Chatton treats a wide range of issues in philosophy of mind and philosophical psychology. As elsewhere, his views here are almost always Scotistic in inspiration and developed in direct response to Ockham (and, often, Auriol as well). For example, Chatton upholds the Scotistic line on the unity of the rational soul against Ockham, who argues for a real distinction between sensory and intellective souls. Again, he follows Scotus in arguing that, pace Ockham, there is a formal distinction (i. e., formal nonidentity) between both the soul and its powers as well as among the powers themselves. Finally, like Scotus and unlike Ockham, Chatton holds that cognition involves the multiplication of species from the object, through the sense faculties, to the intellect. Indeed, in response to Ockham’s radical and wholesale elimination of species (both sensible and intelligible, as well as in medio), Chatton develops a fairly systematic defense of species as necessary for both sensory and intellective cognition.
Chatton’s account of cognition includes an extended discussion of the nature of intuitive cognition, which we can think of as approximating our contemporary notion of perception. One of Chatton’s contributions here is to focus the debate on questions about the certainty of intuitive cognition. Thus, Chatton considers and rejects Auriol’s theory, which leaves open the possibility that intuitive cognition could occur naturally in the absence of its object, on the grounds that such a view utterly vitiates the ‘‘certitude’’ of knowledge grounded in the senses. Given this, it is all the more interesting that Chatton sides with Ockham (and against Scotus) in allowing the possibility God could cause an intuitive cognition of a nonexistent object, but then resists Ockham’s further contention that such a case would not result in deception or error. Chatton insists that it surely would. His stance on these various issues is interesting insofar as it indicates, on the one hand, a special concern to safeguard the epistemic security of sensory intuition, and yet, on the other, resistance to any notion of its being infallible.
Like many of his contemporaries, Chatton restricts intuitive cognition to the senses and, thus, resists the introduction of intuitive cognition at the level of intellect. In rejecting intellective intuitive cognition, he is essentially rejecting the idea (and plausibly so) that we possess (at least in this life) a non-sensory or ‘‘extra-sensory’’ mode of
Perception. In taking this position, however, Chatton departs from Ockham (and also, perhaps, Scotus), who argues for intellective intuitive cognition largely on the grounds that it provides the best explanation for consciousness - that is, for our direct awareness of our own mental states. Indeed, on Ockham’s view, consciousness is higher-order (intellective) perception of lower-order states. As Chatton sees it, the problem with Ockham’s account, is both (a) that it entails an infinite regress of higher-order intuitions, and (b) that the higher-order intellective intuitions it appeals to do not, in fact, explain the phenomena of consciousness. On Chatton’s view, by contrast, any conscious experience - my perception of a rock, say - involves two components: first, an awareness of some object (the rock, in this case); and, second, a subjective or first-personal awareness of the experience (namely, a perceptual experience) as something I am undergoing. According to Chatton, therefore, consciousness is an intrinsic feature of conscious states. Given this, Chatton insists that self-knowledge can be explained without the introduction of any higher-order states, not to say higher-order states of intellectual intuitive cognition.
As the foregoing suggests, Chatton made a number of important contributions to medieval debates about the nature and mechanisms of cognition. Although scholars are not yet in a position to assess the precise extent of Chatton’s influence on subsequent thinkers in this regard, it is clear that he exercised a great deal of influence on Ockham. Indeed, on a number of issues, Chatton’s objections were felt by Ockham to be sufficiently forceful as to require substantial modifications to his views. The best-documented case of such influence concerns Ockham’s developing views of concepts.
In his early writings, Ockham presupposes a kind of act-object analysis of thought (i. e., intellective cognition). On this analysis, concepts turn out to be thought-objects distinct from but dependent on the mental acts directed at them. Because concepts, on this view, are mind-dependent objects. Ockham often refers to them as “ficta” (i. e., “mentally-fashioned entities’’). Chatton vigorously attacked Ockham’s early view on the grounds that such ficta are (a) ontologically superfluous, since mental acts themselves can function as mental representations, and (b) epistemologically problematic, since they stand in the way of the mind’s direct cognitive access to reality. On Chatton’s alternative, “mental-act” analysis of thought, concepts are not construed as intentional objects of acts of thinking, but rather are just acts of thought themselves. Ockham eventually accepts these criticisms and, likewise, Chatton’s own analysis of concepts. He does not, however, arrive at
Chatton’s view all at once. On the contrary, he initially remains neutral between the fictum-theory and the mental-act theory. It turns out, however, that Chatton also plays a crucial role in pushing Ockham from this intermediate position to a wholesale rejection of the fictum-theory. He does so by calling attention to a number of related difficulties in Ockham’s theory of judgment - in particular, in his account of the objects of knowledge (scientia). The details are complicated, but the end result is that these criticisms lead Ockham to recognize systematic advantages of Chatton’s analysis of intellective cognition generally. In his most mature writings, therefore, Ockham not only wholeheartedly endorses the mental-act theory of concepts, but even rejects his own earlier account of objects of judgment in favor of a view that comes quite close to Chatton’s own.
World History
