Bacon subverts, then, once and for all the semiotic triangle implicitly formulated since Plato, according to which the relationship between words and referents is mediated by the idea, the concept, or the definition. At this juncture, the left-hand side of the triangle (the relationship, that is, between words and concepts) is reduced to a merely symptomatic phenomenon (see Figure 9.6).
Figure 9.6
In Chapter 4, on the barking of the dog, we raised the question of whether Bacon had relied on Boethius’s translation of De interpretatione 16a, in which both symbolon and semeion were translated into Latin with the same word, nota, or whether he might not have gone back to the original, concluding from it that words are first and foremost in an exclusively symptomatic relationship with the passions of the soul. Accordingly, he interprets (DS V, 166) the passage in Aristotle from his own point of view: words are essentially in a symptomatic relation with species, and at most they can signify them only vicariously (secunda impositio), while the only real relation of signification is that between words and referents. He disregards the fact that, for Aristotle, words were, so to speak, symptoms of the species with reference to a temporal sequence, but that in any case they signified the species, to the point that we can only understand things named through the mediation of species already known.
For Aristotle, and in general for the medieval tradition prior to Bacon, extension was a function of intension, and in order to ascertain whether something was in fact the case, one had first to understand the meaning of the statement. For Bacon, on the other hand, the meaning of the statement is the fact of which the referent is the case.
What is of most interest to Bacon is the extensional aspect of the entire question, and this is why the relationship of words to what is the case looms so large in his treatise, while the relationship of words and their meaning becomes at best a subspecies of the referential relationship.
We can thus understand why, in the context of his terminology, significatio undergoes a radical transformation from the meaning it had had until now. Before Bacon, nominantur singularia sed universalia significantur, but with Bacon and after him significantur singularia, or at least significantur res (though a res may be a class, a sentiment, an idea, or a species).
9.9. Duns Scotus and the Modistae
Duns Scotus and the Modistae represent a sort of highly ambiguous fringe between the extensional and intensional positions. In the Modistae we encounter a tortured dialectic between modi significandi and modi essendi. Lambertini (1984) has demonstrated how this point continues for the most part to remain ambiguous, not only in the original texts, but also in the context of modern and contemporary interpretations (see also Marmo 1994).
In the works of Duns Scotus too, we come across contradictory statements. In support of the extensionalist point of view, we find: “verbum autem exterius est signum rei et non intellectionis” (Ordinatio I, 27), while on the other hand, in support of the intensionalist position, we find “significare est alicuius intellectum constituere” (Quaestiones in Perihermeneias II, 541a). There are, however, passages that seem to espouse a compromise solution, opposed to be sure to that of Bacon, according to which, though the thing may be subject to transmutation, this is no reason for the vox that signifies it to change, because the thing is not signified insofar as it exists, but insofar as it is understood to be an intelligible species (Quaestiones in Perihermeneias III, 545 et seq.).
Thus there are scholars who would place Scotus among the extensionalists. Nuchelmans (1973: 196), for instance, referring to the commentary on the sentences (Opus Oxoniense I, 27, 3, 19), declares: “Duns Scotus already affirmed that what is signified by the vocal utterance is a thing rather than a concept.” For others, such as Heidegger (1915),11 Scotus is very close to a phenomenological view of meaning as a mental object. And finally, there are still others, like Boehner (1958: 219), who have no qualms about confessing their ongoing perplexity.12
9.10. Ockham
There has been considerable discussion as to whether Ockham’s extensionalist theory is really as straightforward and explicit as might appear at first sight. If we consider in fact the four meanings of significare proposed by Ockham (Summa logicae I, 33), only the first has an unmistakable extensional sense. Only in this first meaning in fact do the terms lose their ability to signify when the object they stand for does not exist.
That said, even though we cannot be completely certain that Ockham used significari and denotari (invariably in the passive form) exclusively in the extensional sense,13 nevertheless in many passages he did use the two terms with this meaning.
What happens with Ockham—and had already happened with Bacon—is that the semiotic triangle is turned completely on its head once and for all. Words are not connected first and foremost with concepts and then, thanks to our intellectual mediation, to things: they are imposed directly on things and on states of affairs; and, in the same way, concepts too refer directly to things.
At this point, the semiotic triangle would look like Figure 9.7: there is a direct relation between concepts and things, given that concepts are the natural signs that signify things, and there is a direct relation between words and the things on which they impose a name, while he relation between words and concepts is completely neglected (see Boehner 1958: 221 and Tabarroni 1984).
Figure 9.7
Ockham is familiar with the Boethius’s dictum according to which “voces significant conceptus,” but in his opinion it is to be understood in the sense that “voces sunt signa secundario significantia illa quae per passiones animae primario importantur,” where it is clear that illa refers to the things, not the concepts. Words signify the same things signified by concepts, but they do not signify concepts (Summa logicae I, 1). In addition, there exists a rather disconcerting text in which Ockham, taking issue with the notion of an intelligible species, equates it with an image that cannot be more than a sign permitting us to remember something that we have already encountered as an individual entity: what is represented must be in some way already known, otherwise the representing image could never help us recognize the represented object. For instance a statue of Hercules would not help me recognize the real Hercules if I had never seen Hercules before; and I could not tell whether the statue looked like Hercules or not.14
This text assumes (as an issue on which there exists general agreement) the fact that we are not able to imagine, on the basis of an icon, something previously unknown to us. This would seem to be at odds with our actual experience (take, for example, the case of the identikit photo), given the fact that people use paintings or drawings to represent the characteristics of persons, animals, or things they have never seen. Ockham’s position could be interpreted in terms of cultural history as an example of aesthetic relativism: although he lived in the fourteenth century, Ockham was familiar for the most part with Romanesque and Early Gothic iconography, in which statues did not represent individuals in a realistic way, but universal types. When we view the portal of the Moissac cathedral or of Chartres, we have no trouble recognizing the Saint, the Prophet or the Human Being, but certainly not a unique individual. Ockham was unacquainted with the realism of Roman sculpture or the portrait tradition of later centuries.
There is nonetheless an epistemological explanation to account for such an embarrassing affirmation. If the concept is the only sign of individual things, and if its material expression (word or image) is merely a symptom of the inner image, then, without a prior notitia intuitiva of an object, the material expression cannot signify anything at all. Words and images cannot create or implant something in the mind of the addressee (as could occur in Augustine’s semiotics), unless there already exists in that mind the only possible sign of experienced reality, namely, its mental sign. In the absence of that sign, the external expression ends up being the symptom of an empty thought. The subversion of the semiotic triangle, which for Bacon was the end point of a protracted debate, for Ockham is an inescapable point of departure.
There are convincing demonstrations of the fact that Ockham also used significare in the intensional sense—we refer the reader to Boehner (1958) and Marmo (1984) for all of those cases in which propositions maintain their meaning regardless of whether they are true or false. We are not concerned here, however, with Ockham’s semiotics, but with his semiotic terminology. He clearly uses supponere in the extensional sense, inasmuch as suppositio exists “quando terminus stat in propositione pro aliquo” (Summa logicae I, 62). It is, however, equally evident that on more than one occasion Ockham uses significare (in the first meaning of the term) and supponere interchangeably: “aliquid significare, vel supponere vel stare pro aliquo” (Summa logicae I, 4; see also Pinborg 1972: 5).
It is, however, in the context of his discussion of propositions and suppositions that Ockham uses the term denotari. Consider, for example: “terminus supponit pro illo, de quo vel de pronomine demonstrare ipsum, per propositionem denotatur praedicatum praedicari, su supponens sit subiectum” (Summa logicae I, 62). If the term is the subject of a proposition, then the thing the term stands for (supponit) is the one of which the proposition
