Abstract
William of Ockham’s discussion of which grammatical categories are relevant for describing the syntax of mental language occurs in two short and closely related passages: Quodlibeta V, 8 and Summa logicae I, 3. In the present paper, I discuss four riddles that are raised by these two texts: (1) I point to an apparent anomaly in the structure of Summa logicae I, 3 and I propose an amendment to the St. Bonaventure edition in this regard; (2) I argue that Ockham’s main grammatical source in the two passages is the Latin grammarian Donatus rather than Priscian (as might have been thought) and I show why this is relevant; (3) I clarify what problem Ockham has in mind when saying that there is a special difficulty about whether distinctions of “quality” (qualitas) are found among mental names as they are among spoken names; (4) I explain what Ockham means by the “figure” (figura) of names and verbs and why he thinks that this grammatical category is of no relevance for the analysis of mental language.
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Notes
- 1.
See Summa logicae I, 26 and I, 49 (Ockham 1974: 88 and 158). Nowhere in the Quodlibeta, on the other hand, is any grammarian explicitly mentioned.
- 2.
I have briefly proposed this conjecture in Panaccio 1995, 202, n.3. Here, I argue for it in more details.
- 3.
See in particular Quodlibeta IV, 35, article 2 (Ockham 1980, 472–474). It is true that the original disputation of Ockham’s Quodlibetal questions must have spread over a period of several years—presumably from 1322 to 1324 according to the editor (Wey 1980, 36*–38*)—but the text we now have is a revised version, and anyway the disputation and writing of Quodlibeta IV, 35, where Ockham unequivocally subscribes to the actus-theory of concepts, certainly antedated the disputation and writing of Quodlibeta V, 7, where he rejects the possibility of simple singular abstractive concepts.
- 4.
- 5.
I will return to this point in the next section of this paper.
- 6.
In the Prologue to his Commentary on the Physics, Ockham expresses his intention to comment on the whole of Aristotle’s natural philosophy, which would certainly include the De anima (Ockham 1985, 4). Later on in the same treatise, indeed, he does explicitly refer to a future work on the De anima (Ockham 1985, III, 2, 448–449, lines 276–277; see also footnote 10 of the editor in Ockham 1985, 14). With respect to the Metaphysics, Ockham often states that he will eventually comment on it, for example in his Commentary on the Categories (Ockham 1978b, 325, l. 22–24 and 326, l. 52–53) and in his Commentary on the Physics (Ockham 1985, 14, l. 118–119; 245, l. 55; and 282, l. 29–30).
- 7.
- 8.
In Ockham’s preferred sense of what synonymy is, “expressions are synonymous which simply signify the same thing (so that nothing is in any way signified by one of the terms which is not in the same way signified by the other)” (Ockham 1974, I, 6, 19; transl. Loux 1974, 58). This definition applies to terms of different languages such as “picchio,” “Specht,” and “woodpecker” (if the latter is taken as an “absolute” term rather than a connotative one).
- 9.
Ockham deals with a similar case in Summa logicae III-2, 29. He explains there that someone who has never seen a lion can nevertheless utter a sentence with the term “lion” as its subject, but what that person would have in mind in so doing is “a mental proposition the subject of which is composed of several incomplex cognitions” (Ockham 1974, 559; my translation).
- 10.
See for example Klima 2009, 37–120, where Gyula proposes a profound and detailed discussion of conceptual complexity and singular conceptual cognition in John Buridan; or Klima 2011, 2013, and 2015a, b, where he addresses the topic of intentionality and representation in medieval philosophy at large.
- 11.
I am most grateful to Irène Rosier-Catach for having helped me find my way in the history of medieval grammar while writing this paper and for having provided me with several useful references.
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Panaccio, C. (2023). Four Notes on the Grammar of Ockham’s Mental Language. In: Hochschild, J.P., Nevitt, T.C., Wood, A., Borbély, G. (eds) Metaphysics Through Semantics: The Philosophical Recovery of the Medieval Mind. International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d'histoire des idées, vol 242. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15026-5_12
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