the parts of the form are parts of the formula, and the formula is of the universal; for being a circle is the same as the circle, and being a soul is the same as the soul. But when we come to the concrete thing, e.g. this circle, i.e. one of the individual circles, whether sensible or intelligible (I mean by intelligible circles the mathematical, and by sensible circles those of bronze and of wood), of these there is no definition, but they are known by the aid of thought or perception; and when they go out of our actual consciousness it not clear whether they exist or not; but they are always stated and cognized by means of the universal formula. 2 Hereafter, I mean to refer to human experience whenever I speak generally of experience or empeiria. 3 Jonathan Barnes, Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, 2nd ed., trans. Jonathan Barnes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 270.

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can play the essential role of grasping universals which is a first step toward acquiring knowledge of

first principles.

Michael Frede, a prominent detractor of empiricism, lends voice to a dissenting view called

deflationism in his seminal article, “Aristotle’s Rationalism,”4 with an appeal to II.19 of the Posterior

Analytics, which he thinks provides evidence for his position:

[I]n [Posterior Analytics] B19, the crucial word, ‘logos’, . . . is used to refer to precisely the disposition of the mind or soul in virtue of which…we know first principles, and [Aristotle] talks of this disposition as something we come to acquire. …Aristotle assumes that we are not born with reason, but only acquire it. …[T]o have reason, to be fully rational or reasonable, is to know first principles.

…On [Aristotle’s] view…reason develops out of our ability to discriminate perceptually and to remember. Given the way human beings perceive, given their powerful memory, which allows them to develop a powerful experience, they come to form the right concepts and thus to acquire reason. (170)

The theses reflected in this passage—that (a) reason is the acquired ability to “recognize

things for what they really are” (167), and that (b) this recognition is consequent upon a possession

of interlocking concepts that relates the would-be knower to just their intrinsically salient features—

are tenets which have a prominent place in the doctrine of deflationism.5 Both tenets derive in one

way or another from the belief of deflationists that Aristotle holds that one’s ability to acquire

distinct concepts is intimately linked with his ability to conceive the general principles or features

which separate them from each other as a matter of metaphysical necessity. But perhaps the feature

which most unites deflationists is their view that “people with experience lack universals

altogether,”6 which provides the inspiration to their name.7 Thus, deflationists impute to Aristotle

                                                                                                                         4 Michael Frede, “Aristotle's Rationalism,” in Rationality in Greek Thought, ed. Michael Frede and Gisela Striker (1996; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 157-73. 5 See LaBarge, op. cit., 28-30. 6 David Charles, Aristotle On Meaning and Essence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 152-5. 7 While Frede purports to opt for a slightly more liberal view, on which men of experience may be aware of universals, albeit in an inchoate way, it is best to construe Frede’s efforts in this regard as mere semantic distancing. For if Frede objects to the notion that experience yields universals per se, and what is important to him for Aristotle for the purposes of determining whether an individual has genuine reason is whether he grasps the first principles or essences which explicate such universals (which it is), then, since he allows that even those who grasp first principles may nevertheless

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the view that our ordinary ability to form linguistic concepts on the way to acquiring experiential

knowledge which we may afterwards parlay into knowledge of universals is due to the fact that the

discriminative powers which are common to human beings in the state of experience are so

powerful as to by and large guarantee the formation of those concepts. Nevertheless, deflationists

argue that for Aristotle, it is only when a sufficient array of concepts that are related to each other in

their natural, metaphysical order has been gleaned by nous, which they claim is a further step beyond

experience, does one actually come to know what kinds of things their concepts are essentially

about.8

In this paper, I draw attention to a few problems that afflict the deflationist’s account of

Aristotle’s view of experience’s connectedness to the world of universals based on passages found in

works that relate to his thoughts on methodology. Thematically speaking, first, I look at some

exegetical difficulties which beset any account that relies on selective readings of Aristotle’s remarks

on experience to promote an ultima facie rationalist reading of the function that he takes perceptual

experience to serve in knowledge acquisition. Here, I extract an incipient account found in Posterior

Analytics I.1 to guide a reconstruction of what Aristotle might have thought an account of

conceptual acquisition looks like. Second, I present an argument against deflationism which shows

that the knowledge framework that results from clearing the difficulties formerly presented reveals

the distinctively empiricist character of Aristotle’s conception of concept-acquisition. In this section,

I cross-reference Aristotle’s remarks in such treatises as Physics and Metaphysics with those in his

Posterior Analytics to show that perceptual experience is what explains concept-acquisition.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       on occasion erroneously ascribe knowledge to themselves, it must be the case that he thinks Aristotle believes that men of experience never grasp features of universals which conduce to knowledge of first principles. (See Charles, op. cit., 160.) 8 Frede, op. cit., 165-6.

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The following principle thus encapsulates the main deflationist thesis I will be challenging

throughout this paper:

D The rudimentary awareness of universals that men of experience have by way of perceptual discrimination and memory does not refer to their explanatorily relevant features. (Frede, op. cit., 164)

I shall refer occasionally to the negation of D as the “empiricist’s thesis,” or principle E.

I. Some Points of Contention

We have seen in broad strokes what deflationism is centrally a view about: viz., Aristotle

holds that the cognitive processes and abilities that are engaged in experience are not conducive for

concept acquisition. (I say “conducive” because how conducive is itself a position that exists along a

gradation; there are many degrees of empiricism, just as there are many degrees of deflationism.) To

see, however, why deflationists are concerned to deny even that men of experience may acquire

“low-level” concepts which help to spur scientific inquiry, a claim that is in theory compatible with

the former, we must go through some of their main points of contention. The following passage

from Metaphysics I.1 is a good place to begin with.

…And art arises, when from many notions gained by experience one universal judgment about similar objects is produced. For to have a judgment that when Callias was ill of this disease this did him good. And similarly in the case of Socrates and in many individual cases, is a matter of experience; but to judge that it has done good to all persons of a certain constitution, marked off in one class, when they were ill of this disease, e.g. to phlegmatic or bilious people when burning with fever,--this is a matter of art.

With a view to action experience seems in no respect inferior to art, and we even see men of experience succeeding more than those who have theory without experience. The reason is that experience is knowledge of individuals, art of universals, and actions and productions are all concerned with the individual; for the physician does not cure a man, except in an incidental way, but Callias or Socrates or some other called by some such individual name, who happens to be a man. If, then, a man has theory without experience, and knows the universal but does not know the individual included in this, he will often fail to cure; for it is the individual that is to be cured. But yet we think that knowledge and understanding belong to art rather than to experience, and we suppose artists to be wiser than men of experience (which implies that wisdom depends in all cases rather on

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knowledge); and this because the former know the cause, but the latter do not. (981a5-27)

On its face, deflationists can cite from this passage at least the following claims in support of

D: (a) Aristotle seems here to be elaborating upon an earlier description of experience at 980b26-

981a1, in which he suggests that, functionally speaking, it is nothing more than the bare ability to

retain percepts in a way such that repeated instantiations of relevantly similar percepts are collated in

a subject as a single extended memory; (b) Aristotle appears to appeal to the state of art specifically

to account for the man of experience’s ability to advance to a higher cognitive state that allows him

to describe the superficial resemblances among the isolated particulars without referring to them,

i.e., by stating only the explanatorily relevant features which serve to unite, in this case, Socrates and

Callias, under the universals which give rise to the man of experience’s mere observational report.

As Scott LaBarge points out, this passage appears to preempt the possibility that the man of

experience could have the ability to grasp universals just by way of concentrating on his knowledge

of particulars.9 Evidently, if it turned out that this was all Aristotle has to say on the relationship

between experience and our ability to cognize universals, we would have no choice but to accept D.

While men of experience can demonstrate in respect of what features Socrates and Callias are similar

in the sense of pointing out their surface similarities, e.g., their fairness of skin, for the purposes of

explaining why a certain medication benefits them, lacking a theory which truly unifies them, he

cannot be said to have a universal which gives even a partial account of why this is.10

However, the following passage from Nicomachean Ethics VI.6 distinguishing men of practical

wisdom from men of experience appears to partially confute this claim:

…Nor is practical wisdom concerned with universals only—it must also recognize the particulars; for it is practical, and practice is concerned with particulars. This is why some who do not know, and

                                                                                                                         9 LaBarge, op. cit., 25. 10 Nicomachean Ethics VII.3, 1147a19-24.

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especially those who have experience, are more practical than others who know; for if a men knew that light meats are digestible and wholesome, but did not know which sorts of meat are light, he would not produce health, but the man who knows that chicken is wholesome is more likely to produce health. (1141b16-20)

While many commentators have picked up on the conspicuously deflationist tenor that is struck

here, a careful perusal of this passage finds additionally that Aristotle ascribes to the man of

experience portrayed here a judgment that includes a universal, viz., the universal “chicken” in the

judgment “chicken is wholesome.” Unlike the man of experience from Metaphysics I.1 whom we’ve

considered, who grasps only that different individuals respond well to a particular medication, the

man of experience depicted here possesses a universal which in reality bears a scientifically explicable

connection to the overarching principle which explains its connection to health production, that of

chicken being a light meat. Given, as we have noted, that one source of difficulty for construing

Aristotle as an empiricist is that he seems oftentimes to posit an impenetrable barrier between

experience and access to the world of universals, this finding is especially significant for defenders of

empiricism. Contra D, then, one might think that experience does provide a more substantial

connection to the world of universals than they let on.

But perhaps D can be interpreted in light of this passage as the claim that knowledge of a

single, isolated universal is not possible, since knowing the essential features of one universal

necessarily presupposes knowledge of a whole host of connected universals which display what

essentially distinguishes them from each other. And this ability, one might argue, cannot be acquired

without significant knowledge already of the subject in a person by way of knowledge of its first

principles. In this way, the argument that the type of concept acquisition that is depicted in this

passage does not conduce to grasping universals might be defended by putting forth the claim that

(i), the universal grasped here is low-level, in the sense that lacking conscious awareness of the

salient features of the essence of chicken which supports our attribution of wholesomeness to the

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meat of chicken, we do not have episteme of the concept of chicken. A different but related line of

attack open to deflationists is that (ii), the sort of cognition which explains our ability to grasp low-

level universals in experience does not account for our actual transition to a higher state which

draws us away from mere knowledge-how of how semantic terms function in a community of

speakers to knowledge-that of what those terms essentially refer to, viz., natural kinds and the

essences which are their principles.

As regards (i), this amounts to an accusation that genuine conceptual acquisition arises only

when we are able to identify the salient features of a concept by way of those of previously acquired

concepts. This charge appears to receive wide support from Aristotle’s many statements, especially

those found throughout his Posterior Analytics, which often seem to restrict the power of grasping

universals to the faculty of reason.11 (ii) charges essentially that experience is a state of mind in which

individuals who intelligibly wield run-of-the-mill linguistic concepts don’t even purport to be

distinguishing features beyond what are perceived in sensory experience in the way that bona fide

concept acquisition requires. Instead, they assume just that the concepts they ordinarily deploy make

a reference only to the observed features which give rise to their formation in their community’s

shared vocabulary, and not to actual kinds and the essences which define them. This requirement

imposes significant epistemic constraints on what counts as grasping a universal, so that necessarily,

one has to graduate from the state of experience—whether it be to techne, phronesis, episteme, sophia, or

nous—in order to count as truly grasping one.

It is clear that with the preceding augmentation of the deflationist’s initial construal of what

Aristotle counts as grasping a universal, D acquires some immunity to the rejoinder previously

brought forth by the empiricist by way of Nicomachean Ethics VI.7: mediation from a state distinct

                                                                                                                         11 E.g., Aristotle states in Posterior Analytics I.31, 87b33-5, that “since demonstrations are universal, and universals cannot be perceived, it is clear that you cannot understand anything through perception.”

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from experience is needed to account for the kind of awareness of universals in which we

consciously represent them as indicating the necessary features of the kind being referred to through

them. Thus, when such a representation occurs, necessarily, the subject of that representation has

departed from the state of experience. By contrast, the awareness of universals in the sense

suggested by the man of experience in Nicomachean Ethics VI.7 can now be explained away in this

vein. Being situated in experience, the features that he latches on to in the universals he is said to

grasp are precisely those which do not suggest their membership in a genuinely unifying kind, which

is just what is needed for him to begin a scientific inquiry into essences and first principles. I shall

refer to universals grasped in the former sense as universals known “per se” so as to distinguish them

from those grasped in the latter sense, which I refer to as universals known “accidentally.”12

Is there evidence to back up this strengthened rebuttal? It appears again that the answer is

“yes,” although this time, it comes from a rather questionable reading of a controversial passage

found in the Posterior Analytics:

… [A] Some [animals] can still hold the percepts in their soul after perceiving them. When this occurs often, there is then a further difference: [B] [i] some animals come to have an account [logos] based on the retention of these items, and [ii] others do not. Thus from perception there comes memory, as we call it, [C] and from memory (when it occurs often in connection with the same item) experience; for memories which are many in number form a single experience. [D] [i] And from experience, [ii] or from all the universal which has come to rest in the soul (the one apart from the many, i.e. whatever is one and the same in all these items), [iii] there comes a principle of skill [techne] or understanding [episteme]—of skill if it deals with how things come about, of understanding if it deals with how things are. (100a3-9)

Deflationists contend that the key part of this passage to hone in on in connection with

Metaphysics I.1 is the transition between (id) and (iid). According to Charles and Frede, the “or” in

between them should be read as a corrective which serves to immediately retract Aristotle’s

attribution of the ability to yield universals in thought to experience and instead assign it to a

                                                                                                                         12 Aristotle attests to this type of distinction in many places, e.g., Metaphysics VII.4 and Nicomachean Ethics VI.3, 1139b25-34.

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different state in which it is possible for universals to rest in one’s soul for use in some productive or

theoretical domain.13 As we shall see, however, the reasons for accepting this suffer from some

especially thorny interpretive problems which make an appeal to it unsuitable for deciding on the

issue of the extent of the connection experience has to universals.

Having seen what the strengthened version of deflationism looks like, I will take up the two

rejoinders which we saw deflationists provide (see pp. 6-7) that give rise to their demand that any

account for Aristotle’s view about what explains our ability to grasp universals be given in terms of a

state that is distinct from experience. These are, again, the claims that (i) acquisition of individual

concepts for Aristotle requires that one have prior knowledge of the first principles specific to the

domain of knowledge in question, and (ii), the knowledge-how that men of experience possess as to

how semantic terms function within their linguistic community does not, for Aristotle, presuppose a

concern with or even awareness of the knowledge-that of what those terms essentially refer to, viz.,

natural kinds and the essences which are their principles.

In the following section, I adduce textual evidence from the Posterior Analytics which suggest

that (i) is false, and which gesture toward the view that Aristotle allows that concepts can be

acquired individually. In §3, I show why (ii) is false by referring to parts of Physics and the Posterior

Analytics, and Metaphysics, which suggest that knowledge of linguistic terms presupposes awareness of

the existence of the kinds being referred to. In § 5, I further motivate the account limned in §§3-4 by

presenting an argument from learning which shows how Aristotle might have supported the view

therein by an appeal to nonconceptual content, a theory in the philosophy of perception on which

the contents of experience are not strictly conceptual. In § 6, I draw an implication my account has

with respect to a standing dispute about the role of dialectic in scientific inquiry, and suggest

                                                                                                                         13 Charles, op. cit., 149-51.

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nonconceptualism’s role in mediating it. The upshot is that if my previous arguments are any good, I

will have shown that Aristotle is much more of an empiricist than deflationism admits, and so that,

to that extent, deflationism is false.

II. A Preliminary Account of Concept Acquisition in Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics

Though incomplete and in many places obscure, the picture of cognitive development that

Aristotle’s methodological and scientific treatises present reveals some consistent points of emphasis

and overlap. One of these is Aristotle’s categorical rejection of the idea that a scientific

demonstration can carry on ad infinitum in any domain of inquiry which pretends to yield what he

calls knowledge “simpliciter.”14 This is because for Aristotle, whichever domain the study of which is

able to yield the most explanatorily sufficient knowledge must ultimately lead us back to its

fundamental first principles or causes; and these, being universal, seem not to be knowable by

reference to sensory particulars. Another one is his claim in De Anima III.8 that “no one can learn or

understand anything in the absence of sense”?15 Given these apparently conflicting statements, how

does Aristotle account for the possibility of anyone knowing anything simpliciter?

We might suppose that Aristotle can help himself to Plato’s innatism, but, ever the

naturalist, he finds such an approach too fantastical and summarily rejects it. Indeed, Aristotle’s

contempt for this doctrine is well-documented, embodied by his remarks to the effect that it would

be “absurd” to suppose that we “possess pieces of knowledge more exact than demonstration

without its being noticed.”16 To acquit Aristotle of hypocrisy on this matter, however, we must show

what alternative to innatism Aristotle proposes in its stead. For this aspect of Aristotle’s thought, the

                                                                                                                         14 Posterior Analytics I.24. 15 432a7-8. 16 Posterior Analytics II.19, 99b29-30.

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simplest explanation, I think, is the best explanation, and I hope that this will be made evident as we

delve deeper into Aristotle’s writings on methodology.

To begin with, then, consider the following passage from I.1 of Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics:

…It is possible to acquire knowledge when you have acquired knowledge of some items earlier and get knowledge of the others at the very same time (e.g. items which in fact fall under a universal of which you possess knowledge). Thus you already knew that every triangle has angles equal to two right angles; but you got to know that this figure in the semicircle is a triangle at the same time as you were being led to the conclusion. In some cases learning occurs in this way, and the last term does not become known through the middle term—this occurs when the items are in fact particulars and are not said of any underlying subject.

…Before you are led to the conclusion, i.e. before you are given a deduction, you should perhaps be said to understand it in one way—but in another way not. If you do not know whether there was such-and-such a thing simpliciter, how could you have known that it had two right angles simpliciter? Yet it is plain that you do understand it in this sense: you understand it universally—but you do not understand it simpliciter. (Otherwise the puzzle in the Meno will arise: you will learn either nothing or what you already know.) (71a7-31)

The “puzzle in the Meno” is a puzzle about knowledge acquisition the most well-known

formulation of which is found in Plato’s eponymous dialogue. Its basic idea is that if we don’t know

what it is we are searching for, we cannot know when we’ve found it. But if we know what we’re

looking for, then we don’t need to go looking for it. A recurring theme throughout the Analytics is

thus that of Aristotle trying to figure out how we can acquire new knowledge about what things are

essentially, given that we don’t know whether the kinds to which they belong exist or not. For

instance, while a field biologist can discover an apparently previously unobserved animal, and

perhaps also give it a name, he cannot assume that other resembling animals which he later comes

across belong to the same kind referred to by that name, since he doesn’t know (or know he knows)

that the kind named actually exists—perhaps upon further research, the animal turns out to be a

congenitally deformed dog, say. To know that the kind exists, we must first know what its essence is.

And this, it seems, is what the field biologist is hoping to discover in the first place. Meno’s paradox

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thus threatens the study of natural science, since natural science is the study of essences and

universals which takes flight from observing natural kinds.

It is surprising then that Aristotle starts this opening chapter of the Analytics not, as we might

have thought, by offering a positive solution to this implication of the puzzle. Instead, he begins by

providing an example of a trivial style of knowledge formation: sometimes, we come to know that a

figure in a particular circle is a triangle “at the same time as you were being led to the conclusion.”

What guides our inference in these cases is, of course, our prior “universal” knowledge that all

triangles have angles equal to two right angles. This is just the type of knowledge which Aristotle

says arises from our knowing “the explanation because of which the object holds that it is its

explanation, and also that it is not possible for it to be otherwise” (71b10-5), which he calls

demonstrative knowledge. Hence, by neglecting what is really philosophically interesting about Meno’s

paradox, viz., how knowledge of universals comes about in the first place, Aristotle appears to

completely sidestep what is important about the puzzle (assuming that deflationism is wrong).

Aristotle does however adumbrate something of a response here which we shall see sheds

light on what II.19 says. Consider this sentence from the second paragraph: “before you are led to

the conclusion, i.e. before you are given a deduction, you should perhaps be said to understand it in

one way—but in another way not.” What is the intended referent of this statement? Should we

assume that Aristotle is talking here about that “universal of which you possess knowledge” from

the illustration in the preceding paragraph? More perspicuously, the question I am asking is this:

whether Aristotle’s remark in the second paragraph should be construed as his saying that because we

knew the relevant universal—all triangles have angles equal to two right angles—we knew also the

claim which falls under it—this figure in the semicircle is a triangle—in a potential sense (i.e., not

simpliciter), or if it should be construed rather as his saying that because we knew the relevant

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universal—this figure in the semicircle is a triangle have angles equal to two right angles—we knew

also the claim under which it falls—all triangles have angles equal to two right angles—in a potential

sense. For clarity, let us call the phrase “that every triangle has angles equal to two right angles “

from that paragraph “T,” and let us call the phrase “this figure in the semicircle is a triangle,” also

from the same paragraph, “S.” On the one hand, S seems like the obvious choice, given that

Aristotle has just been discussing how we sometimes gain knowledge through knowledge that we

already possess. On the other hand, this construal undermines the very pretext given for writing this

treatise, i.e., to provide a plausible response to Meno’s paradox. This is because Aristotle already has

in place a fairly well-understood definition of knowing, which we saw previously: to know (epistatai)

is to know something with the capacity to demonstrate it through “the explanation because of which

the object holds that it is its explanation,” etc. Under this rubric of knowledge as episteme, it is clear

that every piece of knowledge that a person knows will be known in this sense precisely because he

already possesses the explanation required for it to be deduced in a demonstration. Given that, as we

have seen, Meno’s puzzle in one sense targets our claims to know what is general (kinds) on the

basis of what is particular (individuals), it would be exceedingly naïve, especially for Aristotle, to

suppose that Meno’s paradox is directed at, or only at, knowledge that is already implicitly

demonstrable. At stake here is the fact that, if the former construal is assumed, it can be used to

settle a standing controversy concerning a famous passage in II.19 of the Posterior Analytics, on whose

basis many have surmised that Aristotle is a “radical rationalist” who ascribes our ability to grasp

universals to a state called “nous.” Whether the referent of the phrase “the universal of which you

possess knowledge” from the illustration in the preceding paragraph is T or S is thus the topic of the

remainder of this section.

It seems obvious to me that this can’t be T since T is taken in that example not as what gets

its epistemic status upgraded, but as what upgrades the epistemic status of S from its initial state of

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being initially only potential knowledge to what this subsequent paragraph characterizes as

“universal” knowledge. This can be inferred from the fact that Aristotle characterizes knowledge

simpliciter in the next chapter, at 71b10-15, as knowledge of premises which are “true and primitive

and familiar than and prior to and explanatory of the conclusions.” And T is clearly introduced here

to play a similar role, i.e., to make plain the conclusion, S. But it doesn’t seem either that it is S that

is being referred to, for in the example, it is claimed that T is what is antecedently grasped as a

universal, and this is that in virtue of which the subject knows by a demonstration that S is true.

Furthermore, it is unclear in what sense S can be said to have already been understood “universally”

if I were deducing it at the time through T without any inkling as to whether it would follow from it

as a necessary consequence.

Perhaps the claim, then, is rather that S constitutes a piece of universal knowledge because I

grasp the universal in virtue of which it holds true, viz., T, so that I would know that S is a universal

claim if I demonstrated it from the more universal claim represented by T. Those who think this

true might argue thus that the difficulties observed here can be obviated by registering the fact that

“universal” is a relative term for Aristotle, since all theorems are universals relative to something

more fundamental or explanatory, such as T is represented variously as being in the above.

This response would be acceptable were it not for the fact that Aristotle actually says

something quite different here. Observe that Aristotle asks here, “if you do not know whether there

was such-and-such a thing simpliciter, how could you have known that it had two right angles

simpliciter?” But it makes sense to ask this question only if knowledge of T is not either universal

knowledge or knowledge simpliciter because, as we have seen, Aristotle stipulates in the original

example that T is a proposition the hypothetical subject already has at minimum universal

knowledge of. By contrast, the question that Aristotle asks here, presumably for rhetorical effect,

  15  

makes one’s (presumably) incipient knowledge of T, the universal judgment, hinge on his knowledge

of “whether there was such-and-such a thing simpliciter.” The next line seems to confirm this line of

thought. Aristotle states here that one cannot have more than mere universal knowledge of T’s truth

without knowing simpliciter that the kind exists.

Putting these pieces together, what we get is in fact what seems to be a rough outline of

Aristotle’s conception of how a person comes to gain knowledge simpliciter: first, we have an

unarticulated universal knowledge of T, which enables us to perceive the common feature which

unifies the particulars that our knowledge that S makes essential reference to. However, it is only

once we are able to deduce S from our previously unarticulated universal knowledge of T that we

can be said to have knowledge simpliciter of S. And here, Aristotle draws a tight link between

knowing that the kind exists and being able to know simpliciter what one grasps universally. One

might riposte that the object being referred to by Aristotle’s question as to whether one can know

that something had two right angles simpliciter without knowing there was such-and-such a thing

simpliciter is the particular kind of triangle that is exemplified by the subject’s knowledge that every

triangle has angles equal to two right angles, which isn’t an existence question per se, but one of

universals. But this is incoherent, since in this example, it is assumed that the subject already knows

what a triangle is, and Aristotle tells us moreover in various places that questions about existence of

individuals are not relevant questions for men of wisdom.17

Thus, the best explanation for the disanalogy detected between the first and second

paragraphs excerpted from I.1 of the Posterior Analytics is that whereas the first one describes what

Aristotle calls the process of getting to what is more knowable by nature but more obscure to us,

which is deductive and presupposes knowledge of essences and/or first principles, the latter

                                                                                                                         17 Metaphysics I.2, 982a8-10.

  16  

introduces an as yet preliminary characterization of Aristotle’s approach to explaining how we first

get to reach what is more knowable by nature, which is inductive, and doesn’t presuppose that same

knowledge.18

Despite the advantages that this account affords us, including what appears to be a quasi-

account of what is involved in individual concept acquisition, Aristotle does not immediately go on

to describe how this process goes in any great detail until the last chapter of the Analytics. To this

end, then, I turn now to see how the account thus far outlined coheres with Aristotle’s many

statements on experience, and in which ways they bear it out. This will enable us to see what is

wrong with (i), and hence why it should be rejected.

III. Conceptual Development Without Knowledge Simpliciter

Aristotle provides us with ample clues throughout his Posterior Analytics as to how his view of

concept acquisition might look once it has been fully fleshed out, of which the account previously

sketched provides clues to. Recall the suggestion implicit in I.1 which we looked at, that seemed to

predicate knowledge simpliciter on an unarticulated knowledge of a universals that in some sense

hasn’t reached a threshold point that is necessary to parlay that grasp into full-blown demonstrative

knowledge. But even though such a grasp of universals does not amount to knowledge simpliciter, the

mere fact that Aristotle potentially considers it to be a form of universal knowledge is immensely

salutary for the empiricist’s defense of thesis E. In particular, it would confute the deflationist’s

claim (i) that concept acquisition requires substantial knowledge of the domain to which the relevant

concept belongs, which in turn would open a window for the empiricist to mount an attack on claim

                                                                                                                         18 See e.g. Physics I.1, 18419-21.

  17  

(ii). Let us look then to further flesh out the account previously sketched before returning to (i) at

the end of this section, and (ii) in the section following.

As initial textual evidence for the account of concept acquisition just sketched, it seems to

me that this sort of knowledge has a clear parallel to a certain type of man of experience that

Aristotle often depicts. Recall for example an earlier passage from Nicomachean Ethics VI.7 that we

looked at, which shows how certain men of experience may grasp that chicken meat is wholesome,

though without grasping a universal known per se (see p. 8 for my distinction between universals

known per se and those known accidentally) which adumbrates the explanatorily relevant features

that would make his grasp of the semantic term “chicken” one which implies genuine knowledge.

Viewed in light of the foregoing account, we can begin to understand what exactly Aristotle means

here, and also what he means in Metaphysics I.1, when he makes the apparently deflationist claim that

our senses “surely…give the most authoritative knowledge of particulars, ” (981b10-1), even while

denying at 981a14 that experience is knowledge of universals.

On the account given then, knowledge of universals arises naturally in experience, albeit in

an unarticulated sense, when one subconsciously groups into one experience all of the repeated

instantiations of some perceptible object that are remembered. On certain deflationist construals,

e.g., Frede’s and Charles’, an experienced treater of illnesses, which we may, following LaBarge, call

a medic, as opposed to a doctor, may display an uncanny ability to reliably pick out, say, that “this

works/will work for this man with this illness,” but yet have no grip at all on what the explanatorily

relevant features of their judgments are. Neither, these types of deflationism claim, are they aware

  18  

that the commonality which they pick out is a consequence of a natural principle which unites

them.19

This, however, is an interpretation which strains credulity, given what we have learned from

I.1 of the Posterior Analytics about the motivations behind Aristotle’s rejection of Plato’s alternative

innatist account of knowing and the development of his own. If what has been suggested is true,

viz., that experiences of a certain magnitude somehow help to convert what is previously known

universally, albeit in an unarticulated way, into knowledge simpliciter, this would count as the simplest,

most reasonable explanation as to how it is that Aristotle’s politicians in Prior Analytics I.30 can

become as proficient as they are in their ability to enforce legislation just “by dint of a certain faculty

and experience rather than of thought.” Moreover, if experience was truly bereft of universals as it is

suggested by advocates of deflationism, it would seem inconsistent for Aristotle to state in

connection with the experience of the politician that “experience seems to contribute not a

little…and so it seems that those who aim at knowing about the art of politics need experience as

well.”20 But Aristotle in fact elsewhere speaks in a similarly gaudy fashion of the distinctive kind of

unteachable wisdom provided by experience that one ignores at his own peril. Thus, we find him

saying in the Nicomachean Ethics VI, seven chapters from the passage we previously considered that

seemed to be highly critical of experience, that “we ought to attend to the undemonstrated sayings

and opinions of experienced and older people or of people of practical wisdom not less than to

demonstrations; for because experience has given them an eye they see aright.”

A particularly salient example where Aristotle suggests this much occurs in I.30 of the Prior

Analytics, wherein he tells us that men with experience contribute to art and science by “adequately

apprehending” all the phenomena which are to enter into their survey of the “true attributes of

                                                                                                                         19 Charles, op. cit., 150-4. 20 Nicomachean Ethics X.9, 1181a1-13.

  19  

things,” without which demonstrations cannot be formulated. He further intimates experience’s

close connection with universals by concluding this chapter with the comment that it is owing to the

demonstrations carried out by the appropriate theorists that that “whose nature does not admit of

proof” (46a26-7), i.e., first principles and essences, is thereby made clear. Clearly, these sorts of

experiential judgments the survey of which can positively impact scientific inquiry are not the type of

backward-looking ones reflected in Metaphysics I.1, in which the man of experience is limited to

pointing out that a certain medicine benefitted this-and-that man.

On this account, there is also no need to equate the level of connection to universals

displayed by the kind of men of experience depicted in Nicomachean Ethics VI.7, who make

judgments that include only their past experiences without a view to the future, to those we have

seen found in other passages, such as in I.30 of the Prior Analytics, who demonstrate their

unarticulated knowledge of universals by putting on display their conversance with grasping those

features alone which scientists are able to prove in a universal demonstration, having gotten a plainer

view of the fundamental principles or causes through the universals and concepts that the man of

experience of this kind reports to them. These men are not wise and lack knowledge of first

principles by hypothesis, but nevertheless, they still acquire a practically dependable sort of

knowledge that, though a step below knowledge simpliciter, enables them to act as if they had it. In

other words, their lower grade of knowledge is no impediment to their ability to grasp incipient

concepts which point to genuine kinds in a way that makes scientific inquiry fruitful for scientists.

Clearly, then, whereas the deflationist explanation of Aristotle’s ascription of the ability of

men of experience to make these markedly more cognitively demanding judgments implausibly

downgrades what in experience appears patently to involve some type of awareness of universals,

this account suggests that (i) is too strong by appealing to the unarticulated awareness of universals

  20  

that experience may develop as a result of some manner of its characteristic manner of interaction

with the objects with which its subjects come into contact. We should thus reject it.

In the next section, I shall describe how I see Aristotle to conceive of experience’s ability to

grasp universals, in particular, how he might think it possible for it to disclose to its subject features

of objects that are scientifically explicable, though without presupposing the subject’s awareness of

those features. In the section following, I introduce a theory of nonconceptual content to pull

together the account which I have been developing in the preceding sections based on the outline of

an account extracted from Posterior Analytics I.1. This final section will perforce be highly speculative.

IV. Grasping Universals in Experience

Having extracted from Posterior Analytics I.1 what appears to be a rudimentary account of

conceptual and knowledge acquisition, the contested account of conceptual acquisition apparently

delineated in Posterior Analytics II.19 all of a sudden takes on new luster. Where before we lacked

evidence and had only intuitions as to where Aristotle might stand in the matter of conceptual

acquisition and its relation to experience, it seems that we have improved on both fronts to pretend

to an insight into how it should be interpreted. It is an apposite time then for us to consider this

passage briefly before we move to my final section.

… [A] Some [animals] can still hold the percepts in their soul after perceiving them. When this occurs often, there is then a further difference: [B] [i] some animals come to have an account [logos] based on the retention of these items, and [ii] others do not. Thus from perception there comes memory, as we call it, [C] and from memory (when it occurs often in connection with the same item) experience; for memories which are many in number form a single experience. [D] [i] And from experience, [ii] or from all the universal which has come to rest in the soul (the one apart from the many, i.e. whatever is one and the same in all these items), [iii] there comes a principle of skill [techne] or understanding [episteme]—of skill if it deals with how things come about, of understanding if it deals with how things are. (100a3-9)

  21  

As we saw in § 1, deflationists contend that the key part of this passage to hone in on in

connection with Metaphysics I.1 is the transition between (id) and (iid). According to Charles and

Frede, the “or” in between them should be read as a corrective which serves to immediately retract

Aristotle’s attribution of the ability to yield universals in thought to experience and instead assign it

to a different state in which it is possible for universals to rest in one’s soul for use in some

productive or theoretical domain.21

Allow me to register two points of disagreement. Consider first the fact that Aristotle

characterizes the type of empeiria he has in mind here as that which yields “all the universal,” or in

the original OCT translation, “the whole universal.”22 This turn of phrase, it seems to me, is most

plausibly read in reference to (ib), which in turn suggests that Aristotle means for the rest of the

passage to apply only to man. Thus, if I am right, then given the account I have been defending

according to which men of experience have a default, albeit unarticulated, ability to grasp universals

just by virtue of being empowered with man’s especially potent brand of empeiria, the corrective

reading, which forecloses this possibility, cannot be the right construal of this passage.

Moreover, this construal is consistent with what Aristotle is trying to achieve in the rest of

the chapter. Here, he motivates his view that animals which are able to have knowledge of anything

at all must be equipped with some capacity by means of which the relevant materials of empeiria can

be cognized in a way that is able to yield principles of techne or episteme. Restricting the abilities

spoken of here then to a particular kind of empeiria which in its ordinary mode of operation grasps

“all the universal” for an individual would thus be a way for Aristotle to make this point. Now, if

this is true, this would explain why Aristotle states in Posterior Analytics I.31 that “even if perception

                                                                                                                         21 Charles, op. cit., 149-51. 22 In his “Essentialism and Semantic Theory in Aristotle: Posterior Analytics, II, 7-10,” The Philosophical Review 85, no. 4 (Oct., 1976): 530, Bolton notes this device as well in his account of how the possessor of a nominal definition has understanding of universals of the sort which is “best known to sense,” which Bolton identifies as the main instrument for the man of empeiria for gaining episteme More on this in §

  22  

is of what is such-and-such, and not of what is a this so-and-so, nevertheless what you perceive must

be a this so-and-so” (87b28-30), and furthermore, also his deceptively arduous requirement that only

“in so far as we grasp that it exists, to that extent we also have some grasp on what it is” (93a25-30).

Let me fill in this account a bit more.

For Aristotle, human experience is a systematized memory of particulars grouped according

to the features that are detected by perception to be embodied by those particulars.23 Special to the

experiences that we humans alone are able to have is an “exactness of discrimination” by which “we

far excel all other species” and by virtue of which we are “the most intelligent of all animals.24 The

richness of human experience is nonpareil in the animal kingdom.

Despite this, we can record the complexity of the content that stems from the richness of

our experiences only in terms which are more familiar to us (though more obscure by nature). A

notable feature of conceptual acquisition in properly functioning human beings is thus the fact that

we must develop our conceptual repertoire stepwise, in which the concepts that we use are at first

assigned to overlapping swaths of our experiences. This is a fact that doesn’t seem to have escaped

Aristotle. Consider his famous illustration in Physics I.1. There, he describes a child who is learning to

use the term “father,” but does so by unwittingly calling every man “father,” since what is more

familiar to her at that stage are individual men. For children, all concepts are initially defined in

terms of the particulars whose perceptual features they encode. As Aristotle says in the Metaphysics,

“the truth seems to be like the proverbial door, which no one can fail to hit.”

But this doesn’t mean that the child who greets all of her male interlocutors with the term

“father” is therefore void of all truth. Not having developed the capacity to apprehend in conceptual

language the relevant features in perceptual experience which designate her father only as “father,”                                                                                                                          23 Metaphysics I.1, 980b25-981a2. 24 De Anima II.9, 421a20-3.

  23  

she latches on to the most conspicuous similarities between the man who teacher her the term

“father” and all other men, and deploys it innocently in reference to them. Her ability to process the

richness of her experiences conceptually are, at this point, as the “eyes of bats are to the blaze of

day” (993b9-10). Hence, Aristotle states that “the fact that we can have a whole truth and not the

particular part we aim at shows the difficulty of it” (993b7-8). Over time, however, the child comes

to grasp the import of “man” and its relation to “father” as her conceptual vocabulary grows to an

expressively adequate size. At this juncture, she finally apprehends in conceptual language, or

thought, what previously she had perceived in whole nonconceptually: those features referred to by

“father” that don’t overlap with those referred to by “man.” So, from the child’s initial conceptual

misuse of “father” as a term for the people whom she perceives as individual men, i.e., from her

mistaken use of “father” as a synonym for the concept “man,” the child has now progressed to a

stage where she can skillfully distinguish the right use of “man” from “father”: she “distinguishes

each of them” now, as Aristotle says (Physics 184b13-4). It is hence in this way that she comes to

attain an articulated grasp of “father” and “man,” owing to a process not unlike that of mutual

adjustment.

Crucially for the purposes of substantiating my interpretation is the fact that, in a related

passage in the Metaphysics, Aristotle notes that it isn’t that we don’t grasp the truth easily, it is that we

don’t attain the truth adequately “without the union of all” (992a27-993b3). Presumably, Aristotle is

here describing the ordinary man of experience, not the philosophers about whom he subsequently

discusses, since he specifies further that “everyone says something about the truth” (993b3). In any

event, the progression of truth-attainment that he afterwards depicts—“we must be grateful to

those…who have expressed more superficial views; for these also contributed something, by

developing before us the powers of thought”—suggest that what he has in mind as regards the

former claim (that we don’t attain the truth adequately) is that the inadequate vocabulary of the

  24  

beginning stages of our advancement in any field, including our own transition to beings capable of

using language, nevertheless help us to become as one of “the better thinkers” (993b17-19). In

short, the view expressed seems to be not only that truth attainment in the highest sense possible

requires a rich thought, which brings in tow possession of a rich vocabulary, but also that even the

meager thoughts of the developing child contributes to her later ability to apprehend higher

universals. And, as I have been suggesting, this process is mediated by perceptual experience.

A principal utility of empeiria then, Bolton puts it nicely for us, is that it provides us with

crude specifications in unarticulated perceptual language of the natural kinds that we encounter in

ordinary experience.25 This is evident by the fact that concepts do not arise by the mere association

of a word by our memory with the particulars that are remembered in the experiences that we have.

Rather, conceptual acquisition must arise in a way that explains the phenomenon that we have

examined of the knowing but unknowledgeable man of experience’s curious ability to do quite well

at certain tasks. And, as I have suggested, this is possible for Aristotle because the terms which we

give them and the descriptions which we associate them with for the sake of articulating repeated

instantiations of them make an essential reference to things of the sort familiar to us initially in

experience as confused wholes or masses. So, concepts—or at least lexical concepts—don’t simply

arise. It is experience, which grasps universals, that give rise to our construction of them.

How does the foregoing fit within the account we ‘ve been developing? The way I see it, this

latter stage corresponds roughly to what allows us in Posterior Analytics I.1 to have universal

knowledge at first which approximates knowledge simpliciter.26 There, we saw that the initial

interpretation of that passage that suggests itself is incoherent: assuming that one grasps the relevant

first principles or essences of the kind in question, it is implausible that he can lack knowledge                                                                                                                          25 Bolton, “Essentialism and Semantic Theory,” 528. 26 Except in highly unusual cases, of course, such as Aristotle’s example of seeing what an eclipse is because it happens while we’re on the moon in Posterior Analytics I.2, 90a25-30.

  25  

simpliciter that such-and-such kind exists. Thus, what Aristotle must have been suggesting in that

passage is that the existence of what is referred to by our semantic term(s) corresponding to it is just

what we have unarticulated universal knowledge of. And how does one get such knowledge? Consider

Aristotle’s remark at 100b3-5: “it is plain that we must get to know the primitives by induction; for

this is the way in which perception instills universals.” This gives flesh to what he has vaguely been

insinuating, that “induction does not prove what a thing is, but rather that it is or is not” (91a35ff).

What he means, then, according to the insights that we’ve gained from our account, is that we gain

knowledge of universals through induction (epagoge). Intuitively, universal knowledge of an object’s

existence that is attained on the basis of induction, and captured in roughly specified nominal

definitions, need not require the positing of some distinct state, as the deflationists we have seen

tempt us to do. Instead, Aristotle’s belief that “in so far as we grasp that something exists, to that

extent we also have some grasp on what it is” (93a25ff.) is meant to mirror his view that the nominal

definitions that are given in experience—for instance, that thunder is a “sort of noise in the clouds,”

that an eclipse is a “sort of privation of light” (93a22-4)—and which we come by relatively easily,

allows us to move on to grasp what those things are, as embodied by what he calls a “real”

definition, which reveals the their essence. This is because this sort of knowledge gives us

“something of the object itself” (93a23). So, while knowledge simpliciter when it comes to concept

acquisition is hard, that doesn’t mean that introducing into common vocabulary a sort of basic kind-

referring concept for the purposes of “tagging” its referent’s salient features without having prior

conceptual knowledge of what all of them individually are isn’t feasible. For, when “we grasp that

this exists, we seek why it is” (93b30-33).

I submit that this is why Aristotle suggests that it is hard to have knowledge of what

something is without knowing that it exists at 93a27-29. Aristotle’s “upstanding” men of experience

whom we have been considering, and the propriety of whose actions, by which they seem to behave

  26  

knowingly, yet not knowledgeably, show us how they can be unable to impart what it is they have

unarticulated universal knowledge of, and yet at the same time, by all appearances, appear to know.

In other words, while we won’t ordinarily develop conceptions of kinds with our perceptual

awareness of them in mind, they will nevertheless point to their essences in the nominal definitions

that we do come up with for them, as reflected by the fact, as we’ve seen, that men of experience are

often able to act as if they had knowledge of a particular concept, even though they couldn’t teach

what about it they thought they grasped, if asked, in a way that allows others to replicate their

practical successes. Aristotle gestures toward this view in Metaphysics II.1 when, as we saw, he states

that everyone has something of the truth. This explains the utility of nominal definitions when it

comes to explaining how we eventually rise to nous, wherein we come to possess a real definition

which states just the essential features of the kind referred to by a term previously defined

nominally. As embodying experientially familiar kinds, they always refer to perceptible features of

which either we or our communities at large have knowledge of their existence, and so can serve as a

spur to further inquiry into their underlying essence. Experience is sufficient unto itself to produce

concepts about which one knows universally the salient features corresponding to them without

presupposing our flight to a higher state wherein they are grasped in outright conceptual language.

Otherwise, Meno’s paradox would be irresolvable.

The foregoing shows, contra claim (ii) of the deflationist, that the knowledge-how that men of

experience possess as to how semantic terms function within their linguistic community, despite

their lack of a corresponding articulated awareness, does for Aristotle presuppose a concern with and

even awareness of the knowledge-that of what kind of thing those terms essentially refer to, viz., the

natural kinds and the essences which are their sources and principles, even if they don’t know the

  27  

determinate kinds they refer to.27

V. A Nonconceptual Account of Aristotle’s View of Learning

As I begin my final remarks, it bears reminding how the absurdity which afflicts deflationism

arises in the first place. Deflationists suppose that nous only is what Aristotle allows as a mediating

influence in one’s path toward acquisition of knowledge of universals. A complication that results

from this is that one cannot be certain at any point as to which universals among those he abstracts

from his farrago of memories actually disclose the salient, essential features of the universals that are

(mis)perceived in experience.

For Aristotle, the object of scientific study are per se universals, which are all the attributes of

a substance which belong to it in respect of its being (e.g., perishableness), and these are

distinguished from accidental universals, which qualify a substance at different times and places in a

transient manner (e.g., whiteness, or sitting-downness).28 Aristotle states that the sciences—even the

productive and practical sciences—do not study the latter.29 Thus, to know something of an object’s

essence, one must know its per se universals.30 Evidently, awareness of a universal that is bound up

with its non-essential features is closely connected with the type of awareness of universals that

prevents one from fully grasping them, and, en route, attaining episteme.

                                                                                                                         27 This shows why Aristotle rejects as definitions accounts of names given either to nonexistent things, or to things of mythical provenance, such as goatstags. An account of such things, Aristotle says, is “one“—i.e., shows what it is—by way of “connection,” not “non-incidentally. That is to say, an account of what is meant by the terms which are given them is constituted by our knowledge of what its constitutive parts mean—in this case, “goat” and “stag.” And, of these, we do have nominal definitions which are based on our perceptual experience with the kinds referred to by them. (See Posterior Analytics II.7-10.) 28 Metaphysics X.10, 1058b26-1059a15. 29 Metaphysics VI.2, 1026a4-5. 30 Metaphysics XI.2, 1060b20-21.

  28  

It is clear from the preceding that deflationism is wholly unequipped to explain how learning

ever takes place. To wit, restricting the grasp of universals to a fully developed reason commits

Aristotle to innatism. This is because given that one cannot know at any point which universals he

truly knows before he acquires nous, he cannot bootstrap his way to a grasp of the essences and first

principles of a given domain of knowledge in the way typically recommended by Aristotle. By tying

episteme up with having already developed nous, one will experience a widespread lack of know-how

with respect to any individually acquired concept since he will not be capable of knowing that he

knows any individual concept at any point before he attains nous. From Aristotle’s many descriptions

in the Nicomachean Ethics of nous, it is not clear that everyone will attain nous either. Therefore,

supporting the deflationist picture necessarily commits Aristotle to innatism. On this view,

knowledge can arise only if one has “tokened” the requisite universals, but curiously, our grasp of

universals itself doesn’t depend on the tokening, or, in particular, how they are tokened. But if I don’t

know what my experiences of dogs are of, I don’t know how it is I come to grasp the essence DOG

of dogs. So, lacking a psychologically viable explanation of learning, episteme simply collapses into

nous, which does all the explanatory work that empirical psychology might otherwise.

To avoid puzzles of this sort, I propose that to the extent that Aristotle speaks fulsomely of

knowing things by strict contemplation, without any knowledge of particulars, and to the extent that

he denigrates perceptual experience as having authoritative knowledge of particulars, but without

any knowledge of universals,31 we must take him as speaking in illustrative terms of the excesses of

persons of either type: given the choice between being inordinately fixated on theory or conditioned

by experience, pick the former. But the latter is not so much worse (certain higher animals, e.g., the

lion, fare pretty well, practically speaking) if we can’t pick the former, even though both are bad.

                                                                                                                         31 Metaphysics I.1, 981a21-982a2.

  29  

I am suggesting, that is, that we ignore the obviously exaggerated typical portrayals of men

of experience in the loci classici: e.g., the man depicted in Metaphysics I.1 who has memories of whom

all a particular medicine worked on isolated from each other, and so fails to grasp that that medicine

has in fact worked on men who have a particular constitution when burning with fever, and the man

depicted in Nicomachean Ethics VI.7 who knows that chicken meat is wholesome, but has no common

sense to grasp the superficial nature of that statement which points toward a deeper cause and

explanation. While the man described by Aristotle in the former as the techne counterpart of the man

of empeiria seems like a typical man of experience, the man described in the latter as a man of

experience sounds more like someone with ill-developed cognitive faculties undeserving of the “man

of experience” (or “woman of experience”) label. This interpretation receives wide support from the

very noncommittal and contrastive tone by which Aristotle juxtaposes men of wisdom and men of

experience.32

Now, for want of space, I can only gesture towards what an account of learning to Aristotle

might look like which helps to preserve what I think is an unargued, but, as we have seen,

fundamental assumption of his: that experience does afford to us a robust awareness of the relevant

features of universals. I contend that for Aristotle the various states from which we reason that we

have either treated or alluded to, i.e., empeiria, techne, phronesis, sophia, relate to each other in the

progression of linguistic ability that our transition from one state to the other requires. Crucially, one

state is not differentiated from the other by the measure of whether one has nous or episteme, but

                                                                                                                         32 A cursory glance through Metaphysics I.1 confirms this, exemplified by this most remarkable statement, whose relevant comparative adverbs I have highlighted: “in general it is a sign of the man who knows, that he can teach, and therefore we think art more truly knowledge than experience is; for artists can teach, and men of experience cannot” (981b7-8). Indeed, if we consider the woefully ignorant man of experience portrayed here next to the man of wisdom whom Aristotle characterizes as unglamorously inept in worldly matters (981a11-4), we might have to invent a new category: the mere man of wisdom. Such is a man who only learns by consulting an encyclopedia, and he is no more able to translate his knowledge into a practical syllogism that results in an actual action, than is a man who only learns by relying on his memory that Socrates and Callias responded well to a certain medication is able to translate that knowledge into a meaningful practical syllogism that opens the door to learning that is conducive to episteme. These two types of learners are parodies of their supposed pedigrees.

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rather, by the extensiveness of his conceptual vocabulary. This, in turn, depends on one’s having a

proper fit between his experiences and how he conceptualizes aspects of them to which he pays

attention nonconceptually. It seems to me that an account like this can make sense of a thought

frequently expressed in Aristotle’s scientific treatises, and of which a particular passage in Physics I.1

is a paradigm. Let me briefly motivate and explain this theory of learning before I turn to that

passage to close out my paper. Consider this scenario given by Adina L. Roskies:33

Suppose you attend your first wine-tasting with a friend who is an oenophile, and you both have the good fortune to taste a 1982 Château Pétrus. Your friend possesses sophisticated wine-concepts that you lack. You taste something that you describe as a fantastic, complex red wine, clearly the best you have ever had the pleasure to experience. Your friend, equally enthusiastic, taste something he describes as a full-bodied, jammy Bordeaux with moderate glycerin content, noticeable terroir, strong tannins, with definite cassis up front and a hint of butterscotch at the finish. Do your actual taste experiences of the wine differ greatly, or merely the judgments you make about your respective, highly similar perceptual experiences? The conceptualist will say that your taste experiences themselves must be different, for the content of your experience is limited by the concepts you yourself possess; the nonconceptualist will allow that your taste experiences can be exactly the same, since you can have experiences with content that outstrips your conceptual repertoire.

A point of agreement between conceptualists and nonconceptualists is their view that the

content of our thoughts and perceptual experiences is what makes the world appear to us in a

certain way. As a corollary, they also agree that how the world is represented to us as being is a

matter in part of what concepts we deploy in experience, where by “deploying,” I mean the act of

using a concept or exercising it, reminiscent of Aristotle’s description of understanding being

exercised as the use of opinion to judge of a matter in the practical domain.34 The debate about

nonconceptual content is thus about whether nonconceptual content enters into our mental lives in

any appreciable way. Conceptualists argue that there is little to no nonconceptual content in

                                                                                                                         33 Adina L. Roskies, “A New Argument for Nonconceptual Content,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 76, no. 3 (May 2008): 633-59. 34 Nicomachean Ethics VI.10, 1043a13-5. Thus, to deploy a concept without conscious knowledge that one is so doing presupposes that one already has the innate cognitive competency in question to represent his experiences in accordance with the salient features of that concept.

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experience,35 whereas nonconceptualists demur, and argue that nonconceptual content is what

explains how it is possible that a human, initially void of knowledge of any concepts, comes to pick

up any at all. Nonconceptual content is thus, crudely speaking, mental information that captures

features of the world for which we lack the requisite conceptual vocabulary. More precisely,

nonconceptual content is one state, rather than one kind, of content that is represented in

experience. Thus, to be in a nonconceptual state relative to some features of one’s epistemic space is

for perceptual experience to represent those features, say, a wine’s “noticeable terroir,” even though

one lacks the ability to deploy concepts with respect to it by verbally or mentally describing its

features.

Clearly, deflationists such as Frede interpret Aristotle as a conceptualist of the extreme sort.

As they see it, the novice wine-taster doesn’t represent the wine’s terroir, because he has not before

been put in the appropriate causal relations in any regimented way to understand the principles of

wine-tasting. Not having gone through the appropriate motions in his cognitive development with

respect to wine-tasting, his innate cognitive competencies, as represented by “all the universal which

has come to rest in the soul,”36 as Aristotle famously puts it, must await further tokenings of the

relevant wine-tasting experiences before a “principle of skill or understanding” becomes available to

the wine-taster. Frede’s picture thus maps on to the conceptualist’s account of learning, because, as

we have seen, the only viable account of learning for it is one in which a person already possesses

the innate cognitive competencies relevant to his acquisition of the concepts in question, which

environmental cues serve simply to trigger into conscious attention.

As I see it, this is not the kind of learning that Aristotle envisages. The environmental cues

which a person’s experiences afford are more than just triggers which activate subconsciously

                                                                                                                         35 Ibid., 642-8. 36 Posterior Analytics II.19, 100a5-9.

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possessed concepts that his innate cognitive competencies keep hidden from him. They are essential

to the development of those cognitive competencies in the first place. On an account of learning

which admits nonconceptual content into perception, induction, i.e., repeated perceptions, become

relevant to a person’s acquisition of concepts precisely because for a person to refer to the features

that he previously lacked a concept for is to add to one’s conceptual vocabulary a first-pass

definition, as in a nominal definition, 37 of those features that can receive further specification as he

continues to hone his abilities in the domain of knowledge in question.38 By undergoing revision

after revision, in which the person who is learning is involved as a conscious participant at each step

along the way, he is improving upon the cognitive competencies that previously he lacked, and

expanding his conceptual vocabulary in concomitant fashion with respect to the relevant domain of

knowledge.

There is ample proof that Aristotle subscribes to nonconceptualism, and many of these have

been surveyed in §§3-4; but I shall take the liberty of adducing one more. In some passages in which

Aristotle alludes to lexical concepts, roughly, concepts which correspond to single words (such as

DOG) or semantic units (such as an idiom) in a language, Aristotle suggests that persons who lack a

particular sense lack the ability to form thoughts including concepts that correspond to its special

objects. For instance, he says in one passage that if someone lacked a particular special sense, he

would not be able to know of its special objects. Supposing, then, that Tom is congenitally blind, it

                                                                                                                         37 Posterior Analytics II.10, 93b29-31. 38 Thus, when Frede states that “built into Aristotle’s version of rationalism is a strong regard for empirical observation, a regard which is so strong as to tempt us to think of Aristotle as an empiricist. But for Aristotle knowledge, properly speaking, is only based causally and not epistemically on perception and experience” (op. cit., 173), it is apparent that what he has in mind is that we innately possess the requisite cognitive competencies needed to attain nous, since the acquisition of concepts is an activity that takes place without our conscious participation (and even if we tried, we would not be any the wiser for having done so). This construal is supported by the fact that Frede seems to think that episteme is impossible without sophia, when sophia itself is consequent, Aristotle tells us, on possessing both episteme and nous (Nicomachean Ethics VI.7, 1141a17-9). But nowhere does Aristotle come out and say that nous cannot be acquired independently of sophia.

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would then seem to follow that he must lack knowledge of, say, blackness, and presumably, the

concept BLACK.39 But, if one had innate concepts, this wouldn’t follow as a necessary consequence.40

So perceptual experience, it seems, is important for Aristotle precisely for its ability to yield

awareness of particular salient features of one’s experiences, which allows a subject to “tag” them in

an initial definition using conceptual vocabulary that was previously foreign to him. And this

suggests the falsity of the deflationism’s claim (ii), that experience is a state of mind in which

individuals who intelligibly wield run-of-the-mill linguistic concepts don’t even purport to be

distinguishing features beyond what are perceived in sensory experience in the way that bona fide

concept acquisition requires.

VI. An Implication of Nonconceptualism for “High” Dialectic

As we have seen, the fact that the central method employed in Aristotle’s vision of the

natural sciences for the purposes of discovering first principles and universals proceeds by induction

on particulars, which are unquestionably mutable, seems to go against the grain of providing a

theory of a demonstrative science in the first place.41 One of the standing problems in Aristotelian

scholarship then has been precisely how to reconcile this ambiguous aspect of Aristotle’s thought.

                                                                                                                         39 De Anima III.2, 426a20-5. Though it isn’t clear if Aristotle would deny that he might yet be able to acquire a concept of color anyway. 40 See p. 27-8, and fn. 69. 41 To put it more concretely, consider an example. When the man of experience studies why Socrates and Callias responded well to a medication M taken for an illness, he sees only that Socrates and Callias had shared some surface property p, which disposed them to responding kindly to M. The analogue of the natural scientist, however, must somehow apprehend what the unity of all men having the being of Socrates and Callias is in virtue of which that particular property picked up on by the man of experience necessarily disposes them to responding kindly to the medication. In other words, he must locate the ultimate cause—what Aristotle calls the “middle term”—of M’s success in treating Socrates’ and Callias’ illness, using roughly the same method by which the man of experience came to figure out that M treats people with property p. This, of course, is known in post-Humean times as the problem of induction.

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Interestingly, as I see it, the return to good repute of deflationist interpretations of Aristotle

can be traced back to one salient event, viz., the publication of G. E. L. Owen’s widely influential

account of Aristotle’s supposed liberal conception of endoxa, i.e., common or standing opinions. In

his important article “Tithenai ta phainomena,”42 Owen mounts a historiographical defense of the view

that Aristotle freely switches between one usage of “endoxa” that is associated with common

opinions and another that is associated with perceptual phenomena. This evidence is then cleverly

used to prop up Owen’s view that embedded in various places—most prominently Topics I.2,43

Nicomachean Ethics VII.1,44 and perhaps most salutary to the cause of rationalists such as Frede,

Physics IV.4,45 wherein Aristotle seems to base the justification of a scientific thesis in what the most

common opinion about it is—is a dialectical method of inquiry which is to supersede Aristotle’s

method of science, as articulated in the Posterior Analytics. In this section, I shall briefly suggest how

my account obsoletes

Relevant for our purposes is one construal of Owen’s rather abstruse remarks in this section

of his paper: that we are to study the endoxa because the view F, understood in propositional form as

<x is F>, that is most endoxon in a collection of opinions about x reflects the view that is right about

x, this so because views which are most endoxon “fix” the referent of x.46 A natural criticism of

Owen’s view, or this construal of his view, rather, is the counter-intuitiveness of the claim that

Aristotle actually allows, or would allow, endoxa, i.e., standing opinion, to replace the fact-gathering

stage which constitutes such an important part of the natural scientist’s home as standalone evidence

for deciding between competing theses. Such a method seems predominantly a priori, and it is not

                                                                                                                         42 G. E. L. Owen, "Tithenai ta Phainomena," in Aristotle et les Problemes de Methode, ed. S. Mansion (Louvain: Symposium Aristotelicum, 1961), 83-103. 43 Topics I.2, 101b1-4. 44 Nicomachean Ethics VII.1, 1145b1-8. 45 Physics IV.4, 211a7-11. 46 See Robert Bolton, "The Epistemological Basis of Aristotelian Dialectic," in From Puzzles to Principles?: Essays On Aristotle's Dialectic, ed. May Sim (Lanham: Lexington Books, 1999), 85-9.

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clear what a priori methods there are which can be useful in a domain that pretends to scientific

knowledge.

We see where Aristotle might stand on this in a famous passage he writes about bees. In the

Generation of Animals, Aristotle states that the theoretical insights gained into the manner of

conception of bees from endoxa can be accredited only if confirmed by observation.47 In the Prior

Analytics, he writes that “it is the business of experience to give the principles which belong to each

subject.”48 In De Anima, he expresses similarly that “when we are able to give an account

conformable to experience of all or most of the properties of a substance, we shall be in the most

favourable position to say something worth saying about the essential nature of that subject.”49 In

these passages, it is made abundantly clear that the conclusions which are derived from one’s survey

of the endoxa wait upon the results extrapolated from experience for their verification, not the

reverse. So it seems that Owen’s high view of dialectic must be rejected.50 But can we do so without

implausibly dismissing Aristotle’s remarks about the utility of dialectic in, e.g., Topics I.2?

                                                                                                                         47 Generation of Animals III.10, 760b30-4. 48 Prior Analytics I.30, 46a17-19 49 De Anima I.1, 302b22-5. 50 Robert Bolton in addition provides an exceptionally amicable resolution to the predicament under consideration. According to Bolton, even the rather grandiose passages found in Topics I.2 and Physics IV.4 which suggest a probative quality to the data of dialectic, i.e., endoxa, can be interpreted in light of statements elsewhere, e.g., in Prior Analytics I.30 (46a17-22), Physics VIII.3 (253a33-253b12), and Generation of Animals III.10 (760b27-33), which immediately place evidentiary constraints on the probative extent of that data—viz., by allowing it to constitute knowledge only when it is in conformity with the data of observation. Consequently, Bolton argues that the type of dialectic which Aristotle mentions in Topics I.2 et al. as necessary for procuring the best justified scientific explanation of some phenomenon is to be identified instead with a form of dialectic Aristotle calls “peirastic,” for which he finds proof in many parts of the Sophistical Refutations. In particular, two main considerations weigh in favor of accepting Bolton’s account. (1) Peirastic is mentioned as a method specifically aimed at testing scientific first principles (172a17-32), whereas Aristotle in many places states that dialectic is not a method that reasons from endoxa with a view to the truth (Posterior Analytics I.19, 81b18-23). Therefore, the “dialectic” which is mentioned as being necessary for testing every science for its justification in Topics I.2 et al. must be reconsidered in light of the dissonance which would result from accepting Owen’s view, which allows for standing opinion to contradict the results of the sciences. If peirastic circumscribes its conception of endoxa in a more congenial way, we will have reason to reject Owen’s account. Happily, Bolton shows how this form of dialectic in fact restricts endoxa to what is epistemically common—not what is metaphysically common (as in a bare majority, which Owen’s account appeals to)—to the special principles of a subject one of whose claims is being tested with peirastic. So, the other consideration that weighs in favor of Bolton’s account is that (2) the endoxa in peirastic dialectic are commonly known facts (such as to walk a certain distance, you must traverse half that distance first), which everyone knows as well as the experts of that subject do. Accepting Bolton’s resolution thus yields inestimable exegetical benefits. Eliminativist

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We have already seen an outline of how this might be justified if we accept the account that I

have sketching. Recall that the terms of our linguistic community, on my account, are for Aristotle

constructed in reference to existing particulars whose explanatorily relevant features are perceived

nonconceptually. On this account, considered in terms of the kind of cognitive development seen in

an infant, the initial, i.e., nominal, definitions that we formulate for the terms used in our linguistic

community will consist of a loose specification of their referents’ articulable features. Nevertheless,

even though these definitions start out as occasionally errant guides to what is salient about the

things that are being referred through them, they are sharpened gradually according as we come to

know more and more about what they are essentially. This, of course, will be a function of the

success that we enjoy in our stepwise development of the richness of our ever-expanding conceptual

repertoires. And a similar process obviously occurs at every level of our intellectual progress. This is

why Aristotle talks about improving the initially inadequate vocabulary that we possess at the

beginning stages of our participation in any field, so that we may become as one of “the better

thinkers,” of which he credits a certain Timotheus for advancements seen in his era of lyric poetry

(993b17-19). It is significant, thus, that Aristotle says that “in so far as we grasp that it exists, to that

extent we also have some grasp on what it is” (93a25-30). It therefore behooves members of the

scientific community to exploit these initial confused, but nevertheless “whole,” nominal definitions

at the outset of their investigations to their advantage, as they provide a reliable guide to what kinds

of things there are out there.

I think the foregoing account is just what Aristotle means to invoke when he makes his

various statements, which we have seen, that say to the effect that perception is of universals, even

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       views of the method of science (e.g., Owen, op.cit.) and pragmatic accounts of dialectic (e.g., Jonathan Barnes, "Aristotle's Theory of Demonstration," Phronesis 14, no. 2 (1969): 123-52) no longer can pretend to yield the least destructive outcome in light of Aristotle’s initially perplexingly laudatory statements about the utility of dialectic vis-à-vis science, as on Bolton’s account, the endoxa of peirastic justify science without diminishing it. For additional details about this highly nuanced account, see Bolton’s “The Epistemological Basis of Aristotelian Dialectic,” 79-85.

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though we may not yet perceive a universal as a universal.51 Induction is meant to give rise to the

competencies that we previously lacked in coming to fix the concepts that we eventually grow to

deploy accurately, without impinging on our ability to grasp the salient features of individual

concepts one by one through perceptual experience alone. This is consistent with Aristotle’s

accurate observation that “What is absurd is not that you should know in some sense what you are

learning, but that you should know it in this way, i.e. in the way and in the sense in which you are

learning it.”52 Meno’s paradox can be obviated precisely because we do not need to have achieved

the state of sophia in order to bee said to have a facility with individual concepts in a way that

involves grasping some of their salient features in a manner approaching episteme. To say otherwise

would be to make learning impossible. This prong of this, as we have seen, false dilemma is, I think,

is too high a price to pay. The via media is, I think, rather the one I’ve attempted to explicate and

defend in the body of this paper.

Conclusion

Judging by what we’ve seen, I think that Aristotle’s account of reason does implicate

perceptual experience in ways that are much more significant than deflationists have previously seen

fit. In particular, I’ve argued this by showing that Aristotle quite possibly holds an account of

learning according to which perceptual experience does afford us an insight into the salient features

of universals, even if that insight doesn’t translate into immediate conceptual knowledge. In short,

the account begins by showing that the depth of this insight is initially proportioned to the present

status of our conceptual repertoire in some domain of inquiry. As such, our ordinary ability to assign

names to certain salient features of our experiences by way of tagging them with names handed                                                                                                                          51 See Bolton, “Essentialism and Semantic Theory,” 526-33, for an illuminating account of how this sort of process is at work in scientific inquiry. 52 Posterior Analytics I.1, 71a5-9.

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down by our mentors, say, a relative, is epistemically indispensable for the development of our

cognitive competencies with respect to that domain.

Therefore, it is the possibility of the systematic apportionment of our ever developing

conceptual resources to specific swaths of our already rich human experience that makes concept

acquisition possible one by one. The universal knowledge of concepts that is attested to here by

Aristotle in men of experience represents the stage right before the one in which they gain

articulated awareness of those features, giving them knowledge simpliciter. The upshot is that, while

experience for Aristotle is not representable conceptually without the sophistication of linguistic

thought, nevertheless, neither is thought for him comprehensible in all of its variegated parts

without the richness of experience.

In sum, having shown individually for claims (i) and (ii) how Aristotle’s treatises on the

subject contain abundant resources with which to put into significant doubt the deflationist’s main

thesis, viz., that experience does not contain any awareness of universals that accounts for our ability

to latch on to their explanatorily relevant features in a manner which leads to genuine concept

acquisition, I conclude that, on the whole, thesis D is untenable.

 

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