Let us weigh carefully the following passage. Bacon states that “vox significativa ad placitum potest imponi … omnibus rebus extra animam et in anima,” and he admits that we may name conventionally both mental entities and nonentities, but he insists on the fact that it is impossible to signify with the same vox both the individual object and the species. If, to name a species (or any other mental passion), one intends to use the same word already used to name the corresponding object, we must set in motion a secunda impositio (DS V, 162).
What Bacon intends to clarify is that, when we say “homo currit” (“the man is running”) we do not use the word homo in the same sense as in the sentence “homo est animal” (“man is an animal”). In the first case the referent of the word is an individual, in the second a species. There are then two equivocal ways of using the same expression. When a potential customer sees the barrel hoop advertising wine in a wine shop, if there is wine, then the hoop signifies the actual wine. If there is no wine, and the customer is misled by a sign that refers to something that is not the case, then the referent of the sign is the idea or image of wine that has taken shape (erroneously) in the customer’s mind.
For the people who know there is no wine, the hoop has lost its ability to signify, in the same way in which, when we use the same words to refer to things in the past or the future, we do not use them in the same sense as we do when we refer to actual things that are present. When we speak of Socrates, referring, that is, to someone who is dead, and express our opinions about him, in reality we are using the expression Socrates with a new meaning. The word “recipit aliam significationem per transsumptionem,” it is used in an ambiguous way compared with the meaning it had when Socrates was alive. “Corrupta re cui facta est impositio, non remanebit vox significativa (DS IV, 2, 147). The linguistic term remains, but (as Bacon remarks at the beginning of DS I, 1) it remains only as a substance deprived of its ratio and of the semantic correlation that made its material occurrence a word.
In the same way, when a child dies, what is left of the father is the substantia, not the relatio paternitatis (DS I, 1, 38).
When we speak of individual things, “certum est inquirenti quod facta impositione soli rei extra animam, impossibile est (quod) vox significet speciem rei tamquam signum datum ab anima et significativum ad placitum, quia vox significativa ad placitum non significat nisi per impositionem et institutione,” while the relationship between the mental species and the thing (as the Aristotelian tradition was also aware) is psychological and not directly semiotic. Bacon does not deny that species can be the signs of things, but they are so in an iconic sense: they are natural signs, and not signs ordinata ab anima. The vox thus signifies only the individual thing and not the species (DS V, 163). As has already been demonstrated, when we decide to use the same term to name the species, what we have is a second imposition.
Bacon subverts, then, once and for all the semiotic triangle implicitly formulated since Plato, according to which the relationship between words and referents is mediated by the idea, the concept, or the definition. At this juncture, the left-hand side of the triangle (the relationship, that is, between words and concepts) is reduced to a merely symptomatic phenomenon (see Figure 9.6).
Figure 9.6
In Chapter 4, on the barking of the dog, we raised the question of whether Bacon had relied on Boethius’s translation of De interpretatione 16a, in which both symbolon and semeion were translated into Latin with the same word, nota, or whether he might not have gone back to the original, concluding from it that words are first and foremost in an exclusively symptomatic relationship with the passions of the soul. Accordingly, he interprets (DS V, 166) the passage in Aristotle from his own point of view: words are essentially in a symptomatic relation with species, and at most they can signify them only vicariously (secunda impositio), while the only real relation of signification is that between words and referents. He disregards the fact that, for Aristotle, words were, so to speak, symptoms of the species with reference to a temporal sequence, but that in any case they signified the species, to the point that we can only understand things named through the mediation of species already known.
For Aristotle, and in general for the medieval tradition prior to Bacon, extension was a function of intension, and in order to ascertain whether something was in fact the case, one had first to understand the meaning of the statement. For Bacon, on the other hand, the meaning of the statement is the fact of which the referent is the case.
What is of most interest to Bacon is the extensional aspect of the entire question, and this is why the relationship of words to what is the case looms so large in his treatise, while the relationship of words and their meaning becomes at best a subspecies of the referential relationship.
We can thus understand why, in the context of his terminology, significatio undergoes a radical transformation from the meaning it had had until now. Before Bacon, nominantur singularia sed universalia significantur, but with Bacon and after him significantur singularia, or at least significantur res (though a res may be a class, a sentiment, an idea, or a species).
9.9. Duns Scotus and the Modistae
Duns Scotus and the Modistae represent a sort of highly ambiguous fringe between the extensional and intensional positions. In the Modistae we encounter a tortured dialectic between modi significandi and modi essendi. Lambertini (1984) has demonstrated how this point continues for the most part to remain ambiguous, not only in the original texts, but also in the context of modern and contemporary interpretations (see also Marmo 1994).
In the works of Duns Scotus too, we come across contradictory statements. In support of the extensionalist point of view, we find: “verbum autem exterius est signum rei et non intellectionis” (Ordinatio I, 27), while on the other hand, in support of the intensionalist position, we find “significare est alicuius intellectum constituere” (Quaestiones in Perihermeneias II, 541a). There are, however, passages that seem to espouse a compromise solution, opposed to be sure to that of Bacon, according to which, though the thing may be subject to transmutation, this is no reason for the vox that signifies it to change, because the thing is not signified insofar as it exists, but insofar as it is understood to be an intelligible species (Quaestiones in Perihermeneias III, 545 et seq.).