Paradoxes of Signification
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Ian Rumfitt has recently drawn our attention to a couple of paradoxes of signification, claiming that although Thomas Bradwardine’s “multiple-meanings” account of truth and signification can solve the first of them, it cannot solve the second. The paradoxes of signification were in fact much discussed by Bradwardine’s successors in the fourteenth century. Bradwardine’s solution appears to turn on a distinction between the principal and the consequential signification of an utterance. However, although such a distinction played an important role in his successors’ theories, it is shown that Bradwardine’s account of signification does not admit any such distinction, no part being prior to the others. Accordingly his solution, unlike those of his successors, does not fall prey to Rumfitt’s paradoxes.
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5
I. Rumfitt, “Truth and Meaning,” Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 88 (2014), 21-55, at 45.
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P.V. Spade, “Roger Swyneshed’s Theory of ‘Insolubilia’: A Study of Some of His Preliminary Semantic Notions,” in History of Semiotics, ed. A. Eschbach and J. Trabant (Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1983), 105-113, at 106; reprinted in Spade, Lies, Language and Logic in the Late Middle Ages, study viii.
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See A. Maierù, “Le ms. Oxford canonici misc. 219 et la ‘Logica’ de Strode,” in Engish Logic in Italy in the 14th and 15th Centuries, ed. idem (Naples, 1982), 87-110, at 89. Strode was a fellow of Merton College in the 1350s and 1360s, where he composed a Logica containing treatises on insolubles, suppositions, consequences and obligations. In the 1380s he was living next door to the poet Geoffrey Chaucer in Cheapside in London. Chaucer dedicated his poem Troilus and Criseyde to the poet John Gower and to Strode.
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Paradoxes of Signification
In: VivariumSearch for other papers by Stephen Read in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Ian Rumfitt has recently drawn our attention to a couple of paradoxes of signification, claiming that although Thomas Bradwardine’s “multiple-meanings” account of truth and signification can solve the first of them, it cannot solve the second. The paradoxes of signification were in fact much discussed by Bradwardine’s successors in the fourteenth century. Bradwardine’s solution appears to turn on a distinction between the principal and the consequential signification of an utterance. However, although such a distinction played an important role in his successors’ theories, it is shown that Bradwardine’s account of signification does not admit any such distinction, no part being prior to the others. Accordingly his solution, unlike those of his successors, does not fall prey to Rumfitt’s paradoxes.
| All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 459 | 65 | 6 |
| Full Text Views | 202 | 4 | 0 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 41 | 4 | 0 |