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Introduction Introduction At least four assumptions appear to be part of the common ground of inter­ pretation among scholars of Ockham. The first can be described as a kind of general methodological presupposition, in that it has become standard to explore the Franciscan as a potential contributor to current philosophical debates, such as the issue of externalism in the philosophy of language and in the philosophy of mind.1 The view that medieval philosophers – or at least, Ockham – are of interest only to historians and theologians does not enjoy great popularity, especially not among philosophers working in the tradition of analytic philosophy.2 Second, Ockham is usually labelled a nominalist. While nominalism is not a single unified position,3 Ockham can be called a nominalist insofar as he sub­ scribes to the view that there are only particular things in this world: he admits only of two kinds of things in his ontology, namely particular substances (Socrates, this apple) and particularized qualities (the wisdom of Socrates, the redness of this apple).4 It would perhaps be more fitting to call Ockham’s posi­ tion ‘particularistic’. He thereby takes a conceptual stance on the problem of universals.5 According to Ockham, universals are nothing but concepts exist­ ing in the intellect. There is nothing universal ‘out there’ in the world. That a concept such as whale or wisdom is universal means that whale is semantically 1 See for instance Peter King, ‘Rethinking Representation in the Middle Ages’, in H. Lagerlund (ed.), Representation and Objects of Thought in Medieval Philosophy, Hampshire, 2007; Calvin Normore, ‘Burge, Descartes and Us’, in M. Hahn; B. Ramberg (eds.), Reflections and Replies: Essays on the Philosophy of Tyler Burge, Massachussetts, 2003; Claude Panaccio, ‘Ockham’s Externalism’, in G. Klima (ed.), Intentionality, Cognition and Mental Representation in Medieval Philosophy, New York, (forthcoming). 2 See A. Freddoso and H. Schuurman (transl.; ed.), Ockham’s Theory of Propositions – Part II of the Summa Logicae, Indiana, 1998, viii. 3 See Paul Vincent Spade and Claude Panaccio, ‘William of Ockham’, in E.N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2011 Edition), url: http://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/fall2011/entries/ockham, Section 4. Metaphysics. Last access March 7th 2014. 4 On Ockham’s nominalism and the attempt to connect his nominalism with contemporary forms of nominalism, see Claude Panaccio, ‘Nominalisme occamiste et nominalisme con­ temporain’, Dialogue. Canadian Philosophical Review 26 (1987), 281–287; id., Les mots, les con- cepts et les choses. La sémantique de Guillaume d’Occam et le nominalisme d’aujourd’hui, Paris, 1992; Cyrille Michon, Nominalisme – La théorie de la signification d’Occam, Paris, 1994. 5 For the problem of universals see Wolfgang Künne, Abstrakte Gegenstände, Frankfurt/M., 1983, [2] 2007. And for its specific form in the Middle Ages see Martin M. Tweedale, Abelard on Universals, Amsterdam, 1976. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi 10.1163/9789004277625_002 <UN> 2 Introduction related to every particular whale.6 Ockham calls this a relation of signification. By approaching the problem of universals in this way, Ockham ontologically reduces universals to mind­dependent general concepts signifying concrete particular things.7 Concepts in turn belong to the category of qualities or acci­ dents: they are qualities or accidents of the intellect. Note, however, that con­ cepts are immaterial. Although Ockham admits only of particular substances and particularized qualities, there are material substances (Socrates) and immaterial substances (angels) as well as material qualities (the whiteness of Socrates’ beard) and immaterial qualities (Socrates’ thoughts). Ockham does not use his eponymous razor to eliminate the mental from his ontology: he is a dualist. Third, there is no doubt that the assumption of mental speech (oratio men- talis, ams for short) takes a prominent place in Ockham’s philosophy of lan­ guage and epistemology. The literature on different aspects of ams is vast; semantic and syntactic aspects such as the theories of signification and of sup­ position have received extensive scholarly attention, as has the question of their relation to Ockham’s nominalist ontology.8 The standard take on ams sees it as the idea that thought is prior to every natural language, but is itself a kind of language. According to this view, the semantics and syntax of language can be explained in terms of the semantics and syntax of thought. As Calvin Normore has pointed out in a recent paper, the assumption that thought is a kind of language, prior to any natural language, was commonly embraced throughout the 14th and 15th century by authors such as Ockham and Buridan. It has its roots in Boethius, Augustine, and Aristotle.9 Rather than arguing for the assumption of mental speech as a valid idea, Ockham, and others in the fourteenth century, merely applied and developed it. 6 To make the point differently, Ockham takes terms such as ‘whale’ as concrete, general terms, but not as singular, abstract terms. See Künne, Abstrakte Gegenstände, 37. According to the medieval theory of supposition, ‘whale’ in (1) whale is a species is used differently as in (2) Moby Dick is a whale: in (1) ‘whale’ is used for the species whale, whereas in (2) ‘whale’ is used for the things it signifies. As will become clear later, in Ockham’s view, species are nothing but concepts. 7 That is, there is no other kind of relation involved here, such as the so­called ‘one­over­many’ – relation between a Platonic Form and its instantiations. 8 See for instance the Annotated Bibliography of Medieval theories of mental language www .ontologymirror.com/biblio/supposition­biblio­one.htm and www.ontologymirror.com/ biblio/supposition­biblio­two.htm by Raul Corazzon. 9 See Martin Lenz, Mentale Sätze, Wilhelm von Ockhams Thesen zur Sprachlichkeit des Denkens, Stuttgart, 2003 for an account of the historical development of the mental­speech assumption. <UN>.
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