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One of the predominant focuses of medieval philosophers was on Aristotle’s Categories, which was Aristotle’s ideas on the things that can either be subjects or predicates in our language and raised the ontological questions of what really exists. In the 14th century, a theologian at Oxford presented his own commentary and idea of what to include within our ontology, as he understood it from Aristotle. This theologian, William Ockham, was one of the founders of the nominalism movement, Jean Buridan being the other founder. These two philosophers held fairly similar theories of nominalism; however, Ockham’s ontology only consisted of substances and qualities, while Buridan added both quantity and motion to his ontology. In analyzing the sentence of “Socrates is shorter than Plato but both are human” in regards to its truth values, as well as ontological commitments, I will apply Ockham’s ontology, rather than that of Buridan.
Within his Summa Theologica, Ockham develops his ontology and begins by introducing a theory of language. The theory of language that he presents has three different kinds of terms: written, spoken and mental. Of these, the spoken terms signify the same things as the written ones, and the mental terms, which he classifies as intentions of the soul, signify the same things as their corresponding spoken terms. Ultimately, the mental terms form a mental language that carries the same structure for all humans, regardless of their spoken language. These various terms signify things that really exist in the world, for example the term ‘Socrates’ is an utterance that signifies the mental concept of the particular Socrates. These mental concepts are natural signs, which give a conventional relationship between the term and the subject they signify. However, this does not imply that universal terms such as ‘animal’ and ‘man’ signify a really existing thing of ‘animal’ or ‘man;’ rather, they signify many things, as the term man simply signifies all particular men. Thus the term man is related to the mental sign of what a man is and when encountering things that are similar to that mental concept, it may be signified by the term man.
Within his Summa Theologica, Ockham develops his ontology and begins by introducing a theory of language. The theory of language that he presents has three different kinds of terms: written, spoken and mental. Of these, the spoken terms signify the same things as the written ones, and the mental terms, which he classifies as intentions of the soul, signify the same things as their corresponding spoken terms. Ultimately, the mental terms form a mental language that carries the same structure for all humans, regardless of their spoken language. These various terms signify things that really exist in the world, for example the term ‘Socrates’ is an utterance that signifies the mental concept of the particular Socrates. These mental concepts are natural signs, which give a conventional relationship between the term and the subject they signify. However, this does not imply that universal terms such as ‘animal’ and ‘man’ signify a really existing thing of ‘animal’ or ‘man;’ rather, they signify many things, as the term man simply signifies all particular men. Thus the term man is related to the mental sign of what a man is and when encountering things that are similar to that mental concept, it may be signified by the term man.
