Abstract
William of Ockham has been considered the first thinker to develop a theory of mental language with grammatical structures. Ockham’s early views built upon Augustine’s and Boethius’ twofold concept of a mental word: a concept common to all people and a resemblance of words to actual spoken and written languages. Ockham understood mental language to be identical with thinking. The spoken and written words are subordinated to their mental counterparts and therefore share their signification. According to Ockham, mental language does not contain figurative speech, grammatical genders, synonyms, or equivocations but does contain most other features of external languages, including suppositions of terms and certain fallacies related to the suppositions. John Buridan diverged from Ockham’s view at this point and used the notion of modes of thinking to discuss related problems. Gregory of Rimini modified the view of mental language in several respects. He considered the major part of mental language to consist of a mentalized conventional language, with only the act of assenting to a mental proposition, which he considered to be the mental proposition itself, being independent of conventional languages. Peter of Ailly further developed Gregory’s and Ockham’s ideas. In Italy, Peter of Mantua and Paul of Venice discussed the problems of word order and mental language that William of Heytesbury had raised earlier. The former was mainly critical of Heytesbury, while the latter for the most part shared Heytesbury’s views. Several later fifteenth- and sixteenth-century logicians continued the discussions.
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Kärkkäinen, P. (2018). Mental Language. In: Lagerlund, H. (eds) Encyclopedia of Medieval Philosophy. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1151-5_327-2
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