Focusing on Language

The philosophic use of languages other than Greek implied above all problems connected to translation, a problem which Cicero was already aware of in the classical period. At the beginning of the Middle Ages, Boethius, besides creating the basic philosophic terminology used in the following centuries in the West, created the framework in which terms such as nature, personhood, time, and eternity, were discussed, and signaled the need to rethink the meaning of philosophic language in the changing context of philosophy. Starting with the debate on dialectics, the same need was felt with respect to the questions whether, which, and how the terms referring to the ten Aristotelian categories (substance, accident, quantity, quality, relation, modality, status, habit, time and place), could be applied to God. Translating Porphyry, Boethius himself had brought to the fore in the West the problem of universals: do the terms indicating the genus or the species (‘animal’, ‘man’) refer to a reality of a level higher than those that refer to individuals (‘Peter’), or are they only linguistic signs void of any ontological reference? The answers to these questions determine the positions traditionally called ‘realism’ and ‘nominalism.’ But it was not only the question on universals, born inside the field of logic, that encouraged a rethinking of philosophical language: a comparison between Aristotelian logic and the grammatical structures of language became necessary both to the Latin writers and to those who wrote in Arabic, in fact it was a problem for Arabic writers first (but their studies in this field were not translated, as it is easy to understand, by 12th c. Latin translators). In the Christian world, the problem of a correspondence between words and reality was addressed by Anselm of Canterbury, while analyzing the problem of paronymy, namely the problem posed by those terms that indicate a substance by referring to a property of it. The example taken into consideration is the noun 'grammaticus' (the master of grammar), which has the meaning of a quality, namely the knowledge of grammar, but which refers to a substance, the man who knows grammar. The connotation of this term, namely its signifying content, is different from its denoted object: this was a semantic problem unknown to Aristotelian logic. In 12th c. logic and its later developments (modern logic or terminism), the interest for the way in which words can have different meanings according to its various propositional contexts, gave way to the distinction between meaning and ‘supposition’ (suppositio). A term can ‘stand for’ (supponere), or denote, different objects that have the same signifying content but different referents: for example the term ‘man’ can stand for (supponet) the individual Peter (‘I like this man’), or for the human species (‘man is mortal’), or for the grammatical term itself (‘man is a noun’). At the end of the Middle Ages, the debate on language, having refined itself more and more as time passed, became the primary tool for scientific doctrines. Analysis was not limited any more to the ways of signifying names only, but involved every part of speech, both those having their proper meaning (categorematic: nouns and verbs) and those that can acquire a meaning only inside a proposition (syncategorematic: prepositions, conjunctions, etc.). In the meantime the vernacular began to be used even in the composition of philosophic texts, with the writings of Dante in Italian and of Ramon Lull in Catalan during the 13th c., and then becoming even more common in the 14th and 15th c. To Dante we owe the first study on the developments of language, the De vulgari eloquentia.