Mental Word/Concepts

Abstract

The medieval thinkers did not have any one agreed-upon term for concept as a mental entity, but it was generally assumed that there are some such units and they were often viewed as mental words of some kind. In contrast to the words of spoken languages, which vary from nation to nation, the concepts were taken to be the same for all people. Issues related to concepts or mental words were discussed in several fields of inquiry, including logic, theology, and philosophical psychology. In logic, concepts were traditionally called “understandings” (intellectus), and they were supposed to have a mediating role between words and things in signification. This view goes back to Aristotle’s De interpretatione and Boethius’ commentaries on it. In theology, the mental word (verbum) was a prominent theme because Augustine had elaborated an analogy between the human interior word and the Word, that is, the second person of the Trinitarian God. In the tradition of philosophical psychology starting from Aristotle’s De anima, the acquisition of concepts was a central theme. These and other influences led to intricate discussions in the medieval universities about what kind of entities in the mind relating to concepts one should postulate and how they should be described. Thomas Aquinas developed a model that includes a distinction between the intelligible species, the act of understanding, and the concept proper. There was extensive dispute about issues related to concepts in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century, and much of it revolved around ideas presented by Aquinas. William of Ockham developed an alternative to the De anima-based approach on the basis of his nominalist philosophy. The concept or mental word, identified as an act of understanding, became the basic unit in the theory of mental language that Ockham advocated.