Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

Logic and Theories of Meaning . . . 365
It can be briefly said to the question that the contention common to
many opinions, i.e. that ‘as something is understood, so it is also
named’, is false if this is understood precisely, because something can
be signified more distinctively than it is understood. 94
From this passage it is clear that, according to Scotus, naming and understanding
do not always correspond to each other. We can name an object without having
a precise understanding of it. What a name signifies is to a considerable extent
dependent upon the intention of the speaker. It does not mean that speaking
occurs without understanding, but a speaker may successfully refer to an object,
even if his understanding of this object is incorrect or vague.
With his theory of immediate signification of the thing Scotus was the first to
reject the parallelism between understanding and signifying, which makes the conclusion
justified that he made an original contribution in the history of semantics. 95
In fact, he can be seen to have found a way to account for the distinction between
meaning and reference, in the sense that meaning has to do with understanding
and reference with naming. Shortly after he died, philosophers like Ockham and
Buridan showed that supposition taken as a property of mental terms is a much
better tool to solve referential problems. 96
Concrete and abstract terms
In the previous paragraphs I have examined the various answers to the question
‘what does a name signify’?, where the names considered were concrete general
terms, like ‘man’ and ‘animal’. But in the late 13 th century many authors had a
particular interest in the semantic function of other terms, such as abstract essential
terms (for example ‘humanity’), and abstract accidental terms (for example
‘whiteness’). I shall discuss the headlines of the modistic approach to this subject
in the second part of this chapter when we speak about terms of second intention,
but here I shall pay attention to Scotus’ view. 97 Scotus’ rejection of the parallel
between signifying and understanding and the acceptance of signification as a
direct relation between word and thing could easily lead to a theory of strict correspondence
between language and reality, so that for example the concrete term
‘white’ and the abstract term ‘whiteness’ signify numerically different things. Scotus’
account of concrete and abstract terms shows that this can be avoided. In
short, his opinion is that the concrete term ‘white’ and the abstract term ‘whiteness’
signify the same white thing, but in different ways (modes of signifying). 98
94Duns Scotus, Ordinatio I, d. 22, q. un., n. 4. Cited from Pini [2001, p. 39] in his translation.
95Pini [2001, p. 51].
96Marmo [1983, pp. 170–4] shows that there are some affinities between Scotus’ terminology
and that of the Oxford tradition of the theory of supposition.
97For a thorough discussion of the modistic approach, see: Ebbesen [1988].
98Rep. Par. IV, d. 12, q.1, n. 10, In Praed., q. 8. Marmo [1983, n. 47], notices that Scotus’
definition of modi significandi is different from the Modists’s. For Scotus their only function is
the regulation of the well-formation (congruitas) of propositions. I can add that this use of modi
significandi is common even in the fourteenth century, e.g. in the work of John Buridan.