Claude Panaccio

William of Ockham

William of Ockham was one of the most influential thinkers in the Middle Ages and his famous work Sum of Logic was completely ground breaking. The selections presented here are not only from that work, but include also a small selection from his Quodlibetal Questions. These selections present aspects of his theory of signification and supposition as well as his view of mental language. Ockham thinks all spoken and written languages are based on a common mental language. In his works he developed a new semantics for this mental language. This semantics is constrained by his nominalist metaphysics and he paved the way for the via moderna in medieval philosophy that had many influential followers well into the sixteenth century.

Semantics and Mental Language

At the outset of SL , Ockham endorses Boethiuss old distinction between three sorts of discourse: written, spoken, and mental. The first two, he explains, are physically perceptible, whether by the eye or by the ear, and are made up of conventional signs. The units of mental language, by contrast, are concepts. They are internal to thinking minds, and their signification is natural rather than conventional. Being mental, they are not directly perceptible - at least not in this world - to anybody but the person who internally produces them in the course of his or her private thinking. But being originally acquired as the result of a natural process, they are nevertheless strongly similar - and identically organized - from one human being to another. Although it is not a public medium of communication, mental language is potentially common to all. Mental language is prior to, and underlies, every reasonable speech utterance and provides it with meaning. Ockhams semantical theory, as presented in SL and elsewhere, is primarily an explication of the various ways in which the natural conceptual signs that constitute the language of thought are linked with their external referents; and secondarily, of the ways in which conventional discourse is derived from this mental language.

Ockham and Locke on Mental Language

Mental language was the topic of intense philosophical discussions in late scholasticism, at least from the early fourteenth century to the first half of the sixteenth century. Authors such as Walter Burley, William of Ockham, Crathorn, Gregory of Rimini, John Buridan, Albert of Saxony, Pierre d’Ailly, John Dorp, Paul of Venice, Jeronimo Pardo, Juan de Celaya, Fernando de Enzinas, John Major, and a host of others actively, and sometimes lengthily, debated precise questions about the syntactical structure of mental discourse, the unity of the mental proposition, the semantics of mental terms and propositions, and the connection between mental, spoken, and written languages. The earlier part of this story — especially concerning Ockham and Buridan — is of course the best known so far, and it still inspires a significant amount of research.’ On the other hand, work done in the last twenty-five years or so by a handful of scholars has given us penetrating insights into early sixteenth century Spanish, Scottish, and French contributions to the theme; but we still lack, on the whole, a satisfactory overview of its development over this span of two hundreds and fifty years. Much more research is needed before a synthesis will become possible.

Ockham and Buridan on Simple Supposition

Abstract What is at stake, philosophically, in the disagreement between Ockham and Buridan is whether there is simple (or material) supposition in the mental language or not. The key difference is that Ockham’s theory allows for the possibility of use/mention ambiguities within mental language, while Buridan’s approach, whatever it is exactly, does not.

Intuition and Causality: Ockham’s Externalism Revisited

Content externalism, as defended by Hilary Putnam, Tyler Burge and several others, is the thesis that the content of our thoughts at a given moment is not uniquely determined by our internal states at that moment. In its causalist version, it has often been presented as a deep revolution in philosophy of mind. Yet a number of medievalists (e.g. Peter King, Calvin Normore, Gyula Klima, and myself) have recently stressed the presence of significant externalist tendencies in late-medieval nominalism, especially in William of Ockham. Now this interpretation has been cleverly challenged in the case of Ockham by Susan Brower-Toland in 2007, with arguments focusing upon Ockham’s theory of intuitive cognition (precisely where the externalist reading had seemed to be the most secured). The present paper is a reply to this challenge. I first summarize the case for seeing Ockham’s theory of intuitive cognition as a causal and externalist approach, and then critically review Brower-Toland’s arguments against it. The ...

NOMINALISM AND THE THEORY OF CONCEPTS

Abstract Nominalism is the doctrine that only singular things really exist. Species, sets, common natures, general properties, shared attributes, and so on, are thus taken to have no mind-independent reality of their own. The aim of this paper is to explain how this philosophical notion bears upon the theory of concepts as mental representations. The basic principle is that generality is not a feature of the things in the world, but of our representations of them. Examples are given from the recent literature on concept theory, where confusion reigns. The main motivations for nominalism are then briefly recalled. And, most importantly, it is shown how the nominalistic approach can be cashed out, in the field of concept theory, in terms of two main constraints: (1) anything which is supposed to be represented by a concept should be a singular thing; (2) anything which is supposed to occur as a mental representation should also be a singular thing itself.

Solving the Insolubles: hints from Ockham and Burley

In his approach to the “insolubilia” as elsewhere in his semantics, Ockham firmly sticks to the Bivalence Principle: each apparently paradoxical sentence is “solved” by him by being given one and only one of the two traditional truth-values. The Liar’s ‘What I am now saying is false’ (uttered by a speaker who says nothing else) is reckoned to be false, while ‘What I am now saying is not true’ is in the same circumstances considered true. The well-known contradictions which threaten are avoided by the use of a restriction rule which applies to such semantical terms as ‘true’ or ‘false’ and prohibits them — at least in some contexts — from suppositing in a sentence s for s itself.

Belief-Sentences: Outline of a Nominalistic Approach

What I call a nominalistic analysis of belief-sentences is an explication of the meaning of sentences of the form ‘A believes that p’ that does not commit the analyst to the existence of special abstract entities such as sets, Fregean senses and propositions, or universal properties and relations. I take it, without discussing the point here, that if it is feasible, such an analysis is prima facie philosophically preferable to a realistic one for general reasons of clarity and ontological economy. But the question, of course, is: is it, in some reasonable way, feasible? Standard nominalistic approaches to belief-sentences all face well-known and crucial difficulties. The quotational theory, according to which the object-sentence ‘p’ is quoted or mentioned within the belief- sentence ‘A believes that p’, fails the Langford-Church translation test.1 The metalinguistic analysis, on the other hand, according to which the ‘that’-clause within the belief-sentence is, in every case, a primitive metalinguistic predicate fails to satisfy Davidson’s learnability requirement.2 And Davidson’s own approach, the so-called paratactic theory, according to which ‘A believes that p’ means simply ‘A believes this, p’ fails, for all its virtues, to accommodate some important illocutionary and logical characteristics of belief- sentences.3 These negative results from the last four or five decades of debates led more than one phi-losopher to conclude drastically that nominalism just can’t cope with belief-sentences in any satisfactory way. What I would like to show here is that there is still at least one more line of investigation for nominalism in this endeavour. Space being severely limited, I will be content to sketch the general features of this hitherto unexplored approach and to list some of the motivations for it as well as some of its theoretical advantages.

Ockham and Buridan on Epistemic Sentences: Appellation of the Form and Appellation of Reason

Abstract Buridan’s theory of sentences with epistemic verbs (‘to know’, ‘to believe’, etc.) has received much attention in recent scholarship. Its originality with respect to Ockham’s approach, however, has been importantly overestimated. The present paper argues that both doctrines share crucial features and basically belong to the same family. This is done by comparing Buridan’s notion of the ‘appellation of reason’ with Ockham’s application to epistemic sentences of the general principle that a predicate always ‘appellates its form’.

Grasping the Philosophical Relevance of Past Philosophies

This chapter examines what is needed in principle for a historian of philosophy to bring out the relevance of certain past theoretical texts for today’s philosophical discussions. Three conditions are thus spelled out: (1) the historian should be able to identify the referents of (some of) the non-theoretical concrete terms of the relevant texts; (2) the historian should master the inferences that are acceptable within the past doctrines in question; (3) he or she should make it clear on that basis how these doctrines dealt with phenomena that are still taken to be philosophically problematic, especially logico-linguistic phenomena such as predication, ambiguities, modalities, indexicality, self-reference and so on. How all of this in turn requires a special sort of historical contextualization is illustrated with the case of Anselm of Canterbury’s De grammatico.