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].
