Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

Where Is the Mind Supposed to Be? 605
this issue first, it is true that language is in the world and does, in a sense, “operate” on that world
in a tool-like manner; this is not unlike how a shovel operates on the soil it moves. What language
cannot do is mesh or join with that world. To do that, two things are required: ideas must originate
in the senses, and the world has to be an equal partner in the enterprise. Nominalists limit the
world’s role to offering up particular objects. The mind is the star in this scenario; it is the mind
that acts on particulars in the process known as “induction” to create the generality or regularity
that is associated with understanding.
Duns Scotus, writing some twenty years before Ockham, may have been the first to put mind
and world on equal footing. Regularity or universality, like rationality in humans or, in later
centuries, gravity or photosynthesis, is present in nature. Furthermore, the role it plays in making
itself known is as active as that of the human mind. Scotus was the first to posit a relationship of
true reciprocity between mind and world. This last point requires some elaboration. The middle
ages were dominated by religion; both Scotus and Ockham, in fact, were members of a religious
order as well as academicians. The vexing philosophical issues that Scotus struggled with was
how to respond to Aristotle, whose newly discovered writings, lost to the West for a thousand
years, were wreaking havoc with the Catholic church. Scotus, and before him, Aquinas, tried to
square Aristotle’s notion of natural law with divine power, evidenced by God’s spontaneous will.
Contrary to Aristotle’s teachings, the scholastics thought that God could, if he so willed, change
a human embryo into a tree. Contingency rather than necessity was the order of the day. Scotus’s
solution to this vexing problem was to view indeterminacy in positive rather than negative terms.
Contingency does not represent nature falling short in some way. Rather, it represents the wideranging
nature and creativity of God’s thought. At the moment of creation, God sees all the
possibilities open to him, now and in the future. In a sense, the alternatives are all spelled out
ahead of time. It is the function of God’s will, when the proper time comes, to determine which,
if any, of the possibilities he actualizes.
Scotus’s decision to put possibility on the same continuum with necessity humbled intellect
at the same time that it elevated will. It is will, at both the divine and the human level, that
converts imperfectly understood possibilities into fully realized facts. Confused knowledge,
grasped qualitatively (e.g., metaphorically), is the first step in the acquisition of more certain
knowledge. The brilliance of Scotus’s solution was to allow for a type of knowing that could put
the mind in direct relationship to the object or event the inquirer is attempting to know. Individual
objects are an amalgam of particular and general attributes. The mind discovers generality; it does
not, as Ockham would argue, create it. The discovery process is a joint one. Both “object and
author,” to use Scotus’s language, play active roles. It surfaces as mere possibility and is grasped
by the mind as a sign (e.g., called a “phantasm” by Scotus). Charles Sanders Peirce, who built on
Scotus’s ideas in the nineteenth century, would liken this imaginative rendering of generality to
that of a metaphor; a modern-day example might be seeing the plant as a “food factory.” When the
object is viewed through the lens of the sign, it contributes to the discovery process by allowing
certain features to emerge in sharp relief while blocking other, presumably irrelevant features.
The term Scotus used to describe this hybrid sign-object was, appropriately, that of the “physical
universal.” Drawing on our modern-day example, this means that during the qualitative first stage
of coming to understand, the individual can truly see the plant as a factory that produces food—
see that there is a production process going on within the confines of the leaf, that these products
are warehoused, that a waste product is given off, and so forth. Two points are worth noting here:
Scotus’s scholastic realism allowed for the mind to mesh or interrelate with the world in the early
stages of understanding; concepts are immediately obtained from objects. (This understanding, of
course, must be reformulated as a proposition.) Second, Scotus’s view of God (and nature) is an
intellectually friendly one. By building essence into being, God all but ensures that our experience
with nature will be a conceptual as well as a sensory one. Furthermore, although God does not