Intuitive Cognition

Ockham distinguishes intuitive cognition from abstractive cognition. Intuitive cognition is the direct awareness of an existing particular — the immediate, present-tense grasp of something as here, now, and real. When I see this red book in front of me, my visual awareness of it is an intuitive cognition: it presents the book as existing and present, and on the basis of this cognition I can form the evident judgment that the book exists. Abstractive cognition, by contrast, is knowledge of a thing without any commitment to its existence or presence: I can think about the book when it is not there, consider its properties abstractly, or remember it.

Ockham's account of intuitive cognition is his alternative to the Aristotelian-Thomistic picture in which knowledge begins with the extraction of intelligible forms from sensory particulars by the agent intellect. For Ockham, the mind grasps particulars directly — individual things, not forms or universals instantiated in things. This direct contact with particulars is the foundation of all empirical knowledge; abstract concepts and general propositions are built up from this base. The nominalism and the empiricism are internally connected: if only particulars exist, then all genuine knowledge must ultimately rest on cognition of particulars.

A fascinating complication in Ockham's account is his discussion of whether God could cause an intuitive cognition of a non-existent object — whether God could make us seem to directly perceive something that is not there. By God's absolute power, Ockham concedes, this is possible: God could cause a veridical-seeming experience of a non-existent thing. This concession creates a sceptical gap between intuitive cognition and certainty about the external world — a gap that later thinkers, including Descartes, would exploit. Ockham's own solution is that by ordained power, God does not in fact deceive us in this way, so intuitive cognition remains reliable in practice even if not logically guaranteed.

Ockham's theory of intuitive cognition in the Ordinatio is one of the earliest sustained analyses of the role of perceptual acquaintance in knowledge in the medieval period. Its influence on later empiricism — particularly on the idea that knowledge of particulars is more basic than knowledge of universals — was significant, though mediated through the nominalist tradition rather than by direct reading.