The Formation and Function of Stoic Conceptions

Stoic epistemology gave an agent epistemic access to the external world by means of the so-called criteria of truth. Ancient reports tell us that preconceptions and common conceptions were referred to as such criteria of truth. It is common in modern scholarship to take these conceptions to be somehow "given" by nature independently of human reasoning and therefore formed in a different way than conceptions that are not criteria of truth. I offer an alternative to this interpretation. I argue that common conceptions of physics are formed and verified by rigorous dialectical reasoning from the starting-points of initial preconceptions that are not actually true of the properties or objects they are of. Furthermore, passages from Cicero's On Ends and Seneca's Letters suggest that preconceptions of the good and end for man are not actually true of these things, and that it is only by active reflection and reasoning that we obtain common conceptions that express the essential properties of the good and end for man. I conclude, therefore that it is not the case that conceptions that are criteria of truth are true in some privileged way because they arise in agents independently of dialectical reasoning.;A third Stoic criterion of truth is the cognitive impression . Modern scholarship understands such impressions to be similarly "given" by nature independently of the interference of human reason, and to therefore be the cause of preconceptions and common conceptions. I reverse the order of explanation and argue that the particular intentional content of a cognitive impression is dependent in an essential way upon the content of the conceptions that the agent sorts his impression under. I examine two counter-examples to the cognitive impression given by the Academic skeptics and argue that whether an impression is cognitive in an epistemic context is dependent upon the richness of the agent's conceptions. It is therefore not the case that the intentional content of a cognitive impression is independent of the nature of the agent's reason.