Medieval Approaches to Consciousness: Ockham and Chatton

Most medieval thinkers, Ockham included, distinguish between sensory and intellectual cognition. The former consists in the activation and deliverances of the five external senses as well as the cognitive contribution of the internal sensory faculties. By contrast, intellective operations — at least in Ockham’s cognitive theory — include not only things like concept formation, propositional attitudes, and discursive reasoning but also, and much more controversially, acts of intuitive cognition. While many of Ockham’s contemporaries were willing to embrace the notion of intuitive cognition at the level of sensory cognition (indeed, sense cognition appears to be a paradigmatic form of perception), there was a great deal more controversy over the existence of intuitive cognition at the level of intellect. It’s not altogether clear, for example, that Scotus — from whom Ockham takes the intuitive/abstractive distinction — is willing to admit intuition at the level of intellect (though Ockham, no doubt to bolster his own case, insists that he did). In any case, even if Scotus is somewhat ambivalent about this, plenty of other thinkers are quite explicit in their rejection of intellective intuition — thinkers including Peter Auriol (d. 1322), John of Reading (d. 1346), and, as we’ll see, Chatton himself. In rejecting intellective intuition, such authors are essentially rejecting the idea that we possess (at least in this life) a kind of non-sensory or “extra-sensory” mode of perception. As they see it, perceptual states are one and all sensory states.