Ockham on Mental

®
John Trentman

Mind, New Series, Vol. 79, No. 316. (Oct., 1970), pp. 586-590.

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 OCKHAM ON MENTAL

OOKHAM thought it possible to distinguish spoken and written

language from what he called mental language. Further, he thought
mental language is really of prior importance to spoken or written
language, and its structure is, in fact, the proper subject for the logic-
ian to study. By mental language Ockham meant simply a set of
mental acts, or more properl:y, a set of capacities for pedorming
mental acts (passiones or intentiones anim.ae). These acts, according
to Ockham, are natural signs of things (naturaliter significans);
meaning or signification is a relation that, strictly speaking, obtains
between mental acts and things, and in some way not further expli-
cated (except through analogies like smoke as a 8ign of fire) there is
some natural appropriateness about this relation. These capacities
can also be shared by all rational beings so that speakers of different
languages have something in common although the particular
marks or sounds they make to express these capacities differ,
being instituted by convention {secundum voluntariam institutionem).l
The idea of a mental language and its contrast with written or
spoken language is, of course, very old. Its classic discussion
is to be found in Aristotle, De Inte.rpretatione, I (16a). Ockham,
however, and here he largely follows Scotus,~ modifies the traditional
Aristotelian picture somewhat. For Aristotle, mental words are
signs for things; written and spoken words are signs for mental
words. Ockham tightens the analogy between mental and written
or spoken language and, in the process, changes the relation between
them. For Ockham, spoken and written languages do not mean
items in Mental. Rather, spoken, written, and mental words refer
alike to things; spoken or written words refer to what the mental act
intends and are the normal expression of the mental act. Ockham
carulOt go quite so far as to maintain that the mental act cannot exist
independently of some public expression in spoken or written language,
but he sees this as a problem that requires discussion. 3 Nevertheless,
in ordinary experience spoken and written languages are indicators of
mental acts, and the analogy is so close that one can speak of the gram-
matical structure that characterizes mental acts. A primary job of
the logician is investigating what this structure must be and comparing
and contrasting it with the grammars of spoken and written language.
The closeness of Ockham's analogy between mental language and
spoken or written language bothers Professor P. T. Geach, and he
devotes some pages in his Mental Acts to the task of Clismissing
Ockham's doctrine of mental language as far fetched and dangerous. 4
1 Summa wliUl! logic-1M, I, c. i.
2 See Scotll8. Ovm.. I, d. 27, q. 3, n. 19; cf. P. Boehner, CollAded Articles on
Ockham., ed. E. M. Buyta.ert (St. Bonaventure, N.Y., 1958), p. 219.
) OJ. his concern with the language of angels, discussed below p. 590.
4 This may be becall8e oCthe strilring similarities between Ockb.&m's view of
m.enta.! 'l'lts and his own, althougb there seems not to be any independent
ItClmowledgemen,t of them. in hia book. See especially his doctrine of concepts,
pp. II if,
586
 OCKHAM ON MENTAL 587
It is worthwhile setting out some of Geach's criticism in detail. In
support of his belief that Ockham carries the analogy of thought to
language too far, he writes :
Ockham's criterion for transferring Latin grammatical terms to Menml
was very simple-minded. Noutl8 of different declensiollB, or verbs of
different conjugations may be synonyms, and then presumably
correspond to the same Mental noun or verb; so there is no reason to
ascribe differences of declension or conjugation to Mental words.
Without being able to say just how far the analogy of inner language
can be carried, I think men of good sense would see immediately that
Ockham carries it much too far. He merely transfers features of Latin
grammar to Mental, and then regards this as explaining why such
features occur in Latin-they are needed there if what we say inwardly
in Mental is to be outwardly got across to others in Latin. But clearly
nothing is explained at alL Presumably Ockham's reasons for think-
ing that the supposed grammar of Mental had explanatory force were
that Mental is a natural ltnd universal language, and that Mental
words, Wllike Latin words, are immaterial entities. 1
I do not think Ockham's doctrine is completely adequate. In
partiCUlar I should not wish to defend the view of meaning and
corollaries about predication that underlie it. These were soundly
refuted by philosophers like Walter Burleigh and Vincent Ferrer in
the fourteenth century. I do wish to argue that Geach's criticism
distorts Ockham's doctrine on Mental and that since it, therefore,
largely misses the point, the survival of the doctrine is of philosophi-
cal interest for its own sake and is important fO!' understanding
Ockham's philosophic method.
n
In summary Geach argues; (1) Ockham's (only criterion for
maintaining the need of particular grammatical distinctions in
Mental is simple-minded. It is just a matter of noting synonymy
and rejecting as candidates for mental distinctions Latin distinctions
between synonyms. (2) Ockham attempts to explain the existence
of Latin grammatical distinctions by appealing to comparable
distinctioDl< in Mental. But since he got them into Mental simply by
tramferring them from Latin, this explanation is circular. (3)
Ockham perhaps does not see this circularity because he presumably
supposes that Mental is not only universal and natural but also
immaterial, and he further imagines without any good reasons that
spiritual things are" intrinaically intelligible" (103).
(1) is simply wrong, and by seeing how it is wrong, one can see what
Ockham wanted to do with Mental and, hence, see why the rest of
Geach's criticism is largely gratuitous. Geach does not indicate
which texts might support his citation of synonymy as Ockham's
criterion. In those places where Ockham does discuss the differences
between the grammatical structure of Latin and that of Mental, he
mentions synonymy, not as a criterion for identifying differences, but
rather in hi~ discussion of the consequences of the criterion he has
already given. The same criterion is given both in the QuodlilMta
1 P~ter Geach, Meni.a.l Ads (London, 1957), p. 102,
 588 J, TRENTMAN:

Sepf.€m (Strassbonrg, 1491, V, q.viii) and in the Summa Logicae (I,

c.iii). Mental must have a gramllllttical structure that admits those
and only those distinctions which are necessary for the signification of
things according to some necessity of meaning or expression (... ad
significandum res propter necessitatem signijic.ationis ve.l (lxpressionis).
And he adds immediately by way of explication that the propositional
structure of spoken language that requires a mental counterpi!-rt must
be all that is required for distinguishing propositions true about the
world from false ones. 1 Other grammatical distinctiollit in spoken
language llllty be necessary for stylistic reasons (propter arnatum
sermonis et congruUatem), but since they are not essential for framing
true descriptive propositions, they need not have counterparts in
Mental. The criterion, then, is indi8pensability for description, and
it is applied by asking about any grammatical distinction whether its
use makes a difference in the truth values of propositions. From the
statement of this criterion Ockham moves to a discussion of its con~
sequences, one of which is that the existence of synonyms seems not
to mark any distinction of the requisite kind so that in principle
synonymous expressions can be regarded as reducible to a common
mental equivalent. On the basis of this consideration he regards
participles and the di~tinction between ab~tract and concrete nouns
as inessential for Mental. And, interestingly for the question of
how Ockham's theory of suppositio compares with modern qualifica-
tion theory, he doubts whether pronouns are needed in Meutal
(Summa Logiooe I, c. iii).
Now, what is the point of all this? I think Ockham's Mental
can in many ways be compared to the now, I suppose, slightly old-
fashioned ideal languages of twentieth-century philosophers. In
distinguishing Mental from Latin or any spoken language, Ockham
asks us to consider what would have to be the grammatical structure
of a language that was ideal for one purpose-for giving a true
description of things. It would not, of course, be ideal for all
purposes. It would not be ideal for ordinary conversation. For
that we need congruity and verbal ornament. But just as verbal
ornament gives rise to synonymy it also gives rise to equivocation,
and neither can be usefully purged from a language suitable for
conversation. NE'ither, however, serves any purpose in an ideal
language of the sort envisaged. Indeed, the distinction between
equivocal and univocal expressions has no point in Mental by the
very nature of the case. (Intentio animae vel conceptus non est
aequivocus nee uniooous proprie loquendo. Summa Logiooe, I, c.
xiii). Fw:thermore, from Ockham, qua logician, we get only a
schema for Mental; he is only interested in its structure, the sorts of
grammatical distinctions it needs. It is not for the logician, pursuing
his second-order subject, to :fill in the vocabulary of Mental. But
1 Sic partM propositionis mentalis cOl"resporuie1i.tes vocibus sunt distiutae ad
jMie1!4utrl, di,stin,c./4s propo8itwnM veras vel.falsM. Quodlib~ta (Str&1!sbQurg) loc,
~il,.
 OCKHAM ON MENTAL 589
Mental i~ for Ockham (as Geach recognizes) the study proper to the
logician. It is precisely the structure of such an ideal language that
must concern him. To the extent that natural languages do the
business of such a language the logician can attend to their structures,
but Greek-speaking logicians and Latin-speaking logicians study the
same subject, not two different ones. They share the same capacities
for making true judgments, i.e. Mental, and their business in the
strict sense is to study the logical form of that which they share. In
this way the study of logic is not tied to the grammatical peculiarities
of any given natural language but trauscends these idiosyncrasies to
deal with the forms that are necessary for any true description of the
world, and these forms are the grammatical structures of MentaL 1 It
is thus that the logician in the medieval slogan teaches men to speak
truly (vere loqui).
Ockham's real criterion, then, for admitting grammatical distinc-
tions into Mental amounw to asking whether the distinctions in
question would be necessary in an ideal language-ideal for a COUl-
plete, true description of the world. Whether one sees much hope
in this way of proceeding or not, this criterion should hardly be
called simple-minded. But since Geach apparently misses Ockham's
real criterion, it is not surprising that he miMes the point of what
Ockham was doing with M@tltland that, consequently, his criticism
misses the mark. It should be clear that Ockham simply has no
concern to explain why certain grammatical features occur in Latin ;
his concern is with the grammar of an ideal language, whether ex-
pressed in Latin, Greek, or whatever. He has no interest in explain-
ing Latin grammar for its own sake so he can hardly be accused of
explaining it by invoking itself. No such nonsense can be found in
Ockham.
In fact, Ockham would agree entirely with Geach's remark, " And
what carries significance in a language is its structure, not its medium
-the structure that can be transferred from spoken to written
language and to Morse code", and the fact of this agreement makes
it difficult to know what to make of Geach's claim in his immediately
following clause, " but Ockham takes for granted the grammatical
structure of Latin, and supposes that Mental, unlike Latin, is intrin-
sically intelligible, simply because its medium is not material but
spiritual" (103). Since, as I have argued, the structure is what is of
importance to Ockham, the medium is on his explicit admission of no
importance, and he, far from taking the grammar of Latin for
granted, constantly subjects it to comparison with an ideal grammar;
there is no good reason for supposing that he would find a " spiritual "
Latin intrinsically intelligible. The spirituality of Ockham's Mental
IOckham refers with approval to St. Augustine, De Tr;nitate XV, to the
effect that Mental must be distinguished from all natural languages. Contra.ry
to the impression one gets from Gea.eh, La.tin has no preferrlld status. (Nor,
doubtless, WMl it the only language Ockha.m knew.) On this a.nd other related
ma.tters, cJ. Loon Baudry, Lex;que philosophUJue de GuUlaUtM d'OddUIm (Paris,
1958), pp. 289·290.
590 J. TRENTMAN: OAKHAM ON MENTAL

is, of course, not much more mysterious than the spirituality of

Geach's mental acts since they (largely) come to the 8ame thing-
capacities for making judgments; but the fact that Oakham did not
find a spiritual language intrinsically intelligible by virtue of its
spirituality is conclusively demonstrated by the very existence of his
discussion of angelic language. Not only did Oakham evidently not
believe that the ~pirituality o( a medium COnveys intrinsic'intelli-
gibility, there is some reason for believing that Oakham was worried
in a very different way about the closeness of his analogy between
thought and language. If mental acts are so closely tied up with
the idea of a language as they seem to be in Ockham's views, how
can an incorporeal being, incapable of spoken or written language,
have any language, i.e. any thought, at a1l1 Ockham decides, of
course, that angels as in('()rporeal beings can think because they can
use mentall.a.nguage, and thinking is using mental language (mental-
iter loqui),1 but he thinks it important to establish this point and to
explicate it. If Geach were right, there would be no reason for
Ockham to bother. Simply citing the medium would do. If a
spiritual language were intrin.sically intelligible jUJlt because it is
spiritual, there would be no reason for Ockham to explain the
existence of angelic language.
Menta.l iB of key importance to Ockham, and miaunderstandings of
Ockham's views about both language and mental acts can be:;t be
countered by understanding his use of it. From such an under-
standing, however, one could not possibly conclude, as Geach does,
by applauding Ockham's inquiries into the logical syntax of Latin
which are undisturbed by the" futilities JJ of his reflections about
Mental (103). To do Geach justice, however, misunderstandings of
Ockham's use of the mental language idea are fairly widespread.
Indeed, it has even been cl.a.imed recently that Ockham was a kind
of early-day "ordinary-language" philosopher who wanted to
oppoae the use of formal tools in philosophy with attention to
" ordinary" Latin, with great detriment to his understanding of
logical subtleties. 2 But clearly if one takes his doctrine of Mental
and its importance for the logician seriously, as he meant it to be
taken, it should be obvious that quite the opposite is the case. Most
of his philosophizing, including indeed his celebrated diSCll8sion of
universals, is really the result of a kind of ideal-language philosophy,
consisting of inquiries into what must be the logic of an ideal language
-Mental. If a razor sometimes cuts too close, it is at least a sharp
tool.

McGill University JOHN TRENTMAN

1 Relevant discWl1lions are'found in Question£S in IV Semen.tiaJ"'l.I,m Libro6,

II, q, 20 and Quodl,ibeta septem (Paris, 1488), I. q. 6; c./. Baudry, op. cit. p. 14-l.
• De2mond Paul Henry, The Logic a/Brant Anselm (O,dord, 1967), pp. 26 If,