Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

Port Royal: The Stirrings of Modernity 671
3 IDEAS OR TERMS
The first section of traditional logic books was generally a discussion of terms,
or even words. The Port-Royal Logic begins instead with ideas. This is not
as big a shift as it may seem, as certain medieval writers, for example Ockham,
thought there were spoken, written and mental terms, and the latter were primary. 9
Arnauld and Nicole are not always consistent in their terminology, switching every
now and then from “idea” to “term”. The Port Royal use of “idea” indicates their
view of the priority of thought over language. In the Grammaire, Arnauld and
Lancelot defined words as “distinct and articulate sound which men have made
as signs to signify their thoughts” [Arnauld and Lancelot, 1660, II, 1, 27]. This
definition was used to give a reason for studying the words and was included in
the Logic (103-4) when parts of the Grammaire were added to the section on
judgments with the aim of clarifying the role of the verb.
The Logic begins with the claim that “the word idea is one of those that are so
clear that they cannot be explained by others, because there are none more clear
and simple” (39). Despite this pronouncement, Arnauld and Nicole immediately
launch into confusions about ideas which they intend to clear up. They first
remark that they do not mean images “painted in the fantasy”, but rather “all
that is in the mind when we can say truthfully we are conceiving something in
whatever manner we conceive it” (41). Following Descartes, they rejected the
view of Hobbes and Gassendi that ideas are simply derived from sense images.
Like Descartes, again, Arnauld and Nicole give examples of such ideas as that
of a chiliagon or God, which are not associated with an image. In a later work,
On True and False Ideas, Arnauld made it clear that he thought of an idea of
something as the mental perception of that thing. Like Descartes, he thought
our minds, when used correctly, would correctly grasp the natures of things. The
properties of those things would be contained, in Descartes’ language, objectively
in the ideas. So, for example, omniscience is contained objectively in the idea of
God, and having angles which add up to two right angles is contained objectively
in the idea of a triangle. While these remarks suggest ideas have a propositional
content, Arnauld and Nicole maintained that ideas are prior to judgement and
they identified propositions with judgements.
An idea can be clear and distinct or obscure and confused. Arnauld and Nicole
again followed Descartes here, although they in fact blur his distinction between
clarity and distinctness in their explanation. Descartes had said a perception was
clear “when it is present and accessible to the attentive mind ...and stimulates
it with a sufficient degree of strength and accessibility”, and distinct when “as
well as being clear, it is so sharply separated from all other perceptions that it
contains within itself only what is clear” [Adam and Tannery, 1964-76, VIII -1, 22;
Cottingham et al., 1985-1991, I, 208]. The example Descartes gives of a clear idea
which is not distinct is of a pain, for the pain is quite strongly present to the mind,
but the idea is obscure because “people commonly confuse this perception with
9 See [Loux, 1974, 49–51].