The medieval antecedents of semiotics (2) : Is thought structured like a language ? From verbum mentis tooratio mentalis

Abstract

At the end of the previous lecture, we showed how, among the scholastics, Peirce hesitated (which is not without its problems), in his analysis of the best model for signs, between the terminists and the modists : yet this is not, at least at first glance, without problem, for we know that the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries saw Terminists (Ockham) and Modists (Boethius and Martin of Dacia, Raoul le Breton, Siger of Courtrai, Thomas of Erfurt, etc.) oppose each other in the field of signs and meaning.) and that one of the consequences of terminism was precisely to " shave " those entities deemed superfluous, namely modi significandi (a fundamental principle of construction in Modist grammar). At this stage, however, the emphasis was on what attracted him to Ockham and what constituted the strength and originality of the Venerabilis Inceptor : a new definition of logic, or his use of the powerful instrument of suppositio to analyze the formal structure of language rather than hypostasizing this structure into a science of reality or of the mind, his effort to dissociate the two, even if logic is understood more as a scientia rationalis than as a scientia sermocinalis [6]. Above all, with Ockham, we can now consider concepts themselves as signs, and thought itself as a " thought-sign ". For thought is structured in the mode of an authentic natural first language, of a " mental discourse ", of this " oratio mentalis ", an innovation that anticipates many contemporary analyses (see Jerry Fodor's hypothesis of the " language of thought ") [7].

Whereas language was still pure logos, a simple vehicle for thought, reaching out to things through words and prior to them, or, as in Saint-Augustin, a verbum mentis, ultimately affected by the immaterial divine light, more vision than speech, and " prior to all signs " [8], whereas with Abelard, it was still the word (the name) that signified (intellections cannot be signs), with Ockham, thought or the concept is privileged for meaning : it is no longer simply identified with what is signified by signs, it is what signifies. Ockham places language in the mind, and it is the concept, not the word, that becomes the first bearer of meaning. The lecture recalled why Greco-Latin antiquity (Plato, Aristotle, Augustine) had not envisaged such an approach [9], recalled the variations to which the concepts of " sign ", " signification", verbum and oratio had been subjected, and showed how, in the ^thirteenth century, the application of the notion of sign (in its function no longer of sensible indication or assimilation, but of representation) was beginning to spread (e.g. in Guillaume d'Auvergne or Roger Bacon) [10], before the "great controversy " of which Duns Scotus speaks about the meaning of words, which will oppose the terminists and the modists or " speculative grammarians ", whose main arguments (in part already present in Abélard) in favor of a kind of " return to the very things " and of a realistic rather than nominalistic approach to signs and meaning, have begun to be presented.

References

[6] Moody, E., The Logic of William of Ockham, New York, Sheed & Ward, 1935 ; Truth and Consequence in Medieval Logic, Amsterdam, 1953. See also Stump, E., " Topics: their development and absorption into Consequences ", in Kretzmann, N., Kenny, A. & Pinborg, J. (eds.), Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982, pp. 273-299; Adams, M., William Ockham, Notre Dame University Press, 2 vols. 1987.

[7] See the excellent Panaccio, C. Les mots, les concepts et les choses : la sémantique de Guillaume d'Occam et le nominalisme aujourd'hui, Bellarmin-Vrin, Paris, 1992.

[8] Baratin, M., & Desbordes, F., " Signification et référence dans l'antiquité et au moyen âge ", Langages, No. 65, 1982, p. 75-89.

[9] Panaccio, C., Le discours intérieur, de Platon à Guillaume d'Ockham, Paris, Seuil, 1999. See also Maieru, A., " Signum " in medieval culture, Miscellanea medievalia, 13/1, Berlin, Walter de Gruyter, 1981, p. 51-71; Manetti, G., Theories of the Sign in Classical Antiquity, Bloomington (Ind.), Indiana University Press, 1993.

[10] See Panaccio, 1999 and Biard, J., Logique et théorie du Signe au ^XIVe siècle, Paris, Vrin, 1989.