Furthermore, there are two contexts (I, III, 1, 1, pp. 112–113) in which what is designated is the relationship between a name and its corresponding definition, and the denotation is explicitly linked to the meaning (or sententia) of an expression.
Taking issue with those who maintained that the things upon which the vox or name has been imposed are directly signified by the vox itself, Abelard stresses the fact that names signify “ea sola quae in voce denotantur atque in sententia ipsius tenentur.” He then adds that words do not signify everything they can name, but what they designate by a definition. For example, Latin animal signifies a sensitive animal substance, and this is precisely what is denoted by (or in) the word (see Figure 9.4).
Figure 9.4
It is clear then that both designation and denotation continue to maintain a decidedly strong intensional sense and to refer to the relationship between an expression and its corresponding definitional content.
As for signification, it has nothing to do with the naming of things, since it continues to exist “nominatis rebus destructis” (“if the things named are destroyed”), making it possible to understand the meaning of nulla rosa est (Ingredientibus, Geyer ed., p. 309).
Abelard makes a further distinction between two specific meanings of signification that continue to be a source of perplexity even today. Spade (1982) has stressed the fact that for the Scholastics significatio is not the same as our “meaning”: a term significat what it succeeds in bringing to someone’s mind (and this is undoubtedly the sense intended by Augustine). In this way signification, unlike meaning, is a kind of causal relationship. Meaning (be it mental correlate, semantic content, intension, or any form of noematic, ideal, or cultural entity) is not represented in the Middle Ages—and throughout the entire Aristotelian tradition—by the term significatio but by sententia or definitio.
True, in the medieval tradition we find both significare in the sense of constituere intellectus, as well as the expression significare speciem (which seems more tied to a noncausal notion of signification), but this distinction seems to become clear only with Abelard: a word significat something to the mind causally, while the same word is correlated by way of designation and/or denotation with a meaning, that is, with a sententia or a definition.
Accordingly, we can say that what Abelard’s theory envisaged was not a semiotic triangle, but a sort of square according to which a vox: (i) significat intellectus, (ii) designat vel denotat sententiam vel definitionem, and (iii) nominat vel appellat res.
9.6. Thomas Aquinas
In his commentary on the De interpretatione, Thomas Aquinas, who remains faithful to Aristotle’s positions, after distinguishing the first operation of the intellect (perception) from the second (“scilicet de enunciatione affirmativa et negativa”), defines interpretatio as “vox significativa quae per se aliud significat, sive complexa sive incomplexa” (“significant vocal sound—whether complex or incomplex—which signifies something by itself”) (Proemium 2). But immediately afterward he makes it clear that nouns and verbs are merely “principles” of interpretation, which is to be identified exclusively with the oratio, that is, with all those propositions “in qua verum et falsum inveniuntur.”
At this point he uses significare for the nouns and verbs (I, ii, 14), as well as for those voces that signify naturally, such as the moaning of the sick and the noises made by animals; but, as far as human voices are concerned, they do not immediately signify the things themselves but the general concepts, and only “eis mediantibus” (through them) do they refer to singularia (I, 2, 15).
He later states that the name signifies its definition (I, ii, 20). True, when Thomas speaks of composition and division, that is, of affirmation and negation, he says the former “significat … coniunctionem,” while the latter “significat … rerum separationem” (I, iii, 26), but it is clear that even here (where language refers to what is or is not the case) what is signified is an operation of the intellect. It is only the intellect, whose operations are signified, that may be defined as true or false with respect to the actual state of things: “intellectus dicitur verum secundum quod conformatur rei” (I, iii, 28). An expression can be neither true nor false, it is merely the sign that significat a true or false operation of the intellect.5
The verb denotare, in all of its various forms, occurs 105 times in the Thomistic lexicon (to which we may add two occurrences of the noun denotatio), but it appears that Thomas never used it in the strong extensional sense, in other words, he never used it to say that a given proposition denotes a state of affairs, or that a given term denotes a given thing.6
It is occasionally used with the sense of “to signify metaphorically or symbolically that …” See, for instance, the commentary In Job 10, where it is stated that the roaring of the lion stands for Job (“in denotatione Job rugitus leonis”). There is an ambiguous passage in III Sent. 7, 3, 2, which says: “Similiter est falsa: ‘Filius Dei est praedestinatus,’ cum non ponatur aliquid respectu cujus possit antecessio denotari.” But it could be argued that what Thomas is talking about in this case is the mental operation that leads to the understanding of a temporal sequence.
9.7. Suppositio
Authors like Boethius, Abelard, or Thomas Aquinas, more concerned with the problem of signification than with that of denomination, were primarily interested in the psychological (today we would say “cognitive”) aspects of language. Certain of our contemporary scholars, however, committed to the rediscovery of the first medieval manifestations of a modern truth-conditional semantics, find the whole question of signification to be a very embarrassing problem, upsetting as it does the purity of the extensional approach, firmly established apparently by the theory of suppositio.7
In its most mature formulation, supposition is the role a term, once inserted into a proposition, assumes so as to refer to the extralinguistic context. The road, however, that leads from the first vague notions of suppositum to the more elaborate theories like that of Ockham is long and winding. De Rijk (1962–1967, 1982, n. 16) has traced the path by which, in discussing the relationship between a term and the thing to which it refers, the notion of signification (understood as the relationship between words and concepts, or species, or universals, or definitions) becomes ever less important.
We may observe how, for instance (De Rijk 1982: 161 et seq.), the disciples of Priscian spoke of names as signifying a substance at the same time as a quality (a formula in which the latter no doubt represented the universal nature of the thing and the former the individual thing), so that as early as the twelfth century we find the verb supponere as the equivalent of significare substantiam, in other words, signifying the individual thing. It is true, however, that authors like William of Conches insist that names do not signify either substance or quality or a thing’s actual existence, but only its universal nature, and that during the twelfth century the distinction is maintained between signification (of concepts and species) and denomination (the denotation of concrete individual things—see, for example, the Ars Meliduna).
It is, however, clear how, little by little, in the fields of logic and grammar, the cognitive is superseded by the extensional approach, and how “in successive phases, the real meaning of a term became the focus of general interest, with the consequence that reference and denotation became far more important than the over-abstract notion of signification. What a term signifies first and foremost is the concrete object to which it can correctly be applied” (De Rijk 1982: 167).
Notwithstanding this development, this novel point of view is not usually expressed using terms such as denotatio, whose semantic domain remains ill-defined.8 Peter of Spain, for example, uses denotari in at least one passage (Tractatus VII, 68), in which he states that, in the expression sedentem possibile est ambulare (“to someone seated ambulating is possible”), what is denoted is not the concomitance between being seated and ambulating, but that between being seated and having the possibility (potentia) to ambulate. Once again, it is difficult to say whether denotare has an intensional or extensional function. Furthermore, Peter considers significare in an extremely broad sense, given that “significatio termini, prout hic sumitur, est rei per vocem secundum placitum representatio” (Tractatus VI, 2), and it is impossible to decide whether this res is to be considered as an individual or a universal (De Rijk 1982: 169).
On the other hand, Peter does introduce an honest-to-goodness extensional theory simply by developing a notion of suppositio distinct from that of signification (see also Ponzio 1983, who has an interesting reference to Peirce, CP 5.320): what Peter says in fact is that suppositio and significatio are different in that the latter is concerned with the imposition of a vox to signify something, while the former is the meaning of the same term (which already in and of itself and in the first instance signifies that given thing) inasmuch as it stands for something particular.9
In Peter’s theory, however, there is a difference between standing extensionally for a class and standing extensionally for an individual. What we have in the first case is a natural supposition (suppositio naturalis), and in the second an accidental supposition (ibid., 4). Along the same lines, Peter distinguishes between suppositio and appellatio: “differt autem appellatio a suppositione et a significatione, quia appellatio est tantum de re existente, sed significatio et