Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

Peter Abelard and His Contemporaries 91
former. Clearly, on Abelard’s account, traditional intuitions about the inherent
prestige of generality are challenged. Instead of generality’s being characteristic
of a higher order of being (the shared form), it is characteristic of a less complete
kind of representation.
Universal names, he says, “signify diverse things by nomination not by constituting
an understanding that arises (surgentem) fromthose but by
pertains (pertinentem) to those single things” [Abelard,
1919, p. 19 (7–9)]. A general understanding is not read off of things directly, but
is partially the product of human cognitive processing. Its ability to be useful lies
in its ability to pertain to things even while failing to be a copy of them point
for point. This ability to pertain in spite of that failing stems from the fact that
there is something about the things themselves that allows them to be partially
represented in the same way. There is, for example, something about Socrates and
Plato which allows them both to be represented by an image or figure or form of
humanity. What that is, of course, is their being in the same status. Obviously,
an account of abstraction like Abelard’s could easily evolve into a view about
the non-objectivity of general names, but he will have none of that. The status
is what makes objectivity possible. That is why, when Abelard asks whether a
word is called common “according to the common cause in which things agree
or according to the common understanding” [Abelard, 1919, p. 19 (17–20)], he
gives the nod to the former [Abelard, 1919, p. 24 (35–37)]. The common cause
in which things agree is the status. This common cause is the prior, factual basis
for applicability of general terms; the common understanding — the intellectus
— is the subsequent cognitive response to that fact which actually triggers the
production of that term. The intellectus explains how general terms are formed,
but the status explains how they are possible in the first place.
With this semantic account of general terms, a doctrine of shared forms no
longer belongs to the subject matter of logic. The true subject matter emerges:
logic is concerned not with relations of shared forms (man, animal) but with relations
between linguistic items (“man,” “animal”). But this conclusion must itself
be refined to avoid trivializing the discipline. It becomes important to understand
what exactly a word is. If a word is taken just as spoken, and as nothing but an
evanescent sound pattern, then this focus on words means that instead of being
about the perduring realities of shared forms, logic deals only with these transitory
and vanishing sounds. In the derisive phrasing of Anselm [Anselm, 1946, p. 9],
logic devolves into the study of mere flatus vocis, that is, into the study of what
is merely the breath of the word, its physical properties. The need to avoid this
result leads Abelard into one of his subtlest innovations: his distinction between
sermo and vox. Both can be translated as “word,” but the former encourages a
conception of the word as sound invested with meaning, while the latter does not.
The sermo compares to the vox, Abelard argues, as the finished statue compares
to the stone from which it is carved [Abelard, 1933, p. 522 (22–27)]. The two
are in one sense the same thing, because the statue is materially indistinguishable
from its stone. But in another sense the two are different because there is at least