KNOWLEDGE science In fact, Aquinas often uses the verb as equivalent simply to ‘know’; but it is true that he has a pair of terms, the verb ‘cognoscere’ and the noun ‘cognitio’ which have a much broader and less technical scope These words are used in a variety of contexts to refer to very diVerent things: sense-perception as well as intellectual understanding; knowledge by description as well as knowledge by acquaintance; acquiring concepts as well as making use of them Careful attention to context is needed to Wnd the appropriate translation in diVerent contexts Sadly, some medievalists in recent years have abandoned translation for transliteration, which not only produces ugly English but leads to intellectual confusion The pseudo-verb ‘cognize’ looks like an episode verb; and so all kinds of diVerent cognitive states, activities, and acts are made to look as if they referred to a momentary event of which there could be a mental snapshot But it remains true that if we are to look for a rewarding epistemology in Aquinas we should examine his practice with ‘cognitio’ rather than his theory of scientia However, let us look for a moment at Aquinas’ theory as an account of science, rather than as a general epistemology It is important to realize that it is not intended as an account of scientiWc method: we are not meant to understand that the scientist starts with self-evident principles and proceeds to conclusions about the world by rolling out a priori deductions The procedure goes in the opposite direction: the scientist starts with a phenomenon—an eclipse of the moon, say—and looks for the cause of it Finding the cause is the same thing as Wnding the middle term in a syllogism which will have as its conclusion the occurrence of the eclipse The task of science is only completed when this syllogism, in turn, is traced back, through other syllogisms, to arrive at Wrst principles But the Wrst principle thus arrived at forms the conclusion, not the starting point, of the scientiWc inquiry.5 The chain of deduction is not the vehicle, but the output, of the venture The serious problem with Aquinas’ theory is that it leaves quite unclear what is the role of experience and experiment in science True, ‘scientia’ is broad enough to include mathematics and metaphysics; but it is clear from Aquinas’ examples that his account is meant to cover disciplines such as Aquinas clearly distinguishes the two procedures in ST 1a 79 8, but rather confusingly he calls the deductive process ‘inquiry’ and the process of inquiry ‘judgement’ But in his commentary on the Posterior Analytics he makes clear that that work is concerned with ‘judgement’ See Eleonore Stump, Aquinas (London: Routledge, 2003), 525, to which I am much indebted 169