Gregory of Rimini developed a detailed theory of cognition that would be the subject of critical discussion into the sixteenth century. The foundation of his view is that cognition comes in two varieties: intuitive cognition involves no representational intermediaries, whereas abstractive cognition does involve representational intermediaries. The intermediaries at issue here were called ‘‘species.’’ Species were taken to be representational entities that came in several kinds. ‘‘Species in the medium’’ were held to convey information about some extramental thing from the thing itself to a cognizer’s external senses; ‘‘sensory species’’ were posited to convey that information further through a series of internal senses in the brain (e. g., common sense, imagination); and finally, as what was called an ‘‘intelligible species,’’ the relevant information was conveyed in immaterial form further still to the immaterial intellect. In addition to their role in conveying information, species were appealed to as the means by which we could recall information that we had earlier obtained; thus, the species of, say, gold found in the imagination could be recalled even when not in the presence of gold, and upon recollection it could be used, for example, in creating an image of a golden mountain. Gregory’s theory of cognition is predicated upon the adoption of the theory of species. This was not an entirely obvious move: many Scholastics in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries had rejected species outright, perhaps most famously William of Ockham. Gregory takes Ockham to task on several grounds. First, he claims that Ockham contradicted explicit and implicit testimony of the saints, and particularly St. Augustine. Second, he argues that certain cognitive functions that we know we have, like memory, are impossible to explain without the preservation of some representational entity; the representational entity in question is a species.
Gregory draws his account of species into the heart of his cognitive theory by basing upon it his own use of the then-popular distinction between intuitive and abstractive cognition. For Gregory, intuitive cognition is direct cognition of some object, and he holds that intuitive cognition is the foundation for all further cognition. In contrast, we have abstractive cognition when we perceive an object through some sort of representation, that is, through a species. In fact, all abstractive cognition is essentially linked with an intuitive cognition, inasmuch as an intuitive cognition of the species is a necessary precondition for having an abstractive cognition of the object represented by the species (if I just had an intuitive cognition of the species, without the further abstractive cognition, then I would be thinking about the species and not about what the species represents). This is why Gregory, again disagreeing with Ockham, claims that intuitive cognition has no necessary link with the existence of some extramental object (Tachau 1988:358-370).
Thus, Gregory claims that intuitive cognition of singular extramental things is the origin of all our knowledge, providing us with the raw material to then go on and remember, imagine, analyze, think, and reason. Gregory says:
Primacy of generation, is intuitive knowledge of some sensible singular... if it were asked, which singular is that first knowledge of, it should be said that it is of that singular that first moves the senses with a sufficient motion, after the child is able to understand (I Sent., d. 3, q. 3, in Gregory of Rimini 1979-1984, vol 1 [1981]:409, ll. 2-4, 10-11).
Here we see clear evidence for Trapp’s view that Gregory gave the singular extramental thing a privileged position in his philosophy.
With regard to propositional knowledge, Gregory rejects the view of such important Scholastics as Ockham and John Buridan that thought has a compositional nature, and further that concepts are arranged into mental propositions much like words are arranged into sentences in spoken and written language (i. e., as a mental language). Gregory claims instead that mental propositions are formed all at once as a unity; their semantic complexity is in no way mirrored by any compositionality of mental acts or objects. Gregory argues for this view by asking how one could explain the difference between the following two mental propositions ‘‘every whiteness is an entity’’ and ‘‘every entity is a whiteness.’’ In spoken or written language these two sentences, one true and the other false, would be made unambiguously distinct by the spatial or temporal ordering of the component words. But there is no such ordering to be found in the immaterial intellect. Thus, according to Gregory, the only way to explain the distinction between the two propositions is to hold that mental propositions are formed all at once as a unity (Ashworth 1981:73-75; Panaccio 1999:292-296).
Although Gregory did not originate the ‘‘unity’’ view of the mental proposition, his name became associated with the position into the early modern period.
When we turn from mental propositions to mental attitudes like knowing and believing, we come to yet another development that Gregory became renowned for: the complexe significabile. The view descends from the English theologian Adam Wodeham (d. 1358). Wodeham had claimed that the object of knowledge and belief is neither extramental things (Walter Chatton’s view) nor propositions about extramental things (Ockham’s view), but rather it is ‘‘what is able to be signified complexly’’ or ‘‘propositionally,’’ that is, the complexe significabile, which he also says is the total object of a proposition. In trying to keep his ontology lean, Wodeham rejects that the complexe significabile is a thing; it is merely a mode of being, an item with a special ontological status outside of the Aristotelian categories and postulated solely to explain how our knowledge and beliefs can track reality. In adopting Wodeham’s view, Gregory made several changes, including his explicit acceptance that, with the term ‘‘thing’’ understood correctly, one could call the complexe significabile a ‘‘thing.’’ This lack of concern for strict ontological parsimony made Gregory’s view a target for such later thinkers as Buridan (Zupko 1994-1997; Bermon 2007). It was through Gregory’s work that Wodeham’s complexe significabile was passed on to the continental universities, and thus it was in general his understanding of the position that was the center of attention into the sixteenth century (Ashworth 1978).
World History
