Mental Language by Panaccio Claude; Hochschild Joshua; Ziebart Meredith

Author:Panaccio, Claude; Hochschild, Joshua; Ziebart, Meredith [Panaccio]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2016-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

CONCEPT AND SIGN

Is the word the sign of the concept or of the thing itself? John Duns Scotus, in his Ordinatio, mentions a lively debate on this subject—a magna altercatio, as he calls it.1 This dispute over the notion of sign was closely linked to the discussion about the word described in the preceding chapter. Thomas Aquinas maintained that the proper significate of the spoken word is the interior word—for him, identical with the passiones animae of Perihermeneias.2 Those who would adopt the opposing position on this point often did so in the name of a resolute realism that seems to characterize an entire philosophical movement at the end of the thirteenth and beginning of the fourteenth centuries: most of the time, they noted, we use words to refer to things, rather than just to concepts in our minds.

But the question bears on the history of the idea of mental language in another way. The working out of a logico-grammatical theory of interior discourse like Ockham’s supposes a systematic application to the order of thought of those categories in which exterior language is usually analyzed—particularly the category of signification, along with several other related categories. It requires, in other words, that concepts are themselves signs and that we take this description seriously. Now, such an approach is greatly facilitated if we refuse to make the concept the primary significate of the spoken word. Not that the two views are strictly incompatible: after all, why not say—as did many medievals—that the word is the sign of the concept while the latter is the sign of the exterior thing? The problem with this is that the parallelism cannot be pressed too far, for, from a semantic point of view, these two relations are quite different from one other. The truth of a mental proposition, for example, depends, in general, on the way in which the things it represents are disposed in reality, but it would be absurd to propose that the truth of a spoken proposition depends on the way the mental concepts corresponding to it are disposed in the mind. It would follow that an oral enunciation would only need to be sincere to be true (wouldn’t that be convenient!). If the semantic analysis of exterior language is to furnish the ideal model for the analysis of interior thought, it will be more fruitful—as William of Ockham saw—to make the concept-thing relation parallel to the word-thing relation rather than to the word-concept relation and to posit, consequently, that concepts and things are both signs of exterior things.

The two theses—that concepts are signs and that words signify things themselves—thus go together in the theorization of interior language. In this chapter, I will first describe how the idea that concepts could be seen as signs was introduced in the course of the thirteenth century. I will then examine, against the background of this controversy about signification to which Duns Scotus alluded, the manner in which the two theses in question were joined

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