A Companion to Hobbes

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. 3If 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?

In each of his major discussions concerning the function of language, Hobbes remarks that names are words that serve as marks, “imposed on” objects for the sake of recollecting thoughts or conceptions of those objects. Let us examine these, starting with Anti-White , where Hobbes writes that “a name or appellation is a human sound [ vox ]. Say a person has something in mind, of which he retains from mind-picture [ imagio ]. He applies to, or imposes on, the thing the human vocal sound as a “note” enabling him to conjure up a similar mind picture” (Hobbes 1976, 373–4). In the Elements of Law Hobbes writes:

In the number of these marks, are those human voices (which we call the names or appellations of things) sensible to the ear, by which we recall into our mind some conception of the things to which we give those names or appellations. As the appellation white bringeth to remembrance the quality of such objects as produce that colour or conception in us. A name or appellation … is the voice of a man arbitrary , imposed for a mark to bring to his mind some conception concerning the thing on which it is imposed.

(EW IV.20)

In Leviathan :

The generall use of Speech, is to transferre our Mentall Discourse, into Verbal; or the Trayne of our Thoughts, into a Trayne of Words; and that for two commodities; whereof the one is, the Registering of the Consequences of our Thoughts; which being apt to slip out of our memory, and put us to a new labour, may again be recalled, by such words as they were marked by. So that the first use of names, is to serve for Markes , or Notes of remembrance. Another is when many use the same words to signifie (by their connexion and order,) one to another, what they conceive, or think of each matter … for this use they are called Signes .