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Ockham's Supposed Elimination of Connotative Terms and His Ontological Parsimony

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Martin Tweedale
Martin Tweedale
Affiliation:
University of Alberta
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Extract

Two of the best currently practising scholars of Ockham, Marilyn Adams and Paul Spade, seem to have accepted a reading of Ockham's ontological program which, although it contains much that is uncontroversially correct, attributes to Ockham a reductionist view that is on my interpretation of his works far too radical to be genuinely Ockham's. Their reading runs as follows. So far as entities go, Ockham accepts only particular substances and some particular qualities. Aristotle's categories, according to Ockham, are not 10 broad classes of radically different sorts of things, but rather are classes of non-complex terms arranged roughly according to the kinds of questions they can be used to answer. When we look at these terms we find that those in the category of substance and some in the category of quality are not definable by some longer expression synonymous with them but simply signify each of the members of a certain class of substances or qualities. These terms are said to be absolute. But other terms (some in the category of quality and all in the other categories, whether abstract or concrete) can either be replaced by a definition that is synonymous with the term defined or can be interpreted as making “exponible” the sentences in which they occur. These terms are all said to be connotative. It is in principle possible to reword all the sentences in which these connotative terms appear so that the only categorematic terms left are absolute terms from the categories of substance and quality.

Type
Articles
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 31 , Issue 3: Philosophy in the Fourteenth Century , Summer 1992 , pp. 431 - 444
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1992

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References

Notes

1 Adams, Marilyn M., William Ockham, 2 vols. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987)Google Scholar, and Spade, Paul V., “Ockham, Adams, and Connotation: A Critical Notice of Marilyn Adams, William Ockham,” in Philosophical Review, 99, 4 (October 1990): 593–612.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Adams, William Ockham, p. 289.

3 Ibid., p. 317.

4 I do not challenge the view, which Adams would agree with, that Ockham sees the doctrine of categories as a classification of terms. This is evident enough from Ockham's description of the view which he attributes to the antiqui and which he says is rationabilior, viz., that “the only items which exist in the categories are certain incomplexa out of which affirmations and negations, i.e. affirmative and negative propositions are fittingly built up” (see William of Ockham, Summa Logicae I, chap. 41, in William, of Ockham, Opera Philosophica I, edited by Boehner, Philotheus [St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, 1974], p. 115Google Scholar). I do, however, challenge Adams's claim that Ockham's thesis is that “Aristotle's ten categories classify not things but names,” (William Ockham, p. 287). A very quick reading of Summa Logicae I, chap. 41 and chaps. 57–62, shows that besides “names” (i.e., nomina) Ockham grants that in some categories we find verbs, adverbs and prepositional phrases.

5 Adams, William Ockham, p. 289.

6 I should note here that Adams's treatment of the way in which Ockham actually does away with the need for entities other than substances and qualities, e.g., quantities, relations and successive things, does not interpret him as doing away with facts about substances and qualities of a quantitative, relational or successive sort. This is correct, but it will not be found consistent with what she says about his being committed to eliminating all terms in the categories other than substance and quality.

7 Spade, “Ockham, Adams, and Connotation,” p. 601–2.

8 Ibid., p. 603.

9 Claude Panaccio, “Connotative Terms in Ockham's Mental Language,” Cahiers d'épistémologie, n˚ 9016, publication du Groupe de Recherche en Epistémologie Comparée, Directeur Robert Nadeau, Département de philosophie, Université du Québec à Montréal, 1990.

10 “Ockham, then, just like Bertrand Russell some six centuries later, explicitly denied that relational terms are all logically constructible from absolute ones. They are not therefore dispensable in mental language as he understands it” (ibid., p. 11).

11 Ibid., p. 15–16.

12 Ibid., p. 10–11.

13 Ibid.

14 William of Ockham, Summa Logica III, chap. 26 (Op. Ph. I, p. 690–91). My emphasis.

15 William of Ockham, Exposito in Librum Porphyrii de Praedicabilibus, chap. 2 (Op. Ph. II, p. 31–32, lines 16–21).

16 Ibid., p. 32, lines 32–41.

17 William of Ockham, Exposito super Libros Elenchorum II, chap. 16 (Op. Ph. III, p. 296, lines 27–30).

18 Panaccio, “Connotative Terms,” p. 16.

19 Ockham, Summa Logicae I, chap. 26 (Op. Ph. I, p. 88, lines 113–16).

20 William of Ockham, Quodlibet V, q. 19 (Opera Theologica IX, p. 554, lines 16–20).

21 Ockham, Summa Logicae I, chap. 3 (Op. Ph. I, p. 11).

22 Ibid., chap. 6, p. 19–21.

23 Ibid., chap. 45, p. 141.

24 Ibid., chap. 72, p. 222–25.

25 Ockham, Summa Logicae I, chap. 10 (Op. Phil. I, p. 35).

26 Ibid., chap. 26 (Op. Phil. I, p. 89).

27 Ibid., chap. 10, p. 36.

28 Ibid., chap. 41, p. 114.

29 Ibid.

30 Ockham, Summa Logicae I, chap. 26 (Op. Phil. I, p. 89).

31 William of Ockham, Summula Philosophiae Naturalis IV, chap. 10 (Op. Phil. VI, p. 365).

32 Ibid., chap. 2, p. 347.

33 In his Tractatus de Praedestinatione et de Praescientia Dei et de Futuris Contingentibus (Op. Phil. II).

34 Ibid., p. 507–8.

35 Ibid., p. 508.