
Contents
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Concepts in Modern Philosophy Concepts in Modern Philosophy
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The Boethian and Augustinian Traditions The Boethian and Augustinian Traditions
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Mental Language Mental Language
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Concepts and Signification Concepts and Signification
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How Chatton Changed Ockham’s Mind: William Ockham and Walter Chatton on Objects and Acts of Judgment
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Concepts and Meaning in Medieval Philosophy
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Published:February 2015
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Abstract
Stephen Read surveys the relationships between the psychology and logic of mental representations comparing some medieval doctrines with the recently very influential approach of Jerry Fodor. Fodor identifies five “non-negotiable” constraints on any theory of concepts. These theses were all shared by the standard medieval theories of concepts. However, those theories were cognitivist, in contrast with Fodor’s: for medieval thinkers, concepts were mostly implicit but explicable definitions (rationes), a form of natural knowledge. The medieval theories were formed under two influences, from Aristotle by way of Boethius and from Augustine. The tension between them resulted in the Ockhamist notion of a natural language, concepts as signs. Thus, conventional signs, spoken and written, signify things in the world by the mediation of concepts that themselves form a language of thought, signifying those things naturally by their representational similarity (to be distinguished from qualitative similarity, like the similarity of the shapes of two eggs). Indeed, later thinkers realized that everything signifies itself and what is like it naturally in a broad sense by means of the concept of its natural likeness.
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