Читать книгу Bentham - Michael Quinn - Страница 11

As we have seen, Bentham decided early on that English law as it existed did not make sense: it was incomprehensible and unable to guide conduct consistently (2016b: 113–14, 293–5). Legal and political discussion was vitiated by the fact that its core vocabulary (words like right, duty and justice) consisted of terms either undefined or badly defined. Its metaphysics, its science of meaning, was a contradictory chaos, even without taking into account the penchant of common lawyers to work around procedural constraints by resorting to fictional devices, which made assertions all knew to be untrue. Designating phantoms, non-entities, as really existing entities did not offer a constructive solution.

Since law played an essential role in guiding action, leaving law in such a misleading and incomprehensible condition was a dereliction of duty on the part of legislators. In response, drawing on the inheritance of Locke, Hume and D’Alembert (1843: iii. 286), Bentham attempted no less than the invention of a new logic rooted in sense experience. Central to this enterprise was the verbal distinction, reflecting an underlying ontological distinction, between real and fictitious entities. ‘A fictitious entity is an entity to which, though by the grammatical form of the discourse employed in speaking of it existence is ascribed, yet in truth and reality existence is not meant to be ascribed.’ Conversely, a real entity . . . is ‘an entity to which existence is really meant to be ascribed’ (1997: 164 (UC cii. 16)).

The moment language, a construction of the human mind for the formation, recording and transmission of thought, evolved beyond declaration of desire or aversion towards particular real objects, it necessarily ascribed existence to things that had none. It was impossible for all but the most basic language to mirror the world, while to demand that it should was to demand the reduction of human capacity to communicate to the level of animals unable to form abstract concepts. In short, Bentham asserted that all language that deployed the names of anything other than really existing entities is figurative, or metaphorical (UC cii. 466 (1843: viii. 331)). The propositions it contains are fictitious; that is, they are strictly speaking falsehoods, asserting the existence of things that possess no independent existence.

Bentham was less clear than might be wished in delineating the category of real entities, but generally he regarded two sorts of things as real entities, namely particular physical substances or bodies on one hand, and certain psychical entities (that is sensations, impressions and ideas) on the other (1983c: 271n; 2016b: 424; UC ci. 341 (1843: viii. 262); UC ci. 347 (1843: viii. 267); UC ci. 417). All knowledge of external reality came through the mediation of sensory experience and reflection on it. Encounters with physical real entities deposited impressions via our sense organs, while the images or ideas created by those impressions could be recalled at leisure. Since all experience of the world came through our senses, the psychical entities, sensations, impressions and ideas were the direct objects of that experience, so that the existence of the external world was, properly speaking, inferential (1997: 180 (UC cii. 15); 1983c: 271n): we conclude that the wall before us exists because we make highly plausible inferences from the sensory data delivered by sight and touch.

Bentham wasted no time in querying the reality of the external world, arguing that no bad consequences could follow from such acceptance, in contrast to the pain quickly endured if we opted to disbelieve in the wall’s existence. In addition, he assumed not only that the world we perceive exists, but that sense experience is capable of delivering accurate information about it. The basis for accepting these assertions was twofold. First, our only source of information indicated its accuracy. Second, while that source of information might actually be deceptive, the consequences of accepting the evidence of sense were incomparably better than those of rejecting it: ‘in point of practice, no bad consequences can . . . possibly arise from supposing it to be true; and the worst consequences can not but arise from supposing it to be false’ (UC lxix. 52; see also 1997: 182 (UC cii. 15)).

The criterion that rapidly determines the reality of the existence of the external world is thus entirely utilitarian and pragmatic. How do we know that the evidence we perceive in the sensations we experience is reliable? We do not and cannot, but that evidence is the only kind available to us. At this point we might abandon hope of perceiving reality, but Bentham effectively dismissed this option because by denying any rational basis for preferring one course to another it would paralyse thought and action in pursuit of improvement. At this foundational level, utility, the demand that we prioritize pursuit of happiness, wins out over seeking truth in relation to questions that, given the informational constraints of human existence, we simply cannot answer. There is a deep connection here with Bentham’s goal, which was to fashion a discursive tool by which legal and political concepts could be rendered meaningful and determinate. Some philosophers have dismissed Bentham’s logic as revealing the shallowness of his approach and intellect (Peirce, 1931–58: v. para. 158). This, however, is to overlook the fact that, for him, investing effort in doubting the reliability of sensory data led nowhere and thus had little value: logic, like all other arts and sciences, aimed at happiness (UC ci. 92 (1843: viii. 219)).

There are both subjective and objective elements in Bentham’s approach to logic. In relation to the first, all human experience is subjective: we live our lives from the inside out, having no direct access to each other’s experience. Each of us inhabits a private reality, but language provides the bridge between these realities. The subjects of the most primitive communications were existing objects, to which reference was aided by the links between the objects, the names we gave them, and their mental images. When objects were present, we disambiguated our referents by pointing at them. When they were absent, we depended on the ability of their names to call forth the same image in our minds and that of our interlocutors. Such designation, the beginning of both language and logic, became embedded in the structure of language and thought, so that ‘a material image is the only instrument by which . . . conceptions can be conveyed from mind to mind’ (UC cii. 463). To exchange sense through words is, for Bentham, to exchange mental images (1843: iii. 189). Communication about real entities is facilitated by their presentation of unambiguous images, copies of sense impressions. Following Locke, Bentham distinguished between the names of ideas with natural archetypes, and those without: ‘What I assume then, is that of the objects . . . we are in use to speak of, some do, others do not exist. Those which do exist may be said to have their archetypes in nature: those which do not exist may be said not to have their archetypes in nature’ (UC lxix. 52; and see Locke, 1975: 372). However, because noun substantives often do name things, encountering a name produces ‘a disposition and propensity to suppose . . . the real existence, of a . . . correspondent thing’ (UC ci. 341 (1843: viii. 262)).

If we want to exchange meaning about abstract terms, the easiest way is to speak as if they were physical objects, even though this is a misdescription. The logical analysis by which ‘ripeness’, for instance, is first abstracted from a real ripe apple, then designated as a noun in its own right, and then attributed to other plants in a similarly appetizing state abounds in fictions, false propositions about the world, since the quality of ripeness has no existence in the absence of really existing objects in which it might inhere. Bentham anticipated Hans Vaihinger’s philosophy of ‘as if’ in regarding many basic categories with which thought seeks to understand the world as fictitious entities (1997: 88–120; Vaihinger, 1925: 157–66). However, while they both regarded qualities as fictitious, for Bentham the particular bodies to which qualities were attributed were impeccably real (UC cii. 461 (1843: viii. 330); 1983c: 262).

The metaphorical substantification of the immaterial is seen everywhere in language, in constructions like ‘in motion’ or ‘at rest’ and in designation of qualities. In referring to mental operations, we spatialize the mind as the container wherein they occur, and borrow names and images of real entities to designate them (1843: viii. 327–9).⁴ Abstract nouns are not only useful but essential, they permit the exchange of complex and subtle information relating indirectly to the exterior world, even though they do not designate actually existing objects: ‘A proper substantive, the name of a real entity, is understood immediately and of itself it offers a certain image to the conception. An improper substantive offers no such image. Of itself it has no meaning’ (2016b: 401).

Because fictitious entities are not associated with images that correspond to natural archetypes, they possess no obvious shared meaning. Insofar as propositions including such entities can have any meaning, it is only a connection with real entities that can bestow it: ‘The ideas we have are all ultimately derived from substances: that is, from the several natural bodies that surround us’ (2016b: 200). Fortunately, such connections are available for words like right and obligation, which form the currency of law, and Bentham’s three methods for defining those entities, phraseoplerosis, paraphrasis and archetypation,⁵ consist in making those connections explicit.

To make sense of a fictitious entity, it is necessary first to include its name in a proposition (phraseoplerosis). Modern philosophers have recognized the importance of Bentham’s insight that analysis of meaning was properly conducted at the level not of individual words, but of the proposition, anticipating later developments in analytical philosophy (Ogden, 1932: xlii–lii; Quine, 1981: 67–70; Harrison, 1983: 64–8). Paraphrasis consists in ‘that sort of exposition which may be afforded by transmuting into a proposition having for its subject some real entity, a proposition which has not for its subject any other than a fictitious entity’ (UC cii. 217 (1843: viii. 246); see also 1983c: 272n; 2016b: 386). In paraphrasis of normative abstractions, the real entities that do the work are the sensations of pleasure and pain (1977: 495n; 2010b: 286).⁶ Thus a man is under an obligation when he faces pain in consequence of failure on his part to act in a certain way. Harrison notes that a significant difficulty arises concerning the criteria by which we understand that the substituted proposition possesses the same meaning as the original, and concludes that for Bentham it is simply impossible to compare the import of the two, since the first proposition, like the term, has no meaning: ‘The options are either nonsense or taking it to mean what the analysis says: there is no separate way of understanding it’ (1983: 72).

Nothing has no properties. A fictitious entity, being . . . a mere nothing, can not of itself have any properties: no proposition by which any property is ascribed to it can therefore be in itself . . . a true one, nor therefore an instructive one: whatsoever of truth is capable of belonging to it can not belong to it in any other character than that of the . . . supposed equivalent of . . . some proposition having for its subject some real entity. (UC cii. 217 (1843: viii. 246))

Postema criticizes Schofield for insisting that unless successfully paraphrased, fictitious entities had no meaning, arguing that Bentham’s goal was not to produce meaning where none existed, but to fix meaning, in just the way that Hobbes’s sovereign fixed meanings (1991: 120, 124–5), albeit in a more interactive, democratic way (Postema, 2019: 21; Schofield, 2006: 34). There is, however, considerable textual evidence to support Schofield’s interpretation (2016b: 401; 1983b: 74). Yes, Bentham sought to fix meanings to provide a basis for unambiguous communication and guidance of action, but the reason fictitious entities lacked such meanings was that, in themselves and until paraphrased, they had no determinate meaning, so that either they meant nothing, or they meant anything we chose. ‘It is impossible to speak correctly, unless we think correctly; and it is impossible to think correctly whilst words are employed for registering our ideas, which words are so constituted that it is not possible to form them into propositions which shall not be false’ (1843: iii. 171).

Bentham cautioned that correspondence between perception and reality will rarely be complete; we often err in interpretation of sensory data, since interpretation depends not purely on passive perception but on inference therefrom, on ‘judgment, ratiocination, which is liable to be erroneous’ (UC ci. 118 (1843: viii. 224)). Fictitious entities are essential to all but the most basic communication, and, since language is the medium for thought, to all but the most basic thought. No discussion of mental acts can occur without this substantification of the mind, and the pretence that fictitious entities (e.g. judgment, motive) are really existing objects (1983c: 371–2). Language may be ‘an instrument for the communication of thought from one mind to another’ (UC cii. 456 (1843: viii. 329)), but language, because of the unavoidable resort to employing names of fictitious entities as if they were real entities, necessarily misdescribes.

Although all experience is subjective, successful communication depends on the capacity to agree on meanings by attaching the same import to the same words. Bentham fell back on the regularities of experience and the broad equality among human agents, each equipped with the same sensory organs and, generally speaking, possessed of sufficient cognitive competence to process similar sensory inputs in similar ways. Cohen calls this premise universal cognitive competence (1983), and without this assumption communication and co-ordination among human beings in general would be difficult if not impossible. Yes, sensory and cognitive capacities vary along a broad continuum but, even allowing for such differences, the possibilities of inter-subjective communication are sufficient to permit almost universal access to knowledge of the external world through sensation and reflection on it. This universalized inter-subjectivity entails that we can (and should, aided by inductive empirical science) draw the same inferences from the same sensory inputs.

In consequence, although Bentham recognized the subjectivity of experience, he also asserted that opinions and the judgments underlying them were capable of objective assessment. For instance, individual assessments of the probability of an event’s having occurred are, for Bentham, simply statements of the individual’s degree of persuasion or belief that the event did occur. As reports of the internal state of the individual’s mind, they are infallible, at least if the individual is being honest. However, this does not imply that every individual’s assessment of probability is equally valid, because assessments of probability depend upon evidence, and evidence is ‘any matter of fact, the effect . . . of which, when presented to the mind, is to produce a persuasion concerning the existence of some other matter of fact’ (1843: vi. 208). The introduction of facts – ‘the existence of any expressible state of things, or of persons . . . at any given point or portion of time’ – provides an essential escape route from terminal subjectivity. We cannot simply choose to believe whatever we like, since, given proper attention and cognitive competence, the faculty of understanding is governed by evidence.

Now, what is in man’s power to do, in order to believe a proposition, and all that is so, is to keep back and stifle the evidences that are opposed to it. For, when all the evidences are equally present to his observation, and equally attended to, to believe or disbelieve is no longer in his power. It is the necessary result of the preponderance of the evidence on one side over that on the other. (1843: x. 146 [emphasis added]; see also 1843: vi. 18n)

For Bentham, a belief ‘is an act of the Judgment’ (2016b: 155), while judgments about facts admit of objective assessment. Although absolute certainty is incompatible with human existence, what Bentham calls ‘Practical certainty, a degree of assurance sufficient for practice’ (1843: vii. 105), is not. How can we approach practical certainty? How but by relying on the basis of all knowledge: experience, observation, experiment and reflection?

Postema argues that fictitious entities, or at least the assemblage of them which populate the human construction of world-manipulating logic, are just as real as real entities (2019: 13–14, 23). There are indeed passages in which Bentham sounds as if this is what he wants to say (1983c: 266, 271n, 272n). However, if this were his considered position, he would have dissolved the distinction between real and fictitious entities on which he hangs so much. True, Bentham considered many psychical entities ideas to be real entities; they are directly perceptible to sense by introspection. Yet he was also clear that by no means every idea names a real entity. We can make sense, for instance, of the idea of a golden mountain, by synthesizing our ideas of a mountain and of gold respectively. Yet ‘golden mountain’ was one of his favourite examples of a ‘fabulous entity’, fabulous precisely in the sense of being unreal, of not corresponding with physical reality (UC ci. 347 (1843: viii. 267); UC ci. 417). As Bentham noted in a passage where he asserted that the names of logical wholes or genera name real entities, such logical wholes include not only all plants that ever have existed or will exist, but ‘all plants that, without existing, shall be but conceived to exist’ (1983c: 265n). Real ideas, for Bentham, were present to memory, that is, were formed by recalling copies of images or impressions deposited by real entities. If all ideas capable of producing ‘mental images’ are real entities, every conceivable creation of human imagination would qualify as a real entity.

It is true that central elements of human well-being depend on the proper deployment of the fictitious entities rights and obligations, but that doesn’t make all conceivable rights or obligations into real entities. Can fictitious entities have real effects? Certainly: the legal judgment that I have breached my legal obligation is followed by punishment.⁷ Even the sham law delivered by judgments of Common Law judges had undeniably real consequences in distributing pleasures and pains, thanks to belief on the part of those charged with executing those judgments that the judge acted within her prerogative in making them. Doubtless then, the maximization of happiness demands a rational ordering of the constructivist domain of fictitious entities, which is exactly what Bentham thinks paraphrasis supplies.

Bentham’s logic contains tensions between realist and pragmatic or fictionalist perspectives, between the view that use of propositions containing fictitious entities was only legitimate insofar as they were replaceable by propositions referring to real entities, and the view that the sole criterion of legitimacy for use of fictional constructs was a pragmatic one, namely the degree to which their use generated accurate predictions (1983c: 346–8, 371; UC cii. 466; 1843: viii. 331; and see Quinn, 2012a). An introductory book is no place to attempt categorization of Bentham in terms of modern approaches in logic (Tarantino, 2018; Postema, 2019: 9, 15–16; Milnes: 2020). Such attempts may have limited value and involve unavoidable anachronism, since modern debates were unknown to him, he did not locate himself in their terms, and his central focus – developing analytic tools that could facilitate improvements in law and morality – was more practical (see Postema, 2019: 17). For what it is worth, the current writer might characterize him as a (quasi-)realist for pragmatic reasons.