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According to Hobbes, the mind – unconditioned by the use of language – is, to adopt an expression from Sellars, a “Humean representation system” (Sellars 1981). “Singly,” Hobbes writes, conceptions, ideas, or thoughts – terms he uses interchangeably – “are every one a Representation or Appearance, of some quality, or other Accident of a body without us” (2012, 22; 1651, 3) and the “Originall of them all, is that which we call Sense” (2012, 22; 1651, 3). Sensory experiences are states of an animal’s brain – motion caused by the activity of physical bodies in that animal’s environment (Hobbes 2012, 22–4; 1651, 3–4; EW I. 391–4; EW IV.2–9; see also Barnouw 1980). These informational states are retained in the brain after sensory stimulation has ceased. Over time they “decay,” becoming informationally impoverished. Hobbes compares the effect of time on ideas to the effect of distance on a visual image: coarse-grained information can be recovered, but the “details” are lost (EW IV.12–13; 2012, 28; 1651, 5). Hence, Hobbes defines “imagination” as “decaying sense” (think “force and vivacity”). Further, since all conceptions are “totally, or by parts … begotten upon the organs of Sense” (2012, 22; 1651, 3) he holds that conceptions are also memories, in the sense that they are derived from sensory stimulation (2012, 28; 1651, 5; see also EW I.396–7).

Conceptions are not concepts, for they are mental particulars, representing the accidents and qualities of the individual bodies that caused them in sensory experience (see e.g., EW V.197). However, in virtue of the role played by conceptions in their overall behavioral and psychological economy, animals are capable of possessing some concepts. Hence, while Hobbes holds that organisms lacking linguistic competency are not capable of the full range of cognitive powers enjoyed by adults humans – they are unable to form concepts, such as justice or number, the possession of which constitutively depends on language mastery – non-human animals and humans without linguistic competency (such as very young children) do have the ability to think and deliberate, contrary to that which is sometimes asserted (Hull 2006, 2013; Pettit 2008).¹ Hobbes holds that a wide variety of cognitive activity is explicable in terms of transitions between conceptions, which Hobbes calls “the discourse of the mind” (EW I.399) and “the Tryane of thought” (2012, 38; 1651, 8). Hobbes allows that an animal can abstract features of a conception by a Berkeleyan mechanism of selective attention (e.g., EW I.34 and EW I.394; cf. Berkeley 2008, 72).² In its most basic form, thinking is a matter of attending to and comparing features of “the phantasms that pass” through the imagination; an animal is thinking when it “taketh notice of their likeness or unlikeness to one another” (EW I.399). The connections between the ideas in the train of thought – their “consequence,” one to another – are determined by their association in sensory experience (EW IV.2; 2012, 38; 1651, 8). Hence, the natural cognitive powers are sufficient to enable an animal to form concepts, in the sense that they can develop an ability to make discriminations that regulate expectations and behavior.

For example, Archibald J. Dog’s cognitive system does not contain any general representations of red or tomato, but he is capable of attending to the color of a tomato, he can distinguish between red and green tomatoes and, with repeated experience, he forms a preference for the red tomatoes, and will pluck them from the vine when he finds them. Archie learns to associate visual sensations of red tomatoes and gustatory sensations of ripe tomatoes. This association, in the form of a train of thought, guides his behavior and, from the sight of the red color, he expects a tasty ripeness in a tomato, as he “compareth the phantasms that pass” (EW I.399). He comes to learn that tomatoes similar to one another in respect of their redness are likely to be similar to one another in respect of ripeness. Hobbes calls Archie’s ability to make perceptual discriminations and to project regularities on the basis of associative learning natural “prudence” – an ability to make conjectural inferences on the basis of signs “taken by experience” (EW IV.17; 2012, 44; 1651, 10).

Regularly connected events are signs of one another, “when the like Consequences have been observed before” (2012, 44; 1651, 10). Only those who have learned from experience to associate “antecedents” with their regular “consequents” are “trained to see” them as signs, indicating what they signify (Hobbes 1976, 371). The repeated experience of the sign followed by its significate conditions an organism, forming in it a disposition to expect the significate of the sign. Signification, then, is a species of causal relation – the signification of signs is constituted by the functional role played by signs in the cognition and behavior of animals.

This account of signification applies equally well to conventional signs. Hobbes only ever provides one definition of “sign” – the definition (in its different expressions) quoted above. A sign makes an interpreting animal think about its significate, in the sense that the sign determines a train of thought that terminates in an idea and expectation of the significate. There is no alternative definition for the signification of specifically artificial signs and, so, we are invited to conclude that the signification of artificial signs is a causal relation after the manner of natural signification – a conventional sign makes you think about the thing it signifies, when you have had the appropriate conditioning (indeed, this is exactly what the definition of “understanding” would indicate, as we will see). This is supported by the fact that immediately after the definition of “sign” in De corpore, Hobbes provides examples of both natural and artificial signs. He gives the example of dark clouds signifying rain (as he usually does), but then he comments:

And of signs, some are natural …, others are arbitrary, namely, those we make choice of at our own pleasure, as a bush hung up, signifies that wine is to be sold there; a stone set in the ground signifies the bound of a field; and words so and so connected, signify the cogitations and motions of our minds.

(EW I.15)

Given that the definition of “sign” supplied in that paragraph is the one according to which a sign is that which is commonly observed and remembered to be the antecedent of the significate, such that the observation of the sign provokes thoughts of the significate, the signification of conventional signs must also be a relationship of this kind. The difference between natural signs and conventional signs is that the regularity grounding the associative connection between the sign and the significate is a regularity established, in the case of the latter, by human institution. In the case of conventional signs, to see the sign as significant and to have the right disposition, you must be trained in the convention; that is, you must know how the sign is used.

This is also true of the signification of names in speech. One might think that although signification is a causal relation, nevertheless the linguistic meaning of a term is that which is signified – that of which the expression makes you think, qua sign. But this is not Hobbes’s position. Names in speech signify a speaker’s conceptions. As Hobbes puts it in De corpore:

But seeing names ordered in speech … are signs of our conceptions, it is manifest that they are not signs of the things themselves; for that the sound of this word stone should be the sign of a stone, cannot be understood in any sense but this, that he that hears it collects that he that pronounces it thinks of a stone.

(EW I.17)

Given Hobbes’s account of signification and given that names in speech are “a sign of what thought the speaker had, or had not before his mind,” he is exactly right that the only sense in which the word “stone” can be a sign of stones is that someone hearing the word uttered in a sentence “collects” that the speaker thought of a stone.³ If the only sense in which “stone” signifies anything is that it is a sign that the speaker thought about stones, then the signification of a linguistic expression cannot be the linguistic meaning of the expression.

Linguistic meaning determines, however, the signification of thoughts in speech. In addition to the definition of “understanding” cited in the introduction of this chapter, Hobbes also gives the following, general definition in Leviathan, in which he notes two different senses in which an animal can be said to understand speech or “other voluntary signs”:

The Imagination that is raysed in man (or any other creature indued with the faculty of imagining) by words, or other voluntary signes, is that we generally call Understanding; and is common to Man and Beast. For a dogge by custome will understand the call, or the rating of his Master; and so will many other Beasts. That Understanding which is peculiar to man, is the Understanding not onely his will; but his conceptions and thoughts, by the sequell and contexture of names of things into Affirmations, Negations, and other formes of Speech.

(2012, 36; 1651, 8)

Human and non-human animal understanding of speech are established by distinct routes. The non-human animals “can be taught to grasp what we wish and command in words, [but] they do not do so through words as words, but as signs only” (Hobbes 1991, 37; OL II.88, emphasis added). Though language-competent humans and non-human animals can both understand linguistic expressions as signs, human understanding is a manifestation of linguistic competency. Language-competent humans understand “words as words” – as symbols – whereas the non-human animals can only understand them as (natural) signs, “forced out” by fear, desire, joy, or other passions (Hobbes 1991, 37; OL II.88). It is in virtue of a prior mastery of linguistic expressions that language-competent humans are in a position to interpret human speech as significative of conceptions. But what is it to grasp “words as words” according to Hobbes?