(1) A description is a brief discourse made up of accidents and properties. Hence Damascene says in his Logic, Ch. 141: “A description is made up of accidents, that is of properties and accidents. For example, ‘Man is risible, walks upright, [and] has broad nails’. For all these [features] are accidental. Thus, it is also called a “description”2 as foreshadowing, and not making plain the substantial existence of the subject but the consequences [of it].”
(2) From the words of this authority it is evidently given to be understood that nothing should occur in a description that is predicated in quid or per se in the first mode of the described. In this respect a description differs from a definition.
(3) Second, from the cited authority it follows that ‘accident’ is [here] taken not only for some thing inhering in another but [also] for [what is] contingently predicable of another, as was said above.3 For since, according to the Doctor mentioned, a description is made up of accidents of the subject, and a description is not made up [of anything] but [what are] predicable of the subject, one has to call “accidents” these [items] predicable of the described, which can only be concepts or utterances or inscriptions.
(4) It follows, third, from the aforesaid that a description and the described are not always convertible. For since accidents are contingently predicated of something, the described [term] can be predicated of something even though the description is not predicated of it. Nevertheless, this does not happen except because of an imperfection of what the described [term] is predicated of. Thus man can be described as follows: “Man is a biped having two hands”, adding to it some other [items] that can belong only to man. When this is done, the description can be denied of someone lacking hands, [and] yet the described [term] is predicated of him. But this is because of the fact that the individual [man] is not imperfect.
(5) Nevertheless, it can be said that “description” can be taken in two senses, namely: (a) broadly. And this Doctor is talking in this sense about description. Or it can be taken (b) strictly. And in this sense it is not made up of accidents but of properties. And in that sense a description and the described are always converted.
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
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John Damascene, Dialectica, in Jacques-Paul Migne, ed. Patrologiae cursus completus … series graeca, 162 vols., Paris: J.-P. Migne, 1857–1866. vol. 94, col. 554B (this series is conventionally referred to as the Patrologia graeca, and referred to simply as the “PG” — I will do so below); Robert Grosseteste’s Latin version, Ch. 14, (Owen A. Colligan, ed., St. Bonaventure, NY: The Franciscan Institute, 1953), p. 16. ↩
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That is, a “describing.” ↩
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The distinction Ockham is drawing here is between the metaphysical and the logical senses of ‘accident’. See Summa logicae, I, 25.2–8, 15–17, 27–30, 34–37: “Philosophers define accident as follows: ‘An accident is what is present and absent without corruption of the subject’. To make this definition plain, one has to know that ‘accident’ can be taken in four senses. In one sense an accident is said [to be] some thing really inhering in a substance, in the way in which heat is really in fire and whiteness in a wall. And taking ‘accident’ in this sense, the stated definition is made true. … In another sense everything [x] is called an accident that can be contingently predicated of something [y] in such a way that, keeping the truth of the proposition in which being is said of the subject [y] , [x] can be predicated and not predicated of [y]. … In the third sense an accident is said [to be] something predicable that is contingently predicated of something, and can be affirmed and denied in succession of the same thing either through a change in what is conveyed by the subject or though a change in something else. … Fourth, an accident is said [to be] something predicable that does not convey any absolute thing inhering in a substance, but can be contingently predicated of it, but only through a change in what is conveyed by the subject.” ↩