Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

LOGIC AND THEORIES OF MEANING IN
THE LATE 13 th AND EARLY 14 th CENTURY
INCLUDING THE MODISTAE
Ria van der Lecq
INTRODUCTION
The scope of this chapter is the period between 1270 and 1320, of which Gordon
Leff made the following observation:
“No phase of Scholasticism, certainly in terms of our present knowledge,
remains more confused than the events in the decades immediately
each side of the year 1300.” [Leff, 1976, p. 32]
Obviously, a considerable amount of research has been done since Leff wrote these
lines, but it is still not so easy to draw a clear picture of this period. At first sight,
the image of what happened just before and after the year 1300 looks more like
a battlefield of competing metaphysical theories than like an orderly development
of the ideas of earlier logicians. The contextual approach of logic seems to be
abandonned and the discussions are dominated by epistemological and ontological
questions. Nevertheless, as I hope to make clear, some of the 14 th century innovations
cannot be appreciated without the knowledge of the work of the late 13 th
and early 14 th century philosophers.
Late 13th and early 14 th century logic may be characterized by its interest
for grammatical and metalogical problems. Grammar and logic were two of the
traditional seven liberal arts, but the works of the logicians and grammarians in
this period reflect an interest in grammar and logic as sciences, rather than as
arts. There was a common opinion that every science has to have an immutable
object, but the texts show a considerable disagreement about the origin, status
and ontological foundation of this object in the science of logic.
In the debates about the meaning of words we see that referential problems were
solved in terms of signification rather than supposition. Beside ‘signification’ the
key notion was ‘imposition’. The basic function of language is to signify things,
and imposition is the way words acquire their meanings. This is supposed to
work as follows: a first impositor investigates things and their properties and then
decides which sound (vox) should be used to signify that object. When this sound
has been imponed to signify some thing, it becomes a sign and it has acquired