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(7) From what has been said above, the careful [reader] can plainly infer that, although sometimes one proposition can be verified and another one falsified by a mere variation of the terms’ accidents (namely, case, number and comparison), but on account of the thing signified,11 nevertheless this never happens with gender and declension. For, even though you often have to consider gender in order to have well-formedness of an expression (for example, ‘Homo est albus’ is well-formed, and ‘Homo est alba’ is not wellformed’,12 and this comes about from a difference of gender alone), nevertheless, assuming well-formedness, it does not matter which gender or which declension the subject or predicate belongs to. But one certainly does have to consider which number or case the subject or predicate is in, in order to know whether the proposition is true or false. For ‘A man is an animal’ is true, and ‘A man is animals’ is false, and so on for other cases.

(8) Just as there are certain [grammatical] accidents proper to spoken and written names, and certain [others] common to [spoken and written names] and to mental names, one must say a similar thing about the accidents of verbs. The common ones are mood, number, tense, voice and person. This is clear with mood. For one mental expression corresponds to the spoken expression ‘Socrates reads’ and another one to ‘Would that Socrates read’. It is [also] clear with voice. For one mental expression corresponds to the spoken expression ‘Socrates loved’ and another one to ‘Socrates is loved’. Yet there are only three voices in the mind.13 For we do not find spoken deponents14 and common [verbs]15 on account of the needs of signification, since common verbs are equivalent to active ones and passive ones, and deponents [are equivalent] to middle ones and active ones.

(9) It is also clear with number. For distinct mental expressions correspond to ‘He reads’ [and] ‘They read’. The same thing is clear with tense. For distinct mental expressions correspond to ‘You read’ [and] ‘You have read’. The same thing is clear with person. For example, different [mental expressions] correspond to ‘He reads’ [and] ‘I read’.

(10) That we have to posit such mental names, verbs, adverbs, conjunctions and prepositions can be shown from the fact that to every spoken expression there corresponds a mental [expression] in the mind. Thus, just as the parts of the spoken proposition that are imposed16 because of the needs of signification are distinct, so [too] the corresponding parts of the mental proposition are distinct. For this reason, just as spoken names, verbs, adverbs, conjunctions and prepositions are necessary for different spoken propositions and expressions, so that it is impossible to express everything by means of names and verbs alone that can be expressed by means of them together with the other parts of speech, so too similar distinct parts are necessary for mental propositions.

(11) The accidents proper to instituted17 verbs are conjugation18 and inflection.19 Yet sometimes verbs in different conjugations can be synonymous, and similarly verbs of different inflections.

(12) From what has been said [above], the careful [reader] will easily recognize what he has to say, analogously, about the other parts of speech and their accidents.

(13) No one should be surprised that I say that some names and verbs are mental. Let him first read Boethius’s [Commentary] on the De in- terpretatione,20 and he will find it there. Thus, when Aristotle defines the name as well as the verb in terms of an utterance,21 he is taking ‘name’ and ‘verb’ more strictly there, namely, for the spoken name and verb.

Translation by Paul Vincent Spade, CC BY 4.0. Source: Indiana University ScholarWorks. Changes: format conversion only (PDF to Markdown; footnotes, italics and paragraph numbers kept; margin line numbers and page headers dropped).

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Footnotes

  1. That is, they are similar to one another, not to the division into spoken, written and conceived. ↩

  2. Of course, the argument might just as well go the other way. Why have mental verbs if participles could do just as well? ↩

  3. Ockham has in mind the use of pronouns as stand-ins for nouns. Why have the pronouns when the nouns would do just as well? Presumably this doubt does not apply to demonstrative pronouns (‘That is Socrates’), or to certain uses of relative pronouns. For example, in ‘Some man is knocking at the door, and he is shouting very loudly’, there seems to be no plausible way to do without the relative pronoun. ↩

  4. The notion of “grammatical accidents” will be made clear in the following lines. ↩

  5. “Declension” does not here mean “case.” We saw above that case is common to spoken, written and mental names. Here “declension” means, for example, belonging to the third declension rather than second. Since English lacks declensions, the point cannot be illustrated very well in translation. ↩

  6. That is, to concepts. ↩

  7. That is, comparative and superlative degrees. In Latin as in English, comparatives and superlatives are sometimes constructed by changing the form of the word — thus, ‘long/longer/longest’, ‘good/better/best’ — and sometimes by adding the distinct words ‘more’ or ‘most’ to the positive degree. Ockham’s point here is that if mental language contains analogues for ‘more’ and ‘most’, then it doesn’t need to have separate comparative and superlative forms for each adjective and adverb. ↩

  8. That is, spoken and written names. ↩

  9. I am not sure exactly what Ockham has in mind here. The term ‘quality’ sometimes refers to the mood of a verb, but that is treated separately below. Ockham’s editors (p. 13 n. 3) suggest the distinction between proper names and “appellative” or common names. But I hardly think Ockham would want to do without that distinction in mental language, or that there could be much doubt about it. ↩

  10. I know of no passage where Ockham does this. ↩

  11. ‘on account of the thing signified’. The apparatus in the edition (p. 13) does not show any textual funny business at this point. Nevertheless, I would be much happier if the phrase did not exist. The only sense I can make of it is that it is not the variation of grammatical accidents all by themselves that affects the truth value, but rather the semantic conse- quences of that variation. But, I must admit, if that is all Ockham meant here, he certainly picked an awkward way to say it. ↩

  12. I’m sorry, but the point cannot be made in English very well. The sentences (or at least the first one, which is well-formed) means ‘A man is white’. ‘Homo’ is a masculine noun, and so requires the masculine form of the adjective ‘albus’, not the feminine form ‘alba’. Note that, although ‘homo’ is masculine, it does not refer only, or even primarily, to the male of the species. Latin has a separate word ‘vir’ for the male. ↩

  13. In addition to the usual active and passive voice, Ockham is perhaps thinking of the Greek “middle” voice, which Latin does not have. (Nevertheless, how much Ockham knew about Greek is unclear.) The Greek middle voice is frequently (but by no means always) reflexive in meaning. ↩

  14. A deponent verb is a verb that is passive in form but active or reflexive (= middle, see n. 48 above) in meaning. Deponent verbs are not at all uncommon in Latin. ↩

  15. A common verb, as explained later in the sentence, is a verb that has the same grammatical forms for both the active and passive senses. I have no idea which verbs these would be. ↩

  16. See n. 21, above. ↩

  17. See n. 22 above. ↩

  18. That is, belonging to different conjugations. See n. 40 above. ↩

  19. ‘inflection’ = figura. I am not sure what the difference is between conjugation and inflection here. The distinctions among the various persons, numbers, tenses, etc., of the verb are all preserved in mental language, as Ockham has just said. ↩

  20. Boethius, In librum De interpretatione, ed. 2a, I, PL 64, cols. 405–414. ↩

  21. Aristotle, De interpretatione 2, 16a19–21: “A name is an utterance significative by convention, no part of which is separately significative.” Also, ibid. 3, 16b6–7: “Now a verb is what consignifies time, [no] part of which signifies anything externally.” I translate from the Boethian Latin version, L. Minio-Paluello, ed., Aristoteles Latinus II.1–2, (Bruges-Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1965). ↩

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