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Without the use of language an animal’s ability to make inferences, to navigate, know about, and manipulate the world, is exhausted by its power to make successful conjectures by signs. Though good enough for an animal’s daily needs, natural prudence is limited in two important respects, both of which Hobbes characterizes as problems with the memory (e.g., EW I.13–14; EW IV.20). First, as I have already pointed out, since conceptions are not general concepts, the mind cannot naturally form general representations – concept possession, without language, consists in an organism’s ability to project regularities, remembered and recalled as signs. In Leviathan (Hobbes 2012, 52; 1651, 13) and De corpore (EW I.80), Hobbes gives the example of a person doing geometry without using language to make the point. By observing figures in sensory experience – by drawing a diagram and visually inspecting it, perhaps – a person can come to recognize that the sum of the interior angles of a triangle equal two right angles. However, without a general representation of triangularity, “if another triangle be shewn him different in shape from the former, he cannot know without a new labour, whether the three angles of that also be equall to the same” (Hobbes 2012, 52; 1651, 4). Using only his natural cognitive powers his possession of the concept of triangle is limited to his ability to reliably conjecture, from his memories of particular triangles, that the next triangle he encounters will also have interior angles equivalent to two right angles; without the capacity to deploy general representations in cognition, he cannot permanently store the inferential sequence that led him to discover that the interior angles of a three-sided figure are equal to two right angles.

The second problem is that the decay of conceptions introduces errors into the natural process of inference. Since natural cognitive processes involve a “comparison” of ideas, as ideas lose their informational capacity, so they become less and less reliable when deployed in inferences. “Tacit errors, or errors of sense and cogitation” arise, therefore, in the transition from one mental representation to another in inferential processes (EW I.56–7). Hence, for example, without a “sensible measure” by which to preserve the fact that a given figure was so many units wide, it will not be possible for a person to reliably infer that some new figure she encounters has a width of the same number of units (EW I.13).

To overcome these limitations, human beings invent marks: “sensible things taken at pleasure, that, by the sense of them, such thoughts may be recalled to our mind as are like those thought for which we took them” (EW I.14; also EW IV.20). Marks are genuine symbols, in the sense that they are physical tokens, the meaning of which is fixed by conventions governing their use. The point of marks is not so much to help forgetful people remember things they would not otherwise have remembered (although marks can do this); rather, more generally marks help the mark-user raise conceptions in her mind to make inferences and to guide her behavior. The symbolic import of a mark is constituted by its function in cognition. The example Hobbes gives in Elements of Law of sailors who float a buoy to mark a submerged rock to “remember their former danger, and avoid it” (EW IV.20) illustrates the point. The sailors in Hobbes’s example recall that there is a potentially dangerous rock below the water’s surface; they just cannot see the rock from their boat, as they approach it. The buoy, as a mark, causes the sailor to think about the rock (i.e., to raise conceptions of the rock) and they can take appropriate action; that is the sense in which the buoy helps the sailors’ memory. The sailors introduce the device to help themselves recall the rock so that they can then make deliberations, take action, etc. The buoy thereby “points to” the submerged rock, because it causes a sequence of conceptions involving conceptions (memories) of the rock. What makes the buoy a mark is the functional role played by the buoy in cognition. By a standing convention – a rule governing its use – the causal role of the buoy is fixed and, as a mark, it is able to reliably convey information from one time to the next. To grasp the symbolic import of the buoy as a mark is to know the role of the buoy in cognition.

Hobbes does not say much about the relationship between marks and conventional signs beyond the comment in De corpore that “[t]he difference, therefore, betwixt marks and signs is this, that those we make for our own use, but these for the use of others” (EW I.15). I will return to this point below, when I discuss the relationship between names in their role as marks and names as signs of thought, but here I point out the following. First, although Hobbes does not explicitly walk his readers through the process, I think it is reasonably easy to see how a mark, invented for the sake of private cognition, can become a sign to other people of what it marks. Take one of Hobbes’s examples of an artificial sign – stones set in a field to mark the boundary of the field. One can imagine a case in which a farmer, having trouble recalling the exact extent of his field (without “present and sensible measures”), hits upon the idea of putting stones in the ground to mark the boundary. A stone’s function as a mark is to cause the farmer to think about the boundary of his field; once his neighbor knows that this is how the farmer uses these stones, the stones become a sign to his neighbor of the same, causing him to think about the boundary of the field. It is not hard to imagine the community adopting this method – setting stones into the ground – to mark the boundaries of their fields and, also, to signify to their neighbors what they take to be that boundary. It is also easy to imagine this mark-to-sign process happening without explicit teaching. By observing the sailors’ behavior, for example, it would become clear what they are using the buoy for. In both cases, experience could “train someone to see” the mark as a sign, that is, to develop the right cognitive disposition.

Second, a “sensible moniment” is a mark when it is used in private cognition, but a sign where there is common knowledge of its function as a mark; this common knowledge, however, is not essential to the symbolic import of a mark. That is constituted by its role in individual cognition (EW I.14–15).

Names are distinguished from other “human voices” and from other sorts of marks by their specific role in cognition. Names are constituted by the role they play in the act of reasoning. They are imposed on objects, for the sake of recalling conceptions of those objects. Strung together into grammatical sentences, names “register” and “record” the consequences of thoughts through their imposition and their concatenation in the act of reasoning.

“Imposition” is a technical term, which, like “signification,” is borrowed from Scholastic semiotic theory. Hobbesian names function as categorematic terms and not singular terms. To “impose” a name is to establish a convention that fixes the extension of the name. Names “appellate” what they are “imposed on” or that of which they are truly predicable.⁵ A common name, “as Man, Horse, Tree, [is] the name of divers particular things; in respect of all which together, it is called an Universall” (Hobbes 2012, 52; 1651, 13). Proper names, “singular to one onely thing,” (Hobbes 2012, 52; 1651, 13) are a limiting case. They are also categorematic terms, imposed upon objects for the sake of recalling conceptions of those object, but which apply to exactly one thing as “he that writ the Illiad” (EW I.19) is imposed upon Homer to register the thought that he authored the Illiad or “Appius” and “Lentulus” apply to Appius and Lentulus for “(as Cicero has it) Appiety and Lentulity” (EW I.32). Imposition marks out a class – the class of objects, unified by the fact that each individual member of the class causes a similar suite of sensory appearances in the human organism. As I pointed out above, Hobbes is clear that, prior to the use of language, animals are capable of making perceptual discriminations, selectively attending to features of individual objects, recognizing similarities between individual objects, and remembering these, albeit imperfectly. A name is imposed upon many distinct individuals that resemble one another with respect to some feature. There are no universal properties ex parte rem nor universal mental representations, according to Hobbes’s austere nominalism. Class membership is analyzed in terms of the brute resemblance each individual member of the class bears to the others – the feature in virtue of which the name was chosen as a mark.⁶

A name allows its user to think about an entire class of objects, without having to think about each one of them individually. Names go proxy in the act of reasoning for the individuals in the name’s extension. Again borrowing from Sellars, we might call the imposition of the name the establishment of “language-entry” rules for the name (Sellars 1954). Imposition fixes the empirical conditions governing the appropriate use of the name. Knowing how to use a universal name is knowing the perceptual stimulus conditions governing its correct application – the conditions an object must meet to count as having the name predicable of it. In this way, although there is no general mental representation of, say, luminosity, only many memories and sensory experiences of lucid bodies, we grasp the universal name “luminous” because we know it applies to things that appear similar to us in a certain, visual way. The name “luminous” is a symbol that goes proxy for the individual luminous things in the act of reasoning.

Reason, “when wee reckon it amongst the Faculties of the mind,” is nothing other than “Reckoning (that is, Adding and Subtracting) of the Consequences of generall names agreed upon for the marking and signifying of our thoughts” (Hobbes 2012, 64; 1651, 18). As several authors have argued (e.g., Abizadeh 2017; Hull 2006; Pettit 2008; Soles 1996), the imposition of names – categorematic terms – introduces universal representations into the cognitive system. The use of names transforms the human mind from a mere Humean representational system into an “Aristotelian” representational system, in Sellars’ sense (Sellars 1981). “By this imposition of Names,” Hobbes writes, “some of larger, some of stricter signification, we turn the reckoning of the consequences of things imagined in the mind, into a reckoning of the consequences of Appellations” (2012, 52; 1651, 14). In imposing names on things to mark our conceptions and then appending names together into sentences, the discourse of ideas – which consists in “the innumerable acts of thinking about individual things” – is registered in language, “and is reduced to fewer but universal theorems … and this is a most useful economy” (Hobbes 1976, 375).

Hobbes’s example of the geometer recording his discovery about the properties of triangles is a nice illustration. Without the use of names in speech, the geometer can construct a triangle and determine that the interior angles are equivalent to two right angles, but he has to put himself to “new labor” and make a new conjecture every time he wants to know whether any new triangle has this property. This necessarily involves “innumerable acts of thinking” about particular triangles, comparing them and noting their similarities. But with the use of words:

[W]hen he observes that the equality was consequent, not to the length of sides, nor to any particular thing in his triangle [i.e. the one he has constructed]; but onely to this, that the sides were straight, and the angles three; and that that was all, for which he named it Triangle; and will boldly conclude Universally, that such equality of angles is in all triangles whatsoever; and register his invention in these generall terms, Every triangle hath its three angles equall to two right angles. And thus the consequence found in one particular, comes to be registered and remembered, as an Universall rule.

(Hobbes 2012, 54; 1651, 14)

Each mental representation is still a conception – and so particularistic and imagistic – but via the symbolic medium of language, thoughts are “registered and remembered.” However, this “registering” is not a simple one-to-one mapping of a name to a conception. The consequences of thoughts – each of which is just a train of mental particulars – are registered as a universal rule, expressed in the structure of a sentence.

As Hobbes defines truth, it is a semantic property – a property of sentences (or “propositions” as Hobbes calls them):

A true proposition is that, whose predicate contains, or comprehends its subject, or whose predicate is the name of everything, of which the subject is the name; as man is a living creature is therefore a true proposition, because whatsoever is called man, the same is also called living creature; and some man is sick, is true, because sick is the name of some man … these words true, truth, and true proposition, are equivalent to one another; for truth consists in speech, and not the things spoken of.

(EW I.35)

“True” is a metalinguistic predicate (a “name of a name” [Hobbes 2012, 1078; 1651, 372]) and applies to those sentences such that, by the imposition rules governing the names composing the sentence, the extension of the subject term is subsumed or contained within the extension of the predicate term (EW IV.23–4). The truth conditions of a sentence are given by the imposition of the component names – the application conditions that fixed the extensions of the names. Thus, the truth conditions of a sentence can be expressed as a rule of inference concerning the names involved in the sentence, capturing their proper use in cognition: The sentence “man is a living creature” is true if and only if all of the objects in the extension of “man” fall within the extension of “living creature” or, “If x is in the extension of ‘man’, then x is in the extension of ‘living creature’.”

According to Hobbes, a propositional attitude is a relation between a language-using animal and a sentence (2012, 98–100; 1651, 30–1; EW IV.2–8). To judge that a sentence of the form “S is P” is true is to accept that “If x is in the extension ‘S,’ then x is in the extension of ‘P’.” That is, propositional judgments involve grasping the truth conditions of sentences. But this implicitly involves semantic ascent, recognizing metalinguistic information expressed in the structure of the sentence; it is tantamount to acceptance of a rule for linking names to one another in reasoning. In order to grasp the truth conditions of a sentence, one must have an understanding of the imposition rules governing the use of the component names deployed in the sentence. To grasp the truth conditions of “S is P,” one must know how to use “S” and “P” as marks for thought. This, to anticipate the argument of the next section, is just what it is to “understand a name”: “to remember, by means of a name, those things which have to be considered in some matter, and for which the name has been imposed … the name ‘man’ is understood when this word brings to mind not only a human shape, but also its reasoning-capacity” (Hobbes 1976, 52).

The relationship between a language user and the sentences she judges to be true is a kind of causal relation, insofar as names play a functional role in the thought patterns of a language user. A name is a mark and, as a mark, it plays a role in the cognitive activity of the user. It causes the user, who has internalized the rule governing its application, to recall those ideas for which it was set up (Abizadeh 2015). As the buoy causes the sailors to think about the submerged rock when they see the buoy, so a name causes the person who grasps the “imposition” of the name to recall conceptions of the objects on which the name is imposed. A sentence read or heard or “tacitly thought” (EW V.197), causes a person to recall a chain of conceptions, corresponding to the impositions of the names concatenated together into the sentence. This is what Hobbes refers to as “remembering the use of names.” Conceptions are raised upon the hearing or reading of a sentence insofar as there is an associative habit to use a name as a mark for the sake of recalling conceptions. So, when I read the sentence, “red tomatoes are ripe,” the name “red tomato” causes me to think about some tomato and to selectively attend to its color. Then, there is a train of thought that takes me to various memories of ripe tomatoes, with that color. I recall that “ripe tomato” is applied to tomatoes for the sake of this gustatory appearance and judge that the sentence “red tomatoes are ripe tomatoes” is true (cf. EW I.23–4). So, while Archie and I can expect to experience the sensation ripeness from this red tomato on the basis of memory and the associative connections between conceptions, and thereby evince possession of the general concepts of tomatoes and ripeness, only I am able to grasp these concepts through a universal representation, preserved in the sentence I judge to be true. Returning to the case of the geometer, while he can see that two figures are triangles because they resemble one another in respect of having three sides (because he can selectively attend to their shape), with the use of the name “triangle” he is able to make and retain a universal judgment about all triangles, that is, everything within the extension of “triangle”.⁷