Uninstantiability

John Poinsot (1589–1644), aka Joannes a Sancto Thoma, was the first of St Thomas’ followers among the Latins to demonstrate that the origins of animal knowledge in sensation is already – from the first – a matter of the action of signs. This action, “semiosis,” results in the formation of an irreducibly triadic relation apart from which there is no awareness at all on the part of animals. At the level of internal sense, and then again at the level of intellect (the two having in common dependency upon concept-formation in order to interpret the data provided by sensation), Poinsot shows how the concept serves to make objects known only by serving as the foundation for relations which, exactly as those in sensation, exhibit an irreducibly triadic character, with only this difference: that, whereas the triadic relations of sensation are directly founded upon or “provenate from” species impressa (stimulation of sense powers in bodily interaction with the surroundings) determining the external sense powers, the triadic relations of perceptual and intellectual awareness have as their immediate foundations or “sources of provenation” species expressae (“ideas” or concepts) actively formed by the cognitive powers of memory, imagination, estimation, and intellect. Being relations, all of these triadic relations exhibit no direct instantiation as signate matter, and it is this which makes them only indirectly knowable to sense powers. Intellect, by contrast, in being able to know relations precisely in their difference from related objects and things, manifests the species-specific distinctness of human animals in being able to construct and to know and to communicate about objects – beginning with relations – which admit of no direct sensory instantiation. The purpose of this paper is to show how the ability of the human mind to consider objects which admit of no direct instantiation in sense perception is what distinguishes the human being as “semiotic animal” from what the Latins identified as “brute animals,” not because brutes (the “alloanimals,” to use a term from late modern anthropology) are not “rational” in the modern sense of being able creatively to work through problems (indeed they are rational in this sense!), but because human animals are not confined to the consideration of objects as perceptually instantiable.