The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. , No.

 October 

ISSN –

DISCUSSIONS

COULD AQUINAS REJECT SEMANTIC REALISM?

REPLY TO DE ANNA

B S J. B

In a recent contribution to this journal I argued that, pace John Haldane, Aquinas’
version of the mind–world identity thesis (a form of metaphysical realism) is not
compatible with semantic anti-realism.1 Gabriele De Anna has now argued that
Aquinas’ metaphysical realism is compatible with the negation of semantic realism.2
De Anna recognizes that Aquinas and the semantic anti-realist part company on the
issue of whether bivalence applies to undecidable statements about the past. Al-
though he makes an attempt to refine the issue, De Anna concludes by saying (p. )
that ‘[mind–world theorists] may object to semantic realism without embracing at
the same time a full-bodied semantic anti-realism’, and that this attitude is consistent
with Aquinas’ views. It is worth pointing out why De Anna’s weaker thesis cannot go
through either.
A premise of my argument against the compatibility thesis (and De Anna’s
weaker version of it) is Aquinas’ distinction between two ways of acquiring know-
ledge of the natural world: (i) directly, by being literally informed by the object in
question, in which case one arrives at a conformity or formal identity of mind and
world; or (ii) indirectly, by forming some idea of an object by noting its effects. De
Anna claims (pp. –) that this distinction is not important because there is no
significant difference between concepts arrived at via direct encounters with objects
and those arrived at only via encounters with their effects:
There is no restriction of the ways in which one may arrive at those concepts, i.e.,
whether only directly or also indirectly.... Accordingly one could endorse Aquinas’
1 See my ‘Could Aquinas Accept Semantic Anti-Realism?’, The Philosophical Quarterly, 

(), pp. –.

2 De Anna, ‘Mind–World Identity Theory and Semantic Realism: Haldane and Boulter

on Aquinas’, The Philosophical Quarterly,  (), pp. –.

© The Editors of The Philosophical Quarterly, . Published by Blackwell Publishers,  Cowley Road, Oxford  , UK, and 
Main Street, Malden,  , USA.
 STEPHEN J. BOULTER

claim that cognition requires formal identity between mind and thing, and at the
same time suggest that it is possible to possess the form of something one has not
directly encountered.
This is a mistake, which arises from failure to appreciate the significance of the
distinction between the two modes of knowledge acquisition. The distinction forces
us to consider another crucial distinction which Aquinas accepts, that between
adequate and inadequate effects. An effect is ‘adequate’ to its cause if it reproduces
entirely the form of its cause, ‘inadequate’ if it does not reproduce the form of its
cause. For example, offspring are the adequate effects of their parents, while smoke
is an inadequate effect of fire.3 If one has access only to the inadequate effects of an
object, then the intellect has no means of arriving at the formal identity of mind
and object required for cognition. According to Aquinas, concepts are arrived at via
abstraction from sense experience. But ex hypothesi nothing in sense experience in
these cases is adequate to the form of the cause. Consequently any concept ab-
stracted from these sense experiences will likewise fail to be adequate to the cause.
The mind is not able to supply what is missing from these inadequate effects,
because there is nothing in the mind that is not first in the senses.
Consequently one cannot accept De Anna’s claim that formal identity between
mind and object can be achieved without a direct encounter with that object. This is
possible only if one has access to the object’s adequate effects. But if the object in
question is in principle unobservable, and so is never encountered directly, then its
adequate effects cannot be encountered directly either, since cause and adequate
effect are formally identical. Effects are adequate to their causes when they re-
produce entirely the form of their cause. This is to say that effects are adequate to
their causes if cause and effect are formally identical, i.e., are the same kind of thing.
But there is no kind of thing of which some instances are in principle observable by
us and others not. Suppose you are told about a tiger which is in principle
unobservable by human beings. Even if you could be convinced that such a tiger
exists, would you say that such a tiger was a member of the same species of tigers as
those we encounter in zoos?
So if we cannot encounter any adequate effects of an unobservable object, the
mind will never have the resources necessary to arrive at the formal identity of mind
and unobservable objects which is required for cognition. Since Aquinas obviously
‘thinks’ about many unobservable entities (God, angels, objects in the superlunary
world), and is forced to do so for reasons I have already outlined in §V of my pre-
vious article, and since it is impossible for formal identity of mind and object to
occur in these cases, it is difficult to maintain that Aquinas would deny that our
capacity to understand statements about unobservables outstrips our capacity to
recognize their truth-value. Concepts developed via encounters with the (necessarily)
inadequate effects of unobservables are qualitatively different from those gained via
direct encounters with observables. The latter, according to the mind–world identity
theory, are formally identical with their referents; the former lack precisely this
feature. However, these formally inadequate concepts are not devoid of application
3 See Aquinas, De Trinitate q  a ; and Summa Theologiae  q  a .

© The Editors of The Philosophical Quarterly, 

 COULD AQUINAS REJECT SEMANTIC REALISM? 
or reference, for they refer to the causes of certain effects (whatever and however
these causes may be). Nor are they devoid of sense, for they mean, at least in part,
‘the cause of these effects’ (significatio nominis). Many statements containing terms for
unobservables are understandable, and since the terms do not lack reference, the
statements do not lack a truth-value either. However, in many cases the truth-
values of these statements will not be decidable by us, even in principle. But this is
the essence of semantic realism. De Anna’s thesis does not take account of the differ-
ences between types of effects.
Can the analogical use of language extend one’s recognitional capacities? De
Anna suggests (p. ) that I myself do not accept that language can be used ana-
logically, on the ground that I do not believe that one’s recognitional capacities are
extended by the use of analogy. I do accept that language can be used analogically,
and that this is an integral part of Aquinas’ thought. But, like Aquinas, I do not see
that one’s ability to use language analogically has any bearing on the possibility of
extending one’s recognitional capacities. In particular, it has no bearing on the cog-
nitive issues arising from the distinction between adequate and inadequate effects. It
is worth taking a moment to clarify what is meant by ‘recognitional capacities’.
Following Haldane, I take ‘recognitional capacities’ to be ‘powers of cognition to
recognize that p’; I believe this sense of ‘recognitional capacities’ is that employed in
his original article.4 He writes ‘The next task, then, is to outline a theory which com-
bines the features of the strong versions of ontological and epistemological realism
but which is not committed to a notion of truth as extending beyond the full power of
cognition to recognize it’ (p. ; my italics). At issue is how our human recognitional
capacities could be expanded in such a way as to compensate for the difficulties
arising from the distinction between adequate and inadequate effects. Aquinas
would rightly think that our cognitive capacities would be expanded in the required
sense if our current perceptual systems were markedly improved, or if we developed
entirely new perceptual systems (new ‘powers of cognition’). One might also imagine
the development of new modes of cognition which supply information about the
world and make no use of sense experience (beatific vision, perhaps). However,
the required expansion of our recognitional capacities would involve improvements
in the channels through which human beings receive information concerning the
world, improvements in the very powers of cognition; for nothing less than this will
overcome the problem concerning the mind’s achieving formal identity with curr-
ently unobservable objects. Clearly the analogical use of language does not expand
our capacity to recognize more about the world in any of these ways, and so it
cannot overcome the difficulties posed by the distinction between adequate and
inadequate effects.
De Anna says this is ‘unsurprising, but trivial’ (p. ). It is unsurprising, but it is
trivial only if one has failed to appreciate the nature of the difficulty. Furthermore,
De Anna’s suggestion (p. ) that ‘new information will enlarge their recognitional
capacities (i.e., make their minds more extensively identical to the world), and allow
the discovery of new truths besides those already acquired’ is false. New information
4 J.J. Haldane, ‘The Mind–World Identity Theory’, in J.J. Haldane and C. Wright (eds),

Reality, Representation and Projection (Oxford UP, ), pp. –.

© The Editors of The Philosophical Quarterly, 

 STEPHEN J. BOULTER

might extend one’s recognitional capacities in some sense; but no new informa-
tion gained over current sensory channels will expand one’s recognitional capacities
in the sense required.
One final point: De Anna claims (pp. –) that
the mind–world identity theorist may distinguish two senses in which something may
be said to be beyond our recognitional capacities: in the first sense we cannot
recognize it because we lack the relevant concepts or the intellectual ability to form
them.... Thus, against the semantic realist, mind–world identity theorists may accept
that we cannot understand statements that transcend our recognitional capacities in
the first sense.
If semantic realism were committed to the view that we can understand sentences
we lack the intellectual ability to form, there would be very few semantic realists
indeed. At issue between semantic realists and anti-realists is the nature of the truth-
conditions one can call upon to give the semantics of sentences that are understood.
The semantic realist maintains that one can call upon truth-conditions that are
verification-transcendent, while this is what the semantic anti-realist denies. But no
one, semantic realist or anti-realist, is committed to the view that we can understand
sentences for which ‘we lack the relevant concepts’, or sentences that we are
intellectually incapable of forming.

University of Glasgow

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