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…my third question on the reading sheet.
Contrast Duns Scotus, Thomas Aquinas and Haclay on the reality of universals.
He discusses Haclay on 52, then on the bottom of 53 we get the summary.
Scotus and Avicenna held that every concept represents an essence, the essence is present
then in each individual.
So to know the concept is to know the essence which informs each individual being.
So it's to come to an intellectual knowledge, through the universal, of the sort of inner
life, the inner reality of each individual of that universal.
Harclay criticizes this Scotist and Avicennean position and holds that a general idea is
either nothing or it's a mere definition.
We have Harclay giving us a theory of confused and distinct impressions.
Let me do this very quickly. Harclay… [chalkboard sounds]
Some of our impressions are confused and some are distinct.
With a confused impression… [chalkboard sounds]
A confused impression permits us to draw conclusions about the species, the type of thing that
the individual is.
So to perceive an individual in a confused way is to perceive it as a kind of species-being.
I know enough from looking at dogs to know something about…
I know, I look at this dog, I learn something about all dogs.
That's actually what a confused, general knowledge of dogs is.
To have a distinct impression of this dog is to know enough about it to be able to draw
conclusions about this individual, as distinct from other members of the same species.
This is almost just a matter of how, how tight we’ve dialed down the focus knob of our microscope.
Do we have it focused on the group and the group properties, or do we have it focused
on the individual and individual’s distinctness from the group?
This gets at a distinction between things that allows Haclay to say that knowledge of
universals is really just this knowledge, this knowledge of species.
The universals, dogs, trees, whatever we want to talk about, this is where the universals
are, the so-called universals.
The trouble, though, is that they’re founded in confusion of the intellect.
We only have a sort of vague fuzzy knowledge of them and this seems to conflict with…
[chalkboard sounds]
It seems to conflict with the Aristotelian idea, still current at the time, that science
is a matter of grasping the truth of things,
and it grasps the truth of things as being the science of universals.
Science is *of* universals.
So, as Gilson says early in the chapter, Harclay is in the weird position of seeming to have
to maintain that our ability to have scientific, “scientia,” scientific knowledge of things,
depends upon our conceiving of them in a confused rather than a precise manner.
It seems that the generality of our grasp of things comes from a limitation or imperfection
of our minds.
We're not paying close enough attention.
There's something important here. I'll just pause and note this.
Some of you know this from a philosophy of science course.
There's an important break that takes place in our use of the word “science” and our
definition of the type of knowledge that science gives us.
At this period, prior to this, and even for a while after this, we think of science as
being universal knowledge.
To have a scientific grasp of something, to know it completely, is to know it through
the universal or essential qualities of the things.
So the person who knows horses, going back to Plato, is the person who actually grasps
what it *is* to be a horse in some important fashion.
A person who only sort of has practical experience of horses, the horse trainer, perhaps, who's
not a real scholar of horses, that person we would say just has a knack for horses.
He can make the right call most of the time, but not out of any sort of deep grasp of the
Form of Horse.
That's what's needed for science.
At some point, certainly by the 19th century, we have this inversion, where now we begin
to think of scientific knowledge as being knowledge of individuals, knowledge of particulars,
not requiring this abstraction to the universal nature of things.
I just want to point this out because I believe the associations that we have with the word
“science” undergo a parallel shift.
We no longer think of science as being a kind of universal knowledge of things, a universal
philosophical grasp of the ultimate realities of things.
We think of science now as being a bunch of little, sort of particle-sized, observational knowledge.
And then sort of a practical ability to extract a theory that is predictive over that set of data.
So it’s something that's much less associated with the “scientia” from the classical
tradition and much more, sort of, ground-up, empirical, based upon accurate prediction
of future observations.
I won't get into the actual mechanism of that inversion, but we're prior to the inversion here.
So when Harlcay finds himself associating scientific knowledge with confusion,
we have a problem.
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