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Bentham’s Theory of Language

Its Structure, Originality, and Significance to his Political Radicalism
La théorie du langage de Bentham : sa structure, son originalité et son importance pour son radicalisme politique
Kazuya Takashima

Résumés

La présente étude se propose trois tâches. Premièrement, j’offre une interprétation de la théorie du langage de Jeremy Bentham qui, je l’espère, peut concilier ou intégrer les trois interprétations rivales de son implication épistémologique : interprétation réductionniste réaliste, interprétation pragmatiste, et interprétation fictionnaliste. Et cela s’accompagne d’une interprétation de la stratégie de Bentham visant à améliorer l’état de la langue (notamment en ce qui concerne les noms des entités fictives), qui la caractérise comme une stratégie à « deux niveaux ». Deuxièmement, en mettant l’accent sur la pensée linguistique de trois philosophes – Locke, Condillac, et Tooke – je recherche les sources de la théorie du langage de Bentham, puis j’essaie d’évaluer l’originalité de la théorie de Bentham dans le contexte de la tradition empiriste de la pensée linguistique du Siècle des Lumières. Cette recherche nous permet aussi de comprendre comment la théorie de Bentham en est venue à avoir une structure aussi complexe que celle qui se révèle dans la première partie de cette étude. Troisièmement, je pose la question de savoir pourquoi, après environ trente années de silence, Bentham se remit soudain à écrire, vers 1811, sur des problèmes de langage et de logique. En exposant les grandes lignes de ma réponse à cette question, je fais valoir que sa découverte de « l’illusion » le conduisit à mener une « guerre des mots » dans différents domaines de la société, et que sa conscience de la grande force de l’illusion comme facteur d’aggravation de l’état de la langue lui fit saisir la nécessité urgente de développer enfin « un système de logique entièrement nouveau, qui englobe une théorie du langage, envisagée au point de vue le plus général. »

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Texte intégral

Introduction

  • 1 Among others, Schofield (2006) argues this point very persuasively in the context of the developmen (...)
  • 2 Quinn 2012.

1Among Bentham scholars, it is well-known that Bentham’s theory of language served as the foundation of his thought throughout his career.1 Its epistemological implications, however, have been controversial. Michael Quinn has framed this controversy as a conflict among three ways of interpretation: reductionist realist (or “correspondence theory of truth”), pragmatist, and fictionalist. Quinn himself is committed to the reductionist realist interpretation.2 However, it appears that the meaning of key words such as “reductionist realism”, “pragmatism” or “fictionalism” is unsettled among the disputants. Thus, it is doubtful whether these three interpretations really conflict with one another. Having written a book that characterizes the epistemology of Bentham’s theory of language as pragmatism, I find plausibility to some extent in the argument that it can be seen as reductionist realism or fictionalism. Taking all these things into consideration, now it seems to me that Bentham’s theory of language would be better understood as a “many-sided” or “multi-leveled” theory, in the sense that each of the three interpretations seizes just one aspect of it. If so, it might be said that we can finally seize the whole theoretical structure of Bentham’s theory of language when we can tell which aspect of the theory each interpretation sheds light on, and how these three aspects or levels relate to one another.

2With such a prospect, I would like to do three things in this paper. First, I will offer my interpretation of Bentham’s theory of language which I hope is capable of grasping its whole structure in the above-mentioned sense. Second, I will inquire into the sources of the theory by examining the linguistic thoughts of three philosophers which seem to have had great influence on the theory’s formation. This inquiry will show how Bentham’s theory of language came to have such a complex structure, as will be revealed in the first part of this paper. By doing so, it will shed light on Bentham’s “challenge” in the context of the empiricist tradition of linguistic thought in the age of the Enlightenment. Third, I will take up the question as to why Bentham, after about a thirty-year hiatus, resumed writing on the problems of language and logic around 1811. By outlining my answer to this question, I will show that Bentham’s theory of language, which could give both theoretical and practical support to his fight with the established regime, took on greater importance after his transition to political radicalism.

The structure of Bentham’s theory of language

Its reductionist realist level

3“Paraphrasis” may be the most noteworthy element of Bentham’s theory of language to those who interpret its epistemological base as a sort of reductionist (or foundationalist) realism or a “correspondence theory of truth”. What, then, is paraphrasis?

  • 3 ELA, p.325.
  • 4 ON, p.164.
  • 5 ELA, p.325.
  • 6 ON, p.164.
  • 7 Ibid., p.84.
  • 8 According to Schofield, we should not confound Benthams notion of a fictitious entity with his n (...)

4According to Bentham, every noun substantive is ideally either a name of a real entity or a name of a fictitious entity. A real entity is “an object, the existence of which is made known to us by one or more of our five senses”,3 and thus “an entity to which, on the occasion and for the purpose of discourse, existence is really meant to be ascribed.”4 By contrast, a fictitious entity is “an object, the existence of which is feigned by the imagination”,5 and thus “an entity to which, though by the grammatical form of the discourse employed in speaking of it existence is ascribed, yet in truth and reality existence is not meant to be ascribed.”6 In other words, “to language alone —— it is that fictitious entities owe their existence”.7 As to names of fictitious entities, Bentham noted that many of them are not susceptible to traditional modes of definition: definition per genus et differentiam, or the Lockean method of definition (decomposing the idea designated by the word in question into simple ones). This was a serious problem for Bentham. For he had an ambition to construct a science of legislation and thought that in doing so, the primary task was to define the fundamental legal terms, most of which, in his view, were fictions (names of fictitious entities)8 that escaped definition. He devised paraphrasis as a method for exposing the meaning of such fictions.

  • 9 ELO, p.246.

5Paraphrasis is, in short, a method of clarifying the meaning of a word that designates a fictitious entity “by transmuting into a proposition, having for its subject some real entity, a proposition which has not for its subject any other than a fictitious entity.”9 Those noun substantives whose meaning cannot be clarified by either paraphrasis or the traditional methods of definition are considered as meaningless words that should be removed from the field of art and science.

6This argument on paraphrasis resembles Bertrand Russell’s “theory of descriptions” or logical positivists’ “verification theory of meaning”, in that it sees the sentence as the primary unit of meaning in the analysis of fictions and proposes a strategy to elucidate the meaning of fictions in terms of their relationships with real things with which we are directly (without intermediation of language) familiar. Thus, it appears that Bentham, just like Russel or logical positivists, was committed to a sort of reductionist or foundationalist realism. In other words, he seemed to imply that between real and fictitious entities, there is a definite distinction in their ontological or epistemological status, in the sense that while the former have self-sufficient realities of their own, the latter have at most a sort of verbal realities only by their relation to the former. Hence, Bentham seemed to view real entities as privileged representations which can serve as the foundation of all knowledge and ultimately by reference to which the meaning of all words must be confirmed. If so, in this respect, Bentham seemed to be a faithful disciple of John Locke, who conferred such an epistemological privileged status on “simple ideas” and made a great contribution to the establishment of the “correspondence theory of truth” or the reductionist view of knowledge that would dominate western modern philosophy for a long time thereafter. Thus, at the level of the argument on paraphrasis, the epistemological implication of Bentham’s theory of language can be said to be a sort of reductionist or foundationalist realism.

Its pragmatist or fictionalist level

  • 10 In this section, as its title suggests, I will analyze the pragmatist or fictionalist level of Bent (...)

7As for the epistemological status of real and fictitious entities, Bentham in fact held a more complicated view than the one that we have just ascribed to him. We can make this inference from his account of the relationship between substances or bodies on the one hand and what he called “absolute fictitious entities of the first order”, such as matter, form, and quantity, on the other.10

  • 11 ON, p.88.
  • 12 Ibid., p.90.
  • 13 UC, cxxxv. 69.

8As to corporeal substances which Bentham regarded as the paradigmatic examples of real entities, he stated, “no substance can exist but it must be itself matter — be of a certain determinate form — be or exist in a certain determinate quantity: and were there but one substance in existence, all these three attributes would belong to it.”11 In this sense, he described these absolute fictitious entities of the first order as “fractional results, produced from the decomposition of the idea belonging to the word substance.12 Judging from these passages alone, Bentham seemed to think that from the beginning there had been substances which could be fully recognized as such by the human mind, and that it was from the analysis of them that these fictitious entities arose. However, such a reading is implausible, as he explicitly claimed that “bodies are distinguished by the fictitious entities they are known to be made up of and again by the degree of them they contain.” In this sense, he went so far as to say that “a body is an aggregate of fictitious entities.”13 Thus, in his view, mere bodies or substances, unaccompanied by fictitious entities, such as matter, form, quantity, and quality, cannot be recognized by the mind. On the contrary, it is such fictitious entities that make it possible for the mind to recognize or identify each individual substance as such. Thus, real entities, as well as fictitious entities, are the artificial products of an active human mind and therefore have no independent realities in and of themselves.

  • 14 ON, p.152. Referring to the same passage, Tyler argues that Benthams conception of existence like (...)
  • 15 Ibid., p.86.
  • 16 ELO, p.262-3.

9There is another piece of evidence to support the above interpretation. Bentham set forth different definitions of real and fictitious entities. However, they all agree in seeing that what is the most distinctive feature of real entities compared to fictitious ones is the perceptibility or inferability of their existence. It seems that existence is the very source of realities which are attributed to real entities. However, at first sight, paradoxically, Bentham claimed that being a species of quality, “existence itself is a fictitious entity”.14 Thus, it is confirmed that real entities have, for Bentham, no epistemological priority over fictitious ones. Rather, he admitted that real entities are epistemologically dependent on certain fictitious ones, at least at the most fundamental level. Against this backdrop, we can better understand his comparison of fictitious entities with “fabulous entities”, such as Devil or Chimera. According to Bentham, while both fictitious entities and fabulous entities belong to the same class of “unreal entities”,15 the names of the former do not, unlike those of the latter, “raise up in the mind any correspondent images.”16 As to certain fictitious entities, or what he calls absolute fictitious entities, the absence of their correspondent images can be interpreted as a corollary of the fact that they are the conceptual framework within which the whole world subject to human experience is organized. In other words, they are the devices which make it possible for each substance or body to be represented in the mind. As such, they themselves cannot be represented in the mind or cannot be part of the real world.

  • 17 Schofield, in his Utility and Democracy, seems to ascribe a sort of reductionist realism or corres (...)
  • 18 CH, pp.261-71.

10From these arguments, we can infer Bentham’s fundamental idea that the human mind is actively constructing the images of the individual real things, thereby organizing the picture of the whole real world primarily by inventing various fictitious entities, which can only be done by the use of language because it is “to language alone” that fictitious entities owe their existence.17 Actually he explained this idea in his “Essay on nomenclature and classification” by telling an imaginary story about a series of mental operations performed by a farmer’s daughter.18 There, he also expressed the idea that human mind’s construction of the representation of the real world is ultimately driven by its interests. The point can be stated as follows. The human mind actively creates various ideas, such as those of substances, those of qualities possessed by each substance, and those of species or classes containing each substance, by applying its operations such as “attention”, “analysis”, and “synthesis” to a chaotic sensory manifold that it receives from contact with the real world. It then gives a name to each idea thus created so that it can distinguish one idea from another. The result of such mental operations, all of which are carried out for the purpose of obtaining more pleasure or less pain from contact with the world, is the advancement of human knowledge about the world.

  • 19 Postema 1983, p.54.
  • 20 ELO, pp.259-79. Actually, regarding the importance of methodization, Bentham said that “In the whol (...)

11Thus, unlike Locke, Bentham did not think that, without the intermediation of language, the human mind always represents the real world as it is through the media of simple ideas. Hence, Bentham did not think, as Locke did, that simple ideas are privileged representations which are provided by nature itself and so directly correspond to the structure of the real world. Rather, in his view, all ideas including simple ideas are artificial products. Unavoidably depending on language, the human mind has created such ideas by exercising its operations upon the raw sense-data. In this sense, as Postema points out, for Bentham, “language does not provide us with a picture of reality, but with the tools needed to grasp and manipulate reality to our own purposes.”19 In other words, in Bentham’s view, it is our use of language that organizes the world as we know it. The way of such an organization is ultimately prescribed by human needs, interests, or purposes. While people in general are unconsciously involved in such world-organizing (or reorganizing) activities through their daily use of language or occasional invention of new words, those who are engaged in the practice called “art and science” are required to strive consciously to reorganize or reconstruct the structure of reality into the form that would be conducive to the greatest happiness of the greatest number. That is to say, the primary task of any art or science consists in reorganizing ideas and their correspondent words to bring about a new reality of the world, the belief in which would advance human well-being. This is why “methodization”, which, in Bentham’s terminology, refers to the scientific method of classification or arrangement of things and ideas, is discussed as one of the main topics in his Logic which is substantially his methodology of sciences.20

  • 21 Ibid., p.261.
  • 22 Ibid., p.226.
  • 23 Ibid., p.272.
  • 24 Long 1989, pp.103-6.

12According to Bentham, among the various faculties or operations of the human mind, it is imagination or invention that can carry out methodization.21 To be exact, in so far as any product of imagination has received a fixed description, and has proven to be useful for some particular ends, such an imagination is called invention.22 This is why Bentham indicated that “invention is an operation which has for its results every branch of art and every science which, at the point of time in question, is in existence.”23 Thus, Long’s argument misses the point when it claims that the most significant difference between Bentham’s moral sciences and those of Hume and Smith is that, whereas the central methodological principle of the former is invention, that of the latter is imagination.24 Though it has been emphasized by many scholars, including Long, that Bentham distrusted imagination, the truth is that he looked upon it as the engine of the advancement of all sciences and aimed to discipline it to play the role more properly by his system of logic. Bearing in mind his fundamental idea about the relationship between human knowledge and language, it is quite natural that language is the most central subject of his logic.

  • 25 On this point see Postema (1986), ch.9 and Takashima (2017), ch.5, sec.1.
  • 26 Laval 1994, pp.116-20.

13Thus, in his theory of logic and language, Bentham exhibited both an active or operative conception of knowledge or knowing and an instrumental or technological conception of language. In this respect, we can properly consider him as a sort of pragmatist. In addition, if the word “fictionalism” refers to the idea that fictitious entities and fictions as the signs of them are indispensable to the constitution of the real world as we know it, it is evident that we can properly ascribe it to Bentham. As a fictionalist, Bentham thought that the invention of useful fictions, which would lead to a reorganization of the structure of reality into a form more favorable to our own purposes, was the key practice of all sciences. And he himself often carried out such a practice throughout his career. The most conspicuous example of such a practice is his “universal jurisprudence” whose central task consists in redefining the fundamental legal terms, such as “law”, “right”, and “obligation”, in such a way as to make them suitable for his utilitarian ideal functions of law.25 The “division of offences” developed in Chapter 16 of An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation is another example. As Laval points out, the organization of government or government offices that Bentham set out in his Constitutional Code, with a view to maximizing official aptitude and minimizing government expense, also provides an example.26 In addition, his idea of the so-called “felicific calculus” can also be seen as such an example. For his idea is to set up fictitious entities, such as “intensity”, “duration”, “certainty”, and “propinquity”, as new properties of pleasure or pain which is a real entity. This would alter the way we represent pleasures and pains and thus ultimately change the way we (especially legislators) cope with them.

An interpretation as a “two-level” theory

  • 27 UC, ci. 332.
  • 28 To interpret the epistemological base of Benthams theory of language as a combination of these two (...)

14Now it is evident that Bentham’s theory of language has two different aspects or levels in its epistemological outlook, namely a foundationalist or reductionist realist outlook on the one hand and a pragmatist or fictionalist outlook on the other. However, this is not a contradiction. On the one hand, Bentham thought that the meaning of any word, that is, the idea signified by any word, could only be understood by referring to some sense experience that comes from contact with the real world, given that “sense is the foundation from which all ideas take their rise”.27 In this sense, he posited that any word must have a connection with the real world, whether directly or indirectly (namely through its connections with other words). On the other hand, he thought that how the system of words and their correspondent ideas are organized and how each word is anchored to the real world depend on the active operation of the human mind and are therefore always provisional and open to revision. These two ideas are not contradictory.28

  • 29 In coming up with this idea, I received a suggestion from R. M. Hares famous distinction about mor (...)

15Thus it seems that, in terms of reflective thinking about words (or more precisely, fictions), which Bentham thought necessary to improve our language and the way we use it, he distinguished between “daily or common level” thinking and “scientific or professional level” thinking.29 That is to say, reflective thinking about fictions at the scientific level, if done successfully, would lead to a pragmatic redefinition or invention of such words and thereby a re-formation and advancement of knowledge in a certain sphere, as Bentham himself undertook in his “universal jurisprudence”. Such reflective thinking can only be done by the few intellectuals who are familiar with what Bentham called “metaphysics” or “logic”. By contrast, reflective thinking about fictions at the daily level is the analysis of the meaning of the fiction in question using the method of paraphrasis, which can be done anytime, anywhere and by anyone who knows the procedure. It is done for two purposes: first, to exclude from the public sphere of discourse the pernicious fictions (that is, the names of fabulous entities or non-entities) whose connection with the real world cannot be confirmed by this analysis and which are in truth meaningless but are liable to bring about confusion or error in the thought of those who use them; second, to clarify the meaning of useful fictions so that everyone can understand them and can engage in rational and productive discussion on public issues by using them.

16Thus, Bentham thought that it was mainly via two kinds of practice that our language could be improved in terms of fictions. It is because he, as a realist or empiricist, thought that any word or idea must be rooted in the real world, while he, as a pragmatist, assumed the artificiality and revisability of any word or idea.

The sources of Bentham’s theory of language and its originality

  • 30 De Champs (1999) is an important precedent for my attempt to inquire into the sources of Benthams (...)

17In this chapter, I will inquire as to how Bentham came to conceive his theory of language with such a complex structure as we have seen previously. To do so, I will consider the theories of language of three philosophers, Locke, Condillac, and Tooke, and then examine what influence each theory might have had on the formation of Bentham’s theory.30

Locke’s theory

  • 31 UC, lxix. 177.

18Bentham esteemed John Locke as the inventor of “modern Metaphysics”, namely “that science which teacheth the signification of words, and the ideas which they signify”.31 There is no doubt that Bentham regarded Locke’s theory of language as one of the precursors of his own theory. For this reason, Bentham scholars have often presumed a great influence of Locke’s theory on Bentham’s. However, as we shall see below, the influence was rather restricted.

  • 32 However, strictly speaking, Locke admitted that language plays a part in the formation of thought i (...)

19In Locke’s view, human thoughts are formed by the operations of the mind to the ideas which it acquires by experiencing the real world or its own operations. Language is no more than the media by the use of which any thought thus formed is expressed outside the mind.32 Moreover, in his view, the human mind is like a mirror in which the state or the structure of the real world is reflected through the media of simple ideas. It is by articulating these notions that Locke contributed to the establishment of a fundamental assumption of modern epistemology, namely the correspondence theory of truth or the foundationalist or reductionist view of knowledge. In his case, simple ideas which are passively received by the mind are given the status of the bases of all knowledge.

  • 33 Lockes theory of language with such an aim on such a presupposition is a typical example of the th (...)

20Thus, for Locke, both the relation between the real world and the mind and that between the mind and language have the same structure in that the latter represents the contents of the former. He considered it important to question how language could accurately represent the contents of the mind, in which knowledge as the accurate representation of the structure of the real world was included, in order to inquire the proper method of the acquisition and communication of knowledge. For this reason, the point of his theory of language was to explain the function of language as the media of representation of thought, presupposing that there was a correspondence between the structure of thought and that of language.33

  • 34 Locke 1975, bk.III, ch.9, sec.1.
  • 35 Ibid., bk.III, ch.3, sec.10.

21However, in the process of tackling this task, Locke perceived “the very nature of words” to “make it almost unavoidable, for many of them to be doubtful and uncertain in their significations”,34 which could be divided broadly into two points. First, the link between words and ideas was arbitrary, voluntary, individual and private, and second, certain types of complex ideas (ideas of “substances” and “mixed modes”) were themselves formed as the result of arbitrary, voluntary, individual and private mental operations. To remedy this problem, he proposed a new method of clarifying the meaning of words, which can be summed up in the following passage: “a definition is best made by enumerating those simple ideas that are combined in the signification of the term defined”.35 In other words, for Locke, to define a word is to decompose the idea signified by the word into its component simple ideas and then ultimately to refer to the sensations from which those simple ideas originated. In his view, by such a method of definition, we could overcome the problem of the opacity and uncertainty of the meanings of words that prevent an accurate recording or communication of our thoughts or knowledge.

Condillac’s theory

  • 36 In summarizing Condillacs linguistic thought in this section, I relied very much on Harris and Tay (...)
  • 37 See, for example, ELO, pp.282-3, 285-6; ELA, p.322; CH, p.165n, 261, 268n, 269n, 273n.

22Etienne Bonnot, Abbé de Condillac is a French philosopher who acknowledged himself to be a successor of Locke’s philosophy, but whose view about the relationship between thought and language was very different from that of Locke.36 Since Bentham often referred to the works of Condillac in his writings on logic and language,37 it is evident that he was very familiar with Condillac’s theory of language and epistemology.

  • 38 Condillac 1982, pp.368-9.
  • 39 Condillac 1970a, pp.275-6.
  • 40 Condillac 1974, part I, ch.2, sec.4.

23According to Condillac, what Locke saw as the active faculties of the mind, such as attention, comparison, judgment, and reflection, which should be distinguished from the mind’s passive faculty of sensation, are in fact all reducible to the faculty of sensation.38 And the various kinds of sensation that are involved in the acquisition of knowledge are ultimately driven by the desire for pleasures (and the aversion from pains).39 Other animals also have the faculty of sensation and are driven by the desire for pleasures. Thus, it cannot be explained only by these conditions why humans, unlike other animals, came to have such a highly developed cognitive power. Condillac’s answer to this problem is that the advanced cognitive power of humans can be attributed to their having voluntary control of those faculties of the mind concerning cognition, which is in turn due to their use of language. Specifically, in his view, it was not until the words as signs of sensations came into being and humans got to use them freely that we humans came to be able to evoke various sensations at will, independently of the present sensation, and to exercise purposefully various mental faculties upon them. Moreover, once we learned to do so, we also came to be able to create actively new words by exercising our mental faculties purposefully. In such a way, the progress of the human mind and that of human language had been interdependent.40 Thus, for Condillac, Locke’s account of the origin of knowledge was deficient in that it overlooked the fact that language was indispensable to the advancement of human cognitive power and to the development of knowledge itself.

  • 41 Condillac 1982, pp.389-90.

24According to Condillac, human language as we now use was born when humans learned to express voluntarily the cries and gestures which were originally involuntary (physiologically determined) responses to certain sensations, desires, passions, and so on. Such a primitive language, which he calls “the language of gestures”, originally had no parts: a natural gesture or cry conveyed a complex thought holistically. However, after a while, for the purpose of facilitating the communication of thoughts, a process of analysis of the language of gestures began. This process was necessarily accompanied by an analysis of the thought expressed by each gesture or cry. Thus, through the analysis of the language of gestures, various words and their correspondent ideas came into being.41 In such a way, the mind’s stock of ideas gradually increased; as a consequence, humans came to be able to not only invent new ideas and their correspondent words with an increased stock of ideas but also actively construct their own thoughts by manipulating those ideas and words. In this sense, the progress of language and that of the mind had been mutually assisted.

  • 42 See Condillac (1970b), pp.365-7; Harris and Taylor (1989), pp.132-3.
  • 43 Condillac 1982, p.399.

25The process of analysis of the language of gestures and thoughts, Condillac argued, had been guided by nature, that is, by the principle of natural analogy. For instance, as to a concrete object that made some noise, this noise was chosen as the sign of that object. As to an object which made no noise, the vocal sound that had some natural analogy with the color, smell, taste, or feel of the object was chosen as the sign of it. As to non-sensible objects, those words that did designate sensible objects were borrowed as metaphorical designations of them.42 This is why the meaning of any abstract words can be understood by making an analogical inference from the sensible object which the word in question originally designated.43 Thus, Condillac believed that the true meaning of any word could be best revealed by means of etymology.

  • 44 Ibid., p.396.

26In his view, the process of analysis of language and thoughts is not complete. We might and should push this process further, which will bring about an addition to our stock of ideas, instruments of thought, and thus will lead to the progress of knowledge. However, if the process of analysis is not guided by the principle of natural analogy, new words brought about by the process will be unclear in meaning and therefore will become deficient as instruments of thought.44 Thus, for Condillac, the principle of natural analogy was not only the principle that, in fact, had so far generally governed the process of analysis of language and thoughts but also the prescriptive principle that should always govern the process to secure the clear signification of language and to promote the development of knowledge.

27Condillac’s epistemological outlook embodied in the ideas that we have just considered is very different from that of Locke. Unlike Locke, he thought that the picture of the real world as we actually represented in the form of the assemblage of ideas is what the mind artificially creates with the help of language and that simple ideas are not what the mind passively receives from the world but the outcomes of the process of analysis of language and thoughts by the active mind. Besides, by finding the driving force of all mental faculties that constitute human understanding in the desire for pleasures, he suggested the idea that the mind is always engaged in constructing its own picture of the real world with the assistance of language, ultimately for the purpose of seeking to satisfy its needs and pursue its interests. In these respects, it can be said that the epistemological outlook of Condillac had a pragmatic character.

Tooke’s theory

  • 45 CH, p.258.

28John Horne Tooke is a philosopher whose linguistic works were widely discussed in Britain at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century. He acknowledged himself to be a successor of both Locke and Condillac, but unlike them, he had an extremely materialist view of the human mind. Bentham said, about his own projected work on “the principal relations between the field of thought and the field of language”, that “in that work, in addition to the discoveries, half concealed or left unperfected, by Horne Tooke, the distinction, between names of real and fictitious entities, will constitute a capital and altogether indispensable instrument.”45 Thus, it is evident that Bentham received important suggestions from Tooke’s “discoveries” in constructing his theory of language.

  • 46 Harris and Taylor 1989, p.141, 145. In summarizing Tookes linguistic thought in this section, I re (...)
  • 47 Tooke 1857, pp.9-15, 24-5, quoted in Harris and Taylor 1989, pp.143-4, 146-7.

29According to Tooke, only simple ideas exist in the mind as the objects designated by words.46 Perception of various senses, all of which are composed of one or more simple ideas, is the only operation which the mind actually exercises. Thus, in his view, the nature of the mind is entirely passive in that it is only led to conceive various senses by the physical stimuli that it receives from the world. This is Tooke’s materialist view of the human mind. However, if each word stood for one simple idea in the mind (Tooke thought that the mind accommodates only simple ideas), to communicate even ordinary thoughts, a speaker would have to form a sentence of great length. As a result, it would be impossible to communicate thoughts speedily by the use of language. However, to cope with this problem, language came to be equipped with words that do not represent simple ideas but function as substitutes for other words. These are what Tooke calls “abbreviations”. One such abbreviation might stand for a number of other words. Thus, a language equipped with abbreviations can covey a speaker’s thoughts more quickly than without them. Indeed, in Tooke’s view, all words of every human language can be classified into the “necessary words” and the “abbreviations”. The former are words that stand for a simple idea and are indispensable to the communication of thoughts, and the latter are words which are added to language solely for the purpose of dispatch or swiftness of communication.47

  • 48 Harris and Taylor 1989, p.144.

30For instance, every adjective is an abbreviation that is derived from a noun in the way that the noun transformed its “manner of signification” into the form that it would be able to connect immediately with other nouns. Likewise, all particles, such as conjunctions and prepositions, which Locke thought as standing for active operations of the mind, are abbreviations derived from one or more necessary words. With regard to abstract nouns, all of them are abbreviations derived from verbs and/or adjectives. Thus, there are no single ideas that they each represent, although they take the form of nouns. Each of them represents an action or the result of an action (a situation), which one or more verbs and/or adjectives represent. Thus, Tooke thought that any word that does not stand for a simple idea is an abbreviation derived from one or more necessary words and tried to prove this hypothesis by studying etymology. He thought, like Condillac, that etymological analysis is the best way to reveal the true meaning of words.48

  • 49 Tooke 1857, p.15, quoted in Harris and Taylor 1989, p.144.

31According to Tooke, for the purpose of dispatch of communication, language came to be equipped with not only abbreviations in terms or sorts of words, but also those in construction (syntactical abbreviations).49 In this sense, abbreviation is the principle that serves as the basis upon which the progress of language is made. However, for Tooke, the progress of language is not accompanied by the progress of thought or knowledge. He did not believe any possibility of the progress of thought because of his extremely materialist view of the human mind. Thus, he saw language not as an instrument necessary for the formation or construction of thought but as an instrument only for representing thought. At the same time, he denied the Lockean idea that the structure of language as an instrument for representing thought is determined by the structure of thought by finding that the progress of language is guided by its inherent principle of abbreviation, which has nothing to do with the structure of thought itself.

Bentham’s originality

32These three philosophers, Locke, Condillac, and Tooke, whose respective linguistic thoughts influenced Bentham’s theory of language, share a fundamental notion: the idea signified by a word can be understood ultimately by making reference to sense experience because all ideas take their rise from sensorial experience. In this sense, all of the three philosophers’ linguistic thoughts can be equally described as empiricist. However, their views on the nature of the mind and its thought or the relationship between thought and language are very different. According to Locke, the mind can construct various thoughts in principle without the aid of language. Given that language is just the media of representation of thoughts, there exists an isomorphism between the structure of thought and that of language. By contrast, in Condillac’s view, language is not only an instrument of the representation of thoughts but also an instrument indispensable to the formation of thoughts and acquisition of knowledge. Thus, the progress of knowledge goes hand in hand with the progress of language. Lastly, according to Tooke, the nature of the mind is so passive that it cannot construct its thoughts actively, and language is no more than an instrument of the communication of thoughts which the mind is led to conceive by the physical stimuli that it receives from the world. However, language has the inherent principle of abbreviation, which leads its own progress in terms of its efficiency as an instrument of the communication of thoughts. Such progress of language is never accompanied by the progress of thought or knowledge.

  • 50 De Champs also directs attention to this point, and observes that the origin of language to which (...)
  • 51 ELA, p.322.
  • 52 Ibid., p.323.
  • 53 Ibid., p.318.

33Obviously, among these three different views, it is Condillac’s view of a pragmatic nature that Bentham followed. He also thought of language as not only an instrument of the representation of thoughts but also an instrument necessary for the formation of thoughts. Moreover, as to the origin of human language and the process of its progress, Bentham exhibited a view similar to Condillac’s in his argument of the “logical history of language”.50 According to the argument, language, in its origin, had no parts or no terms, and “it was in the form of entire propositions that when first uttered, discourse was uttered.”51 Such original discourses “must, in their import, have been equivalent to whole sentences, to sentences expressive, for example, of suffering, of enjoyment, of desire, of aversion”, just like interjections now in use.52 While other animal’s language remains in such a state, human language underwent a sort of analytic process. As a result, “the earliest and scantiest stock of the instruments of thought and conversation were produced”.53 Regarding this analytic process, Bentham stated as follows:

  • 54 Ibid., p.322.

Of these integers [entire propositions as an original form of language], words were but so many fragments, as afterwards in written discourse letters were of words. Words may be considered as the result of a sort of analysis, — a chemico-logical process, for which, till at a comparatively much later period than that which gave birth to propositions, the powers of the mind were not ripe.54

34Here Bentham posited that as the “chemico-logical” analysis of language proceeded, not only did the mind’s stock of words and ideas as the instruments of thought gradually increase, but the various active faculties of the mind were formed gradually as well. Bentham followed the basic ideas of Condillac’s linguistic thought, in that he thought that the progress of language and that of the mind were mutually dependent and that the progress of human knowledge had been and remains dependent on the progress of language.

35On the other hand, Bentham was dissatisfied with what Condillac offered as the principle which should govern the organization and creation of words and their correspondent ideas: the principle of “nature” or the principle of natural analogy. He criticized it as follows:

  • 55 CH, p.268n.

Those which he [Condillac] regards as having been better made, were (he assures us) the work of Nature: those which were worse made, the work of learned men: meaning such whose labours in this line he saw reason to disapprove of. Nature being a sort of goddess —— and that a favourite one —— by ascribing to this goddess whatsoever was regarded by him as good, he seems to have satisfied himself, that he had proved the goodness of it ... .55

  • 56 Thus, in my view, this is the most remarkable originality of Benthams theory of language in the co (...)

36Thus, Bentham took upon himself the task to discover and articulate the method of organization of words and ideas that could bring about the progress of knowledge, without resorting to an empty notion such as “nature”. He aimed to achieve this by developing his theory of “methodization” or by showing how the progress of knowledge (arts and sciences) can be made by inventing new fictitious entities in his “Essay on nomenclature and classification”.56

37Even if it is Bentham’s original idea that the progress of knowledge can be made by inventing fictions, we may infer that in establishing his notion of fictions or the names of fictitious entities, he relied on Tooke’s discoveries. For in his theory of abbreviations, Tooke noted the existence of nouns that do not stand for sensible single ideas and showed that all abstract terms are such nouns, and that what each of them stands for is not an existent being but an action or a situation of one or more existent beings. Locke also admitted the existence of nouns that do not stand for certain existent beings by offering the notion of the complex ideas of “mixed modes”. Indeed, those words that Locke mentioned as the examples of the names of “mixed modes”, such as obligation, lie, murder, justice, honour and faith, are all classified into the names of fictitious entities by Bentham’s standards. However, strictly speaking, Locke’s “names of mixed modes” are not equivalent to Bentham’s “names of fictitious entities”. For, on the one hand, the latter includes what Locke considered the names of “simple modes” or those of “collective ideas of substances” or those of “relations”. On the other hand, both Devil and Chimera, which would be without a doubt classified into the names of mixed modes by Locke’s standards, are names of fabulous entities by Bentham’s standards. As noted above, in Bentham’s view, although fictitious entities and fabulous entities are equally unreal (non-existent) entities, the former, unlike the latter, are the entities invented as devices which would enable or sophisticate the representation of real entities by the mind. As such, they cannot be represented in the mind. This is why Bentham rejected Locke’s notion that the meaning of any word could be understood ultimately by decomposing the idea signified by the word into its components, the privileged representation of simple ideas. Specifically, he found that such a notion does not hold true for the names of fictitious entities whose representation by the mind is theoretically impossible. Thus, he devised paraphrasis as the method of analysis of the meaning of such fictions.

  • 57 LA, p.286.
  • 58 De Champs (1999) also recognizes the first and the second insights as the sources of Benthams idea (...)
  • 59 As to the distinction between real and fictitious entities, Bentham says that DAlembert is the au (...)

38Actually, Bentham regarded the invention of the method of paraphrasis as one of his original achievements.57 In that case, it appears that his originality concerning the invention of paraphrasis ultimately consists in having integrated the insights shown by his predecessors into his own work. For the idea of paraphrasis can be seen as having been developed by integrating the following three insights shown by Locke, Condillac, and Tooke: first, the insight, presented by Locke and inherited by Condillac and Tooke, that the meaning of any word can be understood ultimately by making reference to sense experience; second, the insight suggested by Condillac that words are historically the products of the analysis of sentences and that sentence is originally the primary unit of meaning; third, the insight presented by Tooke that every abstract word, which is an abbreviation derived from verbs and/or adjectives, stands not for an existent being but a sort of situation.58 Bentham’s theory of paraphrasis can be seen as the theory established by integrating these three insights on the basis of his own ontological categories of “real and fictitious entities”.59

39According to Bentham, in addition to paraphrasis, there is another method of the analysis of fictions. He called it “archetypation” by which he meant the etymological analysis of fictions. However, unlike Condillac and Tooke, he did not think that the study of etymology could be helpful in revealing the true meaning of words, including the names of fictitious entities. We can see such an idea in the following remark:

…in the case of the name of a fictitious entity, a distinction requires to be made between the root of the idea, and the root of the word by which it is designated. Thus, in the case of obligation, … the root of the idea is in the ideas of pain and pleasure. But the root of the word, employed as a sign for the designation of that idea, is altogether different. It lies in a material image, employed as an archetype or emblem: viz. the image of a cord, or any other tie or band, (from the Latin ligo, to bind,) by which the object in question is bound or fastened to any other, the person in question bound to a certain course of practice.

  • 60 CH, p.272n.

Thus, for the explanation of … the name of a fictitious entity, two perfectly distinct species of operations, call them paraphrasis and archetypation, will, in every case, require to be performed ... .60

  • 61 Ibid., p.259.
  • 62 Bentham, perhaps with the aim of emphasizing the difference between Condillacs view and his own vi (...)

40As shown in the latter part of this passage, Bentham admitted that study of etymology has some significance as the method of analysis or explanation of fictions. It is because he, like Condillac, believed that for non-sensible objects, the words that originally designate sensible objects are borrowed as their metaphorical designations.61 However, while Condillac argued that there is, in principle, a natural link between a word and the idea designated by the word, relying on the notion that, historically, the creation of new words had always been guided by the principle of natural analogy, Bentham agreed with Locke and argued that the link between words and ideas is arbitrary.62 This is why Bentham thought that we should distinguish between the root of the idea and the root of the word.

Delusion and “war of words”

  • 63 Mack 1962, p.156 and pp.194-5.
  • 64 Southwood Smith, the editor of the eighth volume of The Works of Jeremy Bentham in which A Fragmen (...)
  • 65 CH, p.259.
  • 66 Ibid., p.258.
  • 67 For reasons of space, here I give only an outline of my answer. I presented it in detail in Takashi (...)

41Although there is no doubt that Bentham attached great importance to his theory of language as the basis of his thought from the beginning of his career, he did not fully develop it in his earliest published works. At most he had explained the method of paraphrasis in a footnote of A Fragment on Government. Perhaps this is because, as Mack argues, Bentham thought that his theory of logic and language was an “occult” doctrine that was too profound and abstruse for publication, especially in its pragmatist or fictionalist aspect.63 He had refrained from writing about logic and language for about thirty years since around 1782 when he had finished developing his “universal jurisprudence”, presumably because in this period he saw his theory of logic and language as complete, or at least found no practical needs to develop it in a more detailed and systematic way. However, around 1811, he returned to the problems of logic and language. Since then, he engaged himself in writing about those subjects intermittently until around 1831 (just before his death),64 with the aim of developing “an entirely new system of Logic, in which shall be comprehended a theory of language, considered in the most general point of view.”65 In this case, what brought about his sudden return to the problems of logic and language and his grandiose ambition to develop a new system of logic that would “trace out, throughout the whole of their extent, the principal relations between the field of thought and the field of language”?66 This is a question that has received little attention in Bentham studies. In my view, however, it is an important question for not only examining the development of his theory of language in his later years, but also understanding the nature of his political radicalism. The outline of my answer to this question, whose keywords are “delusion” and “war of words”, is as follows.67

  • 68 Schofield 2006, ch.5 and 6.
  • 69 Bentham expressed such a view, for example, in BF, pp.67-8.
  • 70 It was from the 1820s that Bentham actually began to use the word delusion in such a peculiar way (...)

42According to Schofield, Bentham’s discovery of “sinister interest” of the “ruling few” at the end of the 1800s led him to set about devising the constitutional reform plan that could identify the private interests of the rulers and the public interests. As a consequence, this brought about his transition to political radicalism.68 How, then, could this constitutional reform plan be realized? At the end of the 1800s, Bentham became aware not only of the existence of sinister interests but also of the existence of a conspiracy among the ruling class to thwart any useful reform plan in order to protect their sinister interests. Thus, in his view, it was inevitable that his proposal of constitutional reform would rouse firm resistance. However, Bentham was not helpless in the face of such resistance. Given that the ultimate aim of his reform plan was to realize the greatest happiness of society, it would be easy for such a plan to gain the support of the common people (the “subject many” in his words) who had been suppressed in the existing regime. Besides, in Britain, since freedom of speech or discussion had already been established to some extent, the rulers were more or less forced to take public opinion into account.69 So Bentham thought it possible to gather support from public opinion using the power of speech and to require the rulers to execute his reform plan against the background of the power of public opinion. However, while he regarded such a strategy as the most legitimate one that he could adopt and put it into practice, he also realized that he could not expect much effect from this strategy alone. At the end of the 1800s, he noticed the workings of “delusion”, which were helpful to the ruling class in protecting and promoting their sinister interests.70

  • 71 Bentham said that in the character of an instrument of misrule, delusion has place and operates in (...)

43By “delusion”, Bentham referred to both a social mechanism which has the effect of imprinting various erroneous opinions or ideas on the minds of the subject many by paralyzing their intellects and the paralyzed and perverted mental state of those who are preyed upon by this mechanism. In his view, such erroneous opinions or ideas propagated by the mechanism of delusion are characteristically conducive to the justification of the existing political and social regime and therefore helpful for preserving the sinister interests of the ruling few. Thus, those preyed upon by such a mechanism come to think that the existing regime that is in truth exploiting them is beneficial to their interests and support it spontaneously. This is why Bentham regarded “delusion” as the powerful instrument of misrule.71

44The point of Bentham’s account of the workings of delusion can be framed as follows. At first, the sinister interests of the ruling few drive them to conceive a variety of prejudices which are helpful to their pursuit of these interests. Then, the ruling few take advantage of the intellectual weakness of the subject many to imprint such prejudices on their minds. In the end, given these prejudices, the intellectual weakness of the subject many is further aggravated.

  • 72 Hume 1979, p.23.

45Bentham also realized that delusion worked through a number of channels or media, many of which were social and cultural rather than overtly political. They included the Church and religion, education, the symbolism of monarchy, literature and the fine arts, and even language and conventional morality.72 Thus, after his discovery of sinister interests and delusion at the end of the 1800s, he set out to complete two significant projects: first, the project to devise and realize a constitutional reform plan that would prevent the occurrence of sinister interests, and second, the project to explode the various opinions or judgments which are propagated by delusion and stand in the way of constitutional reform or to demolish the various institutional bases of the mechanism of delusion including the Church of England and its system of education.

46As to the latter project, it is obvious that Bentham thought that language, the most important instrument of thought and communication, was the most influential media through which the mechanism of delusion worked. Such an idea can be seen, for instance, from the following remark:

  • 73 CC, p.44.

Unhappily for the members of the democratical section [of the tribunal of public opinion], their conceptions, their judgments, their suffrages, their language, have till this time been placed almost completely under the guidance, and almost, as it were, at the disposal of, those of the aristocratical: and thus it is, that by the sinister interest of these their adversaries, not only have they been placed and kept under the yoke of misrule, but the only instrument in which they could seek relief from the disorder of misrule, has been employed, in a great degree, in the aggravation of it, and in keeping them, as far as may be, from all thoughts of applying a remedy. (Italics mine)73

  • 74 Regarding Benthams word war of words, see note 76 below.
  • 75 TS, p.62.
  • 76 The word war of words appears in the context of criticizing censorial impassioned appellatives (...)

47Accordingly, Bentham often carried out his project of demolishing the products and the institutional bases of delusion in the form of engaging himself in the “war of words”.74 Specifically, with the aim of removing the influence of discourses or ideas that were contributing to the continuation of the sinister regime, he often tried to construct and develop counter-discourses or counter-ideas that would expose their wrongness and evilness and thereby lead people to the right opinions and actions. What he did in The Book of Fallacies is the most conspicuous example of such a practice. We can also find such practices in A Table of the Springs of Action and Deontology. What he tried to do in the former work was to replace the erroneous and harmful notions or concepts or words in circulation concerning morality and psychology (especially “censorial impassioned appellatives for ‘pleasures’, ‘pains’, ‘interests’, ‘motives’”75), all of which were the products of delusion and as such might be causes of further delusion, with the right and proper ones.76 What he meant to do in the latter work was to explain the teachings of utilitarian morality in comparison with those of conventional morality and to reveal the erroneousness and undue harshness of the latter. He also sought to encourage readers to accept utilitarian morality as the “morality made easy” (i.e. easy to understand and to obey).

  • 77 FG, p.508.

48What Bentham perceived in engaging himself in such a series of the wars of words was that the abuse of language committed mainly by the ruling few was one of the most powerful engines of the workings of delusion, and that the imperfection of language which made it easier to abuse was at least in part due to the workings of delusion. The imperfection of the framework of government, and as its main cause, the imperfection of language concerning law, politics, and morality, which he saw as the products of “inattention and prejudice” of the ruling few in his earlier days, were now proven to be “the elaborately organized, and anxiously cherished and guarded products of sinister interest and artifice.”77 Thus, Bentham’s discovery of delusion near the end of the 1800s was followed by the awareness that the strong force aggravating the state of language was always at work all over society, and that language thus corrupted constituted a major obstacle to the political and legal reform that he aimed to achieve. Thus, he became dissatisfied with his previously formed theory of language, which focused mainly on the construction of so-called scientific language conducive to the advancement of art and science, and cultivated a more grandiose ambition. That is, he came to consider it urgent to undertake a complete reform of language on the basis of the profound and extensive knowledge about the relations between the field of thought and the field of language. This is why he returned to the problems of logic and language and set out to develop an entirely new system of logic at this time.

Conclusion

49According to Bentham’s argument on paraphrasis, any name of fictitious entity can have no meaning, unless the fictitious entity has some determinate relationship with one or more real entities. In this respect, Bentham was a reductionist realist. On the other hand, in his view, not only fictitious entities but also real entities are artificial products, and are always open to re-formation. In order to advance our well-being, the human mind actively organizes or reorganizes the picture of the real world, by creating or re-creating various ideas and their correspondent words. Inventing or redefining names of fictitious entities is the key practice to such an activity. In this respect, Bentham was a pragmatist or a fictionalist. Reflecting these two aspects of his epistemology, his strategy for improving the state of language in terms of fictions was substantially constituted of two kinds of practice: analysis of the meaning of fictions by the use of the method of paraphrasis on the one hand, and pragmatic redefinition or invention of fictions on the other.

50There is no doubt that each of the main components of Bentham’s theory of language, including the idea of paraphrasis, was established under the influence of the linguistic thoughts of Locke, Condillac, and Tooke. However, as to the basic epistemology, it was Condillac’s pragmatic view that Bentham followed. The most notable originality of Bentham’s thought in the context of the empiricist tradition of linguistic thought of the age of the Enlightenment consists in trying to show how the progress of art and science can be made through reorganizing the system of words and ideas in his theory and practice of “methodization”.

51After his discovery of sinister interests and the mechanism of delusion at the end of the 1800s, Bentham set out to complete two significant projects: first, the project to elaborate a constitutional reform plan that would prevent the occurrence of sinister interests, and second, the project to demolish the products and the institutional bases of delusion. He often carried out the latter project in the form of engaging himself in the “war of words”. And in that process, he noticed the strong force of delusion for aggravating the state of language. Thus, Bentham resumed writing on the problems of language around 1811, with a view to develop an entirely new system of logic which would contribute to a complete reform of language.

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Bibliographie

I. Bentham’s writings (abbreviations in brackets)

The Book of Fallacies, ed. P. Schofield, The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, Clarendon Press, 2015. (BF)

Constitutional Code, in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, published under the superintendence of his executor, John Bowring, 11 vols., Edinburgh, 1838-43, vol.9. (CC)

Chrestomathia, ed. M. J. Smith and W. H. Burston, The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, Clarendon Press, 1993. (CH)

“Essay on Language”, in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol.8, pp.295-338. (ELA)

“Essay on Logic”, in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol.8, pp.213-93. (ELO)

A Fragment on Government, in A Comment on the Commentaries and A Fragment on Government, ed. J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart, The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, The Athlone Press, 1977. (FG)

First Principles Preparatory to Constitutional Code, ed. P. Schofield, The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, Clarendon Press,1989. (FP)

“Logical Arrangements, or Instruments of Invention and Discovery Employed by Jeremy Bentham”, in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol.3, pp.287-95. (LA)

De L’ontologie et autres texts sur les fictions, ed. P. Schofield, trans. J. P. Cléro and C. Laval, Seuil, 1997. (ON)

Preparatory Principles, ed. D. G. Long and P. Schofield, The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, Clarendon Press, 2016. (PP)

A Table of the Springs of Action, in Deontology together with A Table of the Springs of Action and Article on Utilitarianism, ed. A. Goldworth, The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, Clarendon Press, 1983. (TS)

Bentham Manuscripts at University College London. (UC followed by box and page / folio No.)

II. Secondary sources

Becker, J. F. (1964), “Utilitarian Logic and the Classical Conception of Social Science”, in Science and Society, vol.28 (2), reprinted in Jeremy Bentham: Critical Assessments, ed. B. Parekh, 4 vols, Routledge, 1993, vol.2, pp.255-71.

Condillac, E. B. (1970a), Traité des sensations, in Œuvres complètes de Condillac, ed. A. F. Théry, 16 vols., Genève, t.1.

Condillac, E. B. (1970b), Grammaire, in Œuvres complètes de Condillac, t.6.

Condillac, E. B. (1974), Essay on the origin of human knowledge, trans. T. Nugent, AMS Press.

Condillac, E. B. (1982), Logic, in Philosophical writings of Etienne Bonnot, Abbé de Condillac, trans. F. Philip, Lawrence Erlbaum.

de Champs, E. (1999), “The Place of Jeremy Bentham’s Theory of Fictions in Eighteenth-century Linguistic Thought”, Journal of Bentham Studies, vol.2.

Hare, R. M. (1981), Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method, and Point, Clarendon Press.

Harris, R. and Taylor, T. J. (1989), Landmarks in Linguistic Thought: The Western Tradition from Socrates to Saussure, Routledge.

Harrison, R. (1983), Bentham, Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Hume, L. J. (1979), “The Political Functions of Bentham’s Theory of Fictions”, The Bentham Newsletter, 3, pp.18-27.

Land, S. K. (1986), The Philosophy of Language in Britain: Major Theories from Hobbes to Thomas Reid, AMS Press.

Laval, C. (1994), Le pouvoir des fictions, Presses Universitaires de France.

Locke, J. (1975), An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. P. H. Niddich, Oxford University Press.

Long, D. (1989), “Science and Secularization in Hume, Smith and Bentham”, in Religion, Secularization and Political Thought, ed. J. E. Crimmins, Routledge, pp.90-110.

Mack, M. P. (1962), Jeremy Bentham: An Odyssey of Ideas 1748-92, Heinemann.

Postema, G. J. (1983), “Facts, Fictions, and Law: Bentham on the Foundations of Evidence”, in Facts in Law, ed. W. Twining, Wiesbaden, pp.37-64.

Postema, G. J. (1986), Bentham and the Common Law Tradition, Clarendon Press.

Quinn, M. (2012), “Which comes first, Bentham’s Chicken of Utility, or his Egg of Truth?”, Journal of Bentham Studies, vol.14.

Schofield, P. (2006), Utility and Democracy: The Political Thought of Jeremy Bentham, Oxford University Press.

Takashima, K. (2017), Bentham on Language: Utilitarianism and Pragmatism in the Thought of Jeremy Bentham, Keio University Press (in Japanese).

Tooke, J. H. (1857), The Diversions of Purley, Thomas Tegg, London.

Tusseau, G. (2011), Jeremy Bentham, La guerre des mots, Dalloz, Paris.

Tyler, C. (2003), “Jeremy Bentham, Social Criticism & Levels of Meaning”, Journal of Bentham Studies, vol.6.

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Notes

1 Among others, Schofield (2006) argues this point very persuasively in the context of the development of Benthams political thought.

2 Quinn 2012.

3 ELA, p.325.

4 ON, p.164.

5 ELA, p.325.

6 ON, p.164.

7 Ibid., p.84.

8 According to Schofield, we should not confound Benthams notion of a fictitious entity with his notion of a fiction, because these two terms normally refer to two distinct ideas: the former is an entity which does not have physical existence; the latter is an erroneous proposition (Schofield 2006, p.2n). However, as Schofield himself admits, there are some occasions when Bentham uses the term fiction to represent what he means by the term fictitious entity or name of fictitious entity (See, for example, ON, p.84). Thus, in this paper, I will often use the term fiction as an abbreviation of name of fictitious entity.

9 ELO, p.246.

10 In this section, as its title suggests, I will analyze the pragmatist or fictionalist level of Benthams theory of language. Since it is by Postema that the pragmatic implication of the theory was first pointed out explicitly, my argument in this section owes much to Postema (1983) and Postema (1986). It is also Postema who first found a proof of the pragmatist interpretation of Benthams theory of language in his account of the relationship between substances and absolute fictitious entities.

11 ON, p.88.

12 Ibid., p.90.

13 UC, cxxxv. 69.

14 ON, p.152. Referring to the same passage, Tyler argues that Benthams conception of existence like this undermines his own distinction between real and fictitious entities. This is one of the arguments on the basis of which Tyler concludes that there is no absolute standard, set of concepts or reality that Bentham can use to ground either his metaphysics or his censorial utilitarianism (Tyler 2003). However, in my view, such a criticism is irrelevant in that it presupposes that the epistemology of Benthams theory of language is exclusively reductionist realist, and ignores its pragmatist level.

15 Ibid., p.86.

16 ELO, p.262-3.

17 Schofield, in his Utility and Democracy, seems to ascribe a sort of reductionist realism or correspondence theory of truth to Bentham in explaining the theory of real and fictitious entities (Schofield 2006, ch.1). However, in the preface he wrote to the forthcoming Japanese translation of the book, after saying that Benthams views on logic and language require much further study, but one problem that has puzzled me concerns his view as to what constituted an individual thing, that is a real entity. If a tree was a real entity, that is an individual physical object, then wasnt a branch —— wasnt a leaf —— also a real entity?, he finds a clue to this problem in a passage of PP, p.124, which has the marginal heading Law —— bulk and Structure of a —— depends not upon the acts in question but on the Language they are described in. And he states that this passage suggests that, while Bentham argued that what existed was physical matter, the way that physical matter appeared and was described was a construct of the human mind. In my view, here Schofield, whether consciously or unconsciously, refers to the pragmatist level of Benthams theory of language.

18 CH, pp.261-71.

19 Postema 1983, p.54.

20 ELO, pp.259-79. Actually, regarding the importance of methodization, Bentham said that “In the whole field of the art of Logic, so large is the portion occupied by the art of methodization, —— so large, and, at the same time, so difficult to confine within any certain determinate limits, that the task of showing what it is that the art of method can do, is scarcely distinguishable from the task of showing what the art of Logic can itself do in all its totality (ELO, p.261). And in this sense, he went so far as to say that Logic were to be termed a queen, methodization, method, might be termed her prime-minister (ibid).

21 Ibid., p.261.

22 Ibid., p.226.

23 Ibid., p.272.

24 Long 1989, pp.103-6.

25 On this point see Postema (1986), ch.9 and Takashima (2017), ch.5, sec.1.

26 Laval 1994, pp.116-20.

27 UC, ci. 332.

28 To interpret the epistemological base of Benthams theory of language as a combination of these two ideas makes it impossible to ascribe to him the kind of pragmatism which is often summed up in the phrase that the useful is always true, or the truth of a proposition depends on its utility alone. Although those who deny that Bentham is a pragmatist often presuppose such a conception of pragmatism, it is only a vulgar way of interpretation of pragmatism.

29 In coming up with this idea, I received a suggestion from R. M. Hares famous distinction about moral thinking: between intuitive and critical thinking. See Hare (1981), ch.2 and 3.

30 De Champs (1999) is an important precedent for my attempt to inquire into the sources of Benthams theory of language and to evaluate its originality. Inquiring into the sources from a wide-ranging perspective, it gave me valuable suggestions. In comparison with de Champss inquiry, a distinguishing feature of mine consists in that it is based on the prior analysis of the theoretical structure of Benthams theory of language from an epistemological viewpoint. Owing to this uniqueness of my approach, I believe, this paper can offer some novel insights about the sources and the originality of Benthams theory of language.

31 UC, lxix. 177.

32 However, strictly speaking, Locke admitted that language plays a part in the formation of thought in that it helps the mind to retain a certain kinds of ideas. See Locke (1975), bk.II, ch.16, sec.5.

33 Lockes theory of language with such an aim on such a presupposition is a typical example of the theory of the universal grammar which was in fashion in the 17th-century Europe. See Land (1986), pp.238-9.

34 Locke 1975, bk.III, ch.9, sec.1.

35 Ibid., bk.III, ch.3, sec.10.

36 In summarizing Condillacs linguistic thought in this section, I relied very much on Harris and Taylor (1989), ch.10.

37 See, for example, ELO, pp.282-3, 285-6; ELA, p.322; CH, p.165n, 261, 268n, 269n, 273n.

38 Condillac 1982, pp.368-9.

39 Condillac 1970a, pp.275-6.

40 Condillac 1974, part I, ch.2, sec.4.

41 Condillac 1982, pp.389-90.

42 See Condillac (1970b), pp.365-7; Harris and Taylor (1989), pp.132-3.

43 Condillac 1982, p.399.

44 Ibid., p.396.

45 CH, p.258.

46 Harris and Taylor 1989, p.141, 145. In summarizing Tookes linguistic thought in this section, I relied very much on Harris and Taylor (1989), ch.11.

47 Tooke 1857, pp.9-15, 24-5, quoted in Harris and Taylor 1989, pp.143-4, 146-7.

Harris and Taylor 1989, p.148.

48 Harris and Taylor 1989, p.144.

49 Tooke 1857, p.15, quoted in Harris and Taylor 1989, p.144.

50 De Champs also directs attention to this point, and observes that the origin of language to which Bentham subscribed in the Essay on Language was directly derived from Condillacs Essai sur lorigine des connaissances humaines (de Champs 1999).

51 ELA, p.322.

52 Ibid., p.323.

53 Ibid., p.318.

54 Ibid., p.322.

55 CH, p.268n.

56 Thus, in my view, this is the most remarkable originality of Benthams theory of language in the context of the empiricist tradition of the Enlightenment linguistic thought. By contrast, in de Champss view, its originality consists in understanding language as a system of will, or in blending eighteenth-century concerns for definition and truth as grounded in experience with an awareness of symbolic systems as human constructs that was characteristic of later nineteenth-century approaches (de Champs 1999).

57 LA, p.286.

58 De Champs (1999) also recognizes the first and the second insights as the sources of Benthams idea of paraphrasis, but does not mention the third insight. Becker rightly points out that Bentham relied on Tookes notion of abbreviation in inventing the technique of paraphrasis (Becker 1964, p.262).

59 As to the distinction between real and fictitious entities, Bentham says that DAlembert is the author in whose works [Mélanges de Literature et de Philosophie] the notion of this distinction was first observed by me: —— étre fictif is the expression employed by him for the designation of the sort of object, for the designation of which the appellation fictitious entity has ever since been employed (LA, p.286). However, the expression étre fictif does not appear in DAlemberts Mélanges. Thus, as Harrison points out, it may be the case that DAlemberts general thought gave to Bentham some suggestions as to the idea of fictitious entity (Harrison 1983, p.75n). Or, as Laval and Cléro points out, it may be the case that among others DAlemberts article on Quantity in the Encyclopaedia was the source of the idea (Laval and Cléro, Introduction: La théorie des fictions et lutilitarisme, in ON, pp.31-2n).

60 CH, p.272n.

61 Ibid., p.259.

62 Bentham, perhaps with the aim of emphasizing the difference between Condillacs view and his own view in this respect, stated that In language are to be considered, 1.The ideas designated; 2.The signs employed in the designation of those ideas. / As to the signs, they have been for the most part arbitrary, bearing no naturally characteristic analogy to the things respectively designated …” (ELA, p.323).

63 Mack 1962, p.156 and pp.194-5.

64 Southwood Smith, the editor of the eighth volume of The Works of Jeremy Bentham in which A Fragment on Ontology, Essay on Logic, Essay on language, and Fragments on Universal Grammar are included, assumes from the dates marked on the manuscripts that Bentham had devoted himself to writing on logic and language at four distinct periods: in 1811, from 1814 to 1816, in 1826, and so lately as 1831 (ELO, p.214). Schofield observes that Benthams most sustained period of writing on real and fictitious entities, in the context of works on education, logic, language, and grammar, took place in 1813-15 (Schofield 2006, p.9).

65 CH, p.259.

66 Ibid., p.258.

67 For reasons of space, here I give only an outline of my answer. I presented it in detail in Takashima (2017), ch.7 and 8.

68 Schofield 2006, ch.5 and 6.

69 Bentham expressed such a view, for example, in BF, pp.67-8.

70 It was from the 1820s that Bentham actually began to use the word delusion in such a peculiar way. However, as Hume points out, Bentham already employed such a notion in recognizable, if incomplete, forms in an important set of works in which he declared his hostility to the ruling few and their allies, and which he drafted in the period 1809-16 (Hume 1979, p.24). Thus, in the following paragraphs, in order to give an outline of his theory of delusion, I refer to his arguments developed from the 1820s as well. His arguments about delusion can be seen, for example, in FP, pp.183-7 and 261-7; CC, pp.76-7.

71 Bentham said that in the character of an instrument of misrule, delusion has place and operates in so far as, by some erroneous conception or opinion, individuals, who but for the error would not be, are operated upon in such sort that they give support to misrule (FP, p.261).

72 Hume 1979, p.23.

73 CC, p.44.

74 Regarding Benthams word war of words, see note 76 below.

75 TS, p.62.

76 The word war of words appears in the context of criticizing censorial impassioned appellatives such as avarice or frugality both of which should be replaced with the neutral word pecuniary interest, in the following remark: Applied to the several springs of action and in particular to pleasures and to motives, these censorial and impassioned appellatives form no inconsiderable part of the ammunition employed in the war of words. / Under the direction of sinister interest and interest-begotten prejudice, they have been employed in the character of fallacies, or instruments of deception, by polemics of all classes: by politicians, lawyers, writers, on controversial divinity, satirists and literary censors (TS, p.96).

77 FG, p.508.

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Kazuya Takashima, « Bentham’s Theory of Language »Revue d’études benthamiennes [En ligne], 16 | 2019, mis en ligne le 20 décembre 2019, consulté le 06 février 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/etudes-benthamiennes/5856 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/etudes-benthamiennes.5856

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Kazuya Takashima

Meiji University (Japan)

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