Abstract
This chapter explores some of Claude Panaccio’s most significant contributions to the study of Ockham’s account of the language of thought, construed as an exemplary model of how to do the history of philosophy. It focuses on three central issues. First, it gives a short history of the now-resolved debate over the existence of simple connotative concepts in mental language, which was essentially about whether Ockham intended his mental language to be ideal or logically perfect. Second, it describes the ongoing controversy about whether Ockham grants (or should grant) the existence of simple abstractive cognitions proper to one individual, or singular absolute concepts. Third, it gives an analysis of the tension between causality and similarity in Panaccio’s account of Ockham’s view on how concepts are what they are the concepts of.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
For Panaccio’s position here see especially Panaccio (1998) and the references therein to his debates with Alain de Libera and Kurt Flasch.
- 3.
I elide a number of issues here. For example if “Cicero is Tully” is true then one can also infer that “Cicero” and “Tully” name the same thing so such a sentence does convey information about how some language works. It does not tell us anything more about extra-linguistic reality than, say “Cicero is” would.
- 4.
See also Trentman (1970).
- 5.
See also Tweedale (1992).
- 6.
I use square brackets [...] to enclose items in the mental language.
- 7.
In SL I, c. 65, OPh I, l1 ff, Ockham writes: “Notandum est etiam quod semper terminus, in quacumque propositione ponatur, potest habere suppositionem personalem, nisi ex voluntate utentium arctetur ad aliam, sicut terminus aequivocus in quacumque propositione potest supponere pro quolibet suo significato nisi ex voluntate utentium arctetur ad certum significatum.” And in SL III-4, c 4 l, OPh I, 113–118 he adds: “Et est notandum quod iste tertius modus aequivocationis potest reperiri in propositione pure mentali, quamvis duo primi modi non habeant locum nisi in signis ad placitum institutis. Unde ista propositio mentalis ‘homo est species’ distingui potest, eo quod subiectum potest supponere significative vel pro se ipso. Et sic de consimilibus est dicendum.”
A speaker disambiguates an equivocal spoken term by intending it as she would use one of the concepts to which it is subordinated (cf. SL I, c. 13, OPh I, 44–47). These intentions or acts of will cannot themselves be items in the mental language on pain of regress.
- 8.
Panaccio has argued persuasively that subordination is, for Ockham a relation only between terms (Panaccio 2004, 168ff).
- 9.
And that later writers like Pierre d’Ailly were right to think that there could not be any equivocation in mental language. Even Ockham nods!
- 10.
One might wonder whether the language of similitudo is to be taken seriously. Holkot, for example, writes in Sent. II, q. 3 (Oriel, fol. 159ra): “Parum curo de hoc quia non pono speciem naturalem similitudinem rei cuius cognitionem facit, ut similitudo lapidis in angelo si[cu]t lapis. Sed pono unam qualitatem causativam notitie lapidis quando lapis non est presens. Propter quod dicitur ‘representativa’ lapidis et ‘similitudo’ lapidis, vel eius ‘species;’ et eadem res potest vocari ‘habitus,’ quia facilitat vel inclinat intellectum ad cognitionem abstractivam lapidis.” Quoted in Tachau (1988, 249). Panaccio, quite reasonably, does take it seriously in Ockham’s case.
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Normore, C.G. (2017). Likeness Stories. In: Pelletier, J., Roques, M. (eds) The Language of Thought in Late Medieval Philosophy. Historical-Analytical Studies on Nature, Mind and Action, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66634-1_5
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