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.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
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.
Bibliography
Baudry, Léon. 1950. Guillaume d’Occam: Sa vie, ses œuvres, ses idées sociales et politiques. T. I: L’homme et les œuvres. Paris: Vrin.
Biard, Joël. 1993. Guillaume d’Ockham: Somme de logique. Première partie. 2nd ed. Mauvezin: Éditions Trans-Europ-Repress.
Donatus. 1981. Ars Donati grammatici verbis Romae. Critical Edition in Holtz 1981, 571–674.
Ebbesen, Sten, ed. 1995. Sprachtheorien in Spätantike und Mittelalter. Tubingen: Gunter Narr Verlag.
Ebbesen, Sten and Irène Rosier-Catach. 1997. Le trivium à la faculté des arts. In Weijers and Holtz 1997, 97–128.
Freddoso, Alfred J. 1991. William Ockham: Quodlibetal questions. Volume 2: Quodlibets 5–7. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Freddoso, Alfred J. and Francis E. Kelley. 1991. William Ockham: Quodlibetal questions. Volume 1: Quodlibets 1–4. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Gal, Gedeon and Stephen Brown. 1974. Introductio. In Ockham 1974, 7*–73*.
Hayden, Deborah. 2017. Language and linguistics in medieval Europe. In Oxford research encyclopedia of linguistics. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.013.380.
Holtz, Louis. 1981. Donat et la tradition de l’enseignement grammatical. Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.
Klima, Gyula. 2009. John Buridan. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 2011. Tradition and innovation in medieval theories of mental representation. In Klima and Hall 2011, 7–16.
———. 2013. Three myths of intentionality vs. some medieval philosophers. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 21: 359–376.
———. 2015a. Mental representations and concepts in medieval philosophy. In Klima 2015b, 323–337.
———, ed. 2015b. Intentionality, cognition, and mental representation in medieval philosophy. New York: Fordham University Press.
Klima, Gyula, and Alexander W. Hall, eds. 2011. Mental representation. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Kneepkens, C. H. 1995. The Priscianic tradition. In Ebbesen 1995, 239–264.
Kneepkens, C.H. 2017. The Donatus minor between via antiqua and via moderna: Grammar education and the Wegestreit. Historiographia Linguistica 44: 355–390.
Loux, Michael. 1974. Ockham’s theory of terms: Part I of the summa logicae. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.
Ockham, William. 1970. Scriptum in librum primum Sententiarum. Ordinatio. Distinctiones II–III. In Guillelmi de Ockham opera theologica, ed. S. Brown, vol. II. St. Bonaventure: The Franciscan Institute.
———. 1974. Summa logicae. In Guillelmi de Ockham opera philosophica, ed. P. Boehner, G. Gal, and S. Brown, vol. I. St. Bonaventure: The Franciscan Institute.
———. 1978a. Expositio in librum Praedicamentorum Aristotelis. In Guillelmi de Ockham opera philosophica, ed. G. Gal, vol. II, 133–339. St. Bonaventure: The Franciscan Institute.
———. 1978b. Expositio in librum Perihermeneias Aristotelis. In Guillelmi de Ockham opera philosophica, ed. A. Gambatese and S. Brown, vol. II, 341–504. St. Bonaventure: The Franciscan Institute.
———. 1980. Quodlibeta septem. In Guillelmi de Ockham opera theologica, ed. J.C. Wey, vol. IX. St. Bonaventure: The Franciscan Institute.
———. 1985. Expositio in libros Physicorum Aristotelis. In Guillelmi de Ockham opera philosophica, vols. IV–V, ed. V. Richter et al. St. Bonaventure: The Franciscan Institute.
Panaccio, Claude. 1995. La philosophie du langage de Guillaume d’Occam. In Ebbesen 1995, 184–206.
———. 1999a. Le discours intérieur: De Platon à Guillaume d’Ockham. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
———. 1999b. Semantics and mental language. In Spade 1999, 53–75.
———. 2004. Ockham on concepts. Aldershot: Ashgate.
———. 2010. Intuition and causality: Ockham’s externalism revisited. Quaestio 10 (Later medieval perspectives on intentionality, ed. F. Amerini): 241–253.
———. 2011. Concepts as similitudes in William of Ockham's nominalism. In Klima and Hall 2011, 25–32.
———. 2015. Ockham’s externalism. In Klima 2015b, 166–185.
———. 2017. Mental language: From Plato to William of Ockham. (Trans. J. P. Hochschild and M. K. Ziebart). New York: Fordham University Press (transl. of Panaccio 1999a).
Priscian. 1855. Institutiones grammaticae, ed. M. Hertz. Leipzig: Teubner.
Schierbaum, Sonja. 2014. Ockham’s assumption of mental speech: Thinking in a world of particulars. Leiden: Brill.
Spade, Paul V., ed. 1999. The Cambridge companion to Ockham. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Weijers, Olga, and Louis Holtz, eds. 1997. L’enseignement des disciplines à la faculté des arts (Paris et Oxford, xiiie-xve siècles). Turnhout: Brepols.
Wey, Joseph. 1980. Introduction. In Ockham 1980, 7*–41*.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
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
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15026-5_12
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-15025-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-15026-5
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)