Sem.

Jonathan DePadua Racelis Philosophy of Language and Culture

Philosophy IV Fr. Jayson Gaite

The Problem of Universals: Medieval Thought on Language

The theory of universals was used to address the issue of language in the medieval
era, and it was used to discuss the problem of language. A lot of philosophers maintained
that only the particulars existed and that the rest of the world, the universals, were a waste of
time and meaningless. The study of language by William of Ockham was more methodical,
comparing universals with specifics. Porphyry's Isagoge attracted Boethius' curiosity, and he
began to think about universals after translating it into Latin. Universals, according to
Boethius, are substances that may be expanded to encompass all members of the human
species, not as substances. We determine the extension and species of the notion from top to
bottom, and the intension and genus of the concept from bottom to top.

Throughout the figure, the ultimate genus is substance, the first and most basic form
of being, and the specifics are people like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Porphyry. The issue
of universals, according to Abelard, is a question of logic and epistemology. Nouns were
divided into three categories: general, proper, and expected. William of Ockham dealt with
terms and created two separate classifications concerning them in Sum of Logic Part 1 on
terms. The first categorization would be the initial step in our investigation of William's
linguistic talk. The most basic and fundamental kind of language is conceptual language.
Words that are written are susceptible to mental words that are subject to spoken words.
Man's knowledge, according to William of Ockham, is concerning individual entities,
especially visible objects. Simultaneously, man may use universals to conceive about
specific entities. In that it is a notion, universal differs from specific. In two approaches,
William looked at the notion of universals. A universal is a symbol of mental conceptions
rather than a single, specific material. On its own, the material cannot be a symbol, nor can it
exist in mind, speech, or writing. When it comes to genus and species, they don't exist in the
minds of the speakers. Name givers have traditionally constructed words that signify
universals. The subject phrase in a statement like "'Man being an animal' is a true
proposition" is a proposition in and of itself. Because they can neither be the subject nor the
predicate of a proposition, conjunctions, adverbs, interjections, and prepositions are not
Sem. Jonathan DePadua Racelis Philosophy of Language and Culture
Philosophy IV Fr. Jayson Gaite

included in the word title in the third meaning. The categorematic and syncategorematic
words were distinguished by Ockham.