 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Let Me Count the Ways – Speculative Grammar. Some ideas seem so appealing, so obvious, that they appear again and again throughout the history of philosophy. One of them is that language corresponds to the world. From Parmenides, who banned non-being from his metaphysics because it cannot be spoken, to Wittgenstein, whose Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus proposes that propositions are like pictures that show reality, it seems that philosophers have never stopped trying to understand how this correspondence might work. And for good reason. A true sentence is one that describes things as they really are. Thus, if we want to understand reality, and we're philosophers, so of course we want to do that, an obvious way to make progress would be to analyze language. The fact that language accurately represents the world suggests that the parts and structures of language somehow mirror the parts and structures of reality. Consider a sentence like, the giraffe roller skates. It seems irresistible to think that the world is arranged in much the way the sentence is. You have a concrete entity, the medieval would say a substance, which is the giraffe, and you have the action the giraffe is performing, namely roller skating. The grammatical contrast between subject and verb parallels the metaphysical contrast between the substance and the action. On the other hand, there also seem to be features of language that don't hook up with reality so well. What would be the real things that correspond to words like if and not, to say nothing of phrases like Peter's nonexistent sister? In light of this, we might decide that language's purchase on reality is somewhat more tenuous, or at least more complicated. If you want to know just how complicated, you can do no better than to read discussions of language produced by university masters towards the end of the 13th century. This was the heyday of what is called speculative grammar. It may seem odd that philosophical questions would be raised in the context of doing grammar. Chances are that you haven't been asked to think much about grammar since you were a child, and that was the usual medieval practice too. The word comes from the Greek grammata meaning letters. Studying grammar was at first, quite literally, a matter of learning your letters, that is learning to read. This is why the late antique pagan philosopher Simplicius chose to insult his rival John Philoponus by calling him the grammarian. He was effectively calling him a mere schoolmaster. But already in antiquity, grammar came to include more sophisticated discussions of language. In a medieval setting, grammar was one of the three disciplines of the trivium, along with rhetoric and logic. This meant that the clever men of the arts faculty where the trivium was taught took a professional interest in grammar and connected it to their other philosophical interests. This, in a nutshell, is how grammar became speculative. Of course, grammar had been part of the trivium before the rise of the universities, and indeed since antiquity, but conceptions of grammar became more ambitious in the 13th century. This was, as usual, because of Aristotle. Once they were able to read the full range of Aristotle's logical works, and especially his posterior analytics, the masters were led to wonder whether grammar would really qualify as a full-blown science in Aristotle's sense. The arts masters were desperate to say that it would, given the central role of grammar in their university careers. But there was a problem. Aristotle states clearly that a science must establish universal truths, whereas grammar seems always to study a particular language. The arts masters were teaching Latin grammar, but of course they knew that there were grammars for other languages. They even noted and worried about such things as Latin's lack of definite articles, an apparent defect relative to Greek. Variation between languages also casts doubt on the idea we were just exploring, that there is a neat correspondence between language and world. Grammatical structures differ greatly from one language to another, but it isn't as if there was one reality for the French and another for the English. Okay, maybe that's a bad example, but you know what I mean. The grammarians were not to be dissuaded though. They admitted that many features of Latin, or of any other language, are accidental, but insisted that some features must be shared by all languages. It would be these universal features which are essential to language as such that are studied in grammar as a properly scientific enterprise. For instance, in Latin the word for giraffe is camelo pardos, while in German it is giraffe. It tells us nothing about real giraffes that the German word is etymologically related to the English word, while the Latin word is not, but it does tell us something about giraffes that in all three languages the word in question is a noun. A giraffe is a substance, and nouns typically pick out substances. Well, actually it's more complicated than that, and you can't say I didn't warn you. The authoritative source for medieval grammarians was not any work by Aristotle, but the Institutes of the 6th century author Priscian. A measure of its popularity and the importance of grammar in medieval education is that there are more than 1,000 surviving manuscripts of the Institutes. When Priscian gets to defining the noun, he says that it signifies not just substance, but also quality, which makes sense. There are other nouns that could pick out a giraffe, including her proper name Hiawatha, and such words as animal or thing, to say nothing of nominal phrases like tallest residence of the zoo and all Savannah roller skating champion 2016. When we say giraffe, we are signifying a substance only insofar as it has the particular quality, indeed the particularly wonderful quality, of being a giraffe. This line of thought is at best implicit in Priscian himself, but in the works of the 13th century grammarians, it becomes as explicit as an adult rated movie. Indeed, the idea that words signify in different ways, or modes, is the basis for the name that was given to some of the speculative grammarians in this period, modistae, or modists. The modists were distinguished not just by their conviction that grammar does indeed have the rank of a universal science, but by their decision to dedicate whole treatises to the subject of the modes of signification, modi significandi. We have already gotten to know one of the earliest figures usually considered as modists, Boethius of Dacia, one of the so-called Latin Averroists. There was also his countryman Martin of Dacia, who like Boethius wrote around 1270. Their ideas were taken up and further developed by figures whose lives and work stretched into the 14th century, including Rodolfus Brito, Thomas of Erfurt, and C.J. of Courtois, not to be confused with the other so-called Averroist, C.J. of Rabant, though he did also write about grammar. And by the way, there are also a number of anonymous treatises that apply the modist approach, so this was a significant and widespread movement in the late 13th and early 14th centuries. The core idea of modism is that our ways of talking express our ways of thinking, and that our ways of thinking in turn express the way things are. Thus, we have a distinction between three types of modes. The modes of signification, which belong to language, the modes of understanding, which are the ways we grasp reality, and finally the modes of being. It's vital to the modists that each thing out in the world really does have multiple modes of being, since otherwise there would be no basis in reality for the various ways we can think and talk about a given thing. My mother, Hiawatha, is only one single giraffe, but I can refer to her in an almost indefinitely large number of ways. As giraffe, as animal, as beautiful, as tall, as running, as a running joke. These ways of speaking latch onto her modes of being, the various ways that she genuinely is. When I think of her prodigious stature and speak of her as tall, I am talking about her insofar as she possesses the accidental attribute or property of tallness. When I instead think of her as a giraffe, I call her by that name, I am talking about the mode of being that she shares in common with other members of her species. But the modist theory makes it sound as though our concepts somehow intervene between language and reality. Does a word like giraffe or running really signify Hiawatha at all, or just my thought of Hiawatha? This question was one of those disputed ones. Some authors insisted that words must refer to or signify concrete things like a particular giraffe. But many modists, such as Martin of Dacia, insisted that language does signify concepts, at least in the first instance. To signify something, you have to have it in mind. Your words express your thoughts rather than the thing itself. On the other hand, your concept is about the concrete thing in the world. This means that language can still signify the real thing via mental concepts. If I say, oh how exciting, here comes a giraffe, what I am fundamentally doing is communicating a thought I am having. But since my thought is itself about something, namely Hiawatha as she comes towards us on roller skates, my words do incidentally say something about the world. Now, not all the noises we make signify. We are capable of making meaningless noises as when we grunt or just speak nonsense. The terminus logician William of Sherwood gives an example that would be at home in a Harry Potter novel, Buba Blikatrix. For the medieval sounds made by non-human animals would fall mostly or entirely into this category of literally insignificant noise. How then does a mere sound come to acquire meaning? Mostly through an act of the mind, which imposes a certain meaning on a certain sound. This is what the grammarians call the ratio significandi, or signifying relation. Once this is added, we have something more than a sound, we have a meaningful verbal expression, in Latin dictio. But even this is not enough, since one and the same dictio can be used in different ways, something particularly clear for speakers of Latin, where case endings can be added to indicate whether something is the subject of a verb, the object of a verb, an instrument, or what have you. Hence, the expression for giraffe in Latin takes a different form when I say the giraffe sees, camelo pados videt, than it does when I say I see the giraffe, vidio camelo padum. Sorry, I don't know how to say roller skate in Latin. We could even indicate one and the same thing with different parts of speech. The modus like the example of pain. I can refer to it using the noun pain, the verb hurt, the adjective painful, or even the interjection ouch. The grammatical differences are there to mark further acts of the intellect, whose various modes of understanding correlate with cases and parts of speech. When I just mean to refer to the pain in my toe, I use a noun. When I describe how it is making my toe feel, I use the adjective, and when I want to let you know that you are standing on my foot, I use the interjection. Once the mode of understanding is marked at the level of language, we have what the grammarians called a paz oraciones, a word as it would actually appear in a real sentence. The grammarians like to say that with this sort of expression, we are signifying one thing as another, like when I signify a pain as something that is hurting me right now. When all goes well, the mode of signification reveals a mode of understanding that actually fits the way the world is. In other words, grasps a real thing under one of its modes of being. My toe really hurts. The thing out there really is a giraffe, and it really is seeing something or being seen or standing on my foot. But sometimes all does not go well. There's a difference between saying something meaningful and saying something true. The grammarians recognize this, and in fact, their theory makes it easy to explain. Suppose you say to me, giraffes are ugly. I understand what you're saying just fine, but I also know that you're saying something false. The good news is that you have successfully used language to convey to me what you're thinking. The bad news is that you are thinking about giraffes in a way that does not correspond to the way they really are. More puzzling for the modus were cases where language doesn't look like it even could correspond to the world, under any mode of being. What does the word nothing refer to, or the word matter, assuming as the medievalists did that matter is pure potentiality? Again, the level of the mental concept could come to the rescue here. By negating concepts that do refer to reality, the mind is capable of forming notions of potentiality, nothingness, or privation, even though no such absences really exist outside the mind. This solution could also be used to handle empty words like centaur or chimera. These signify concepts that are only figments of the mind, with no correlate outside in real being. Then there are the linguistic expressions that don't even pretend to signify anything. Those words like if and not. This is pretty much the group of Latin words that are indeclinable, in other words that get no nominal or verbal endings. The grammarians tended to see them as serving a merely auxiliary function. It was even claimed that they are, properly speaking, not part of language. In other cases, a term might be a mere substitute for a fully formed pars orazionis. A good example is the pronoun, like he or it. Obviously, you can't know what a pronoun refers to without the help of context. In general, the grammarians are prepared to admit that context is vital in understanding the way that a given word functions in a given sentence. We can see this as a legacy from the terminus logicians who, as we noted back in episode 225, sometimes argued that the supposition or referent of a term might be established by the context in which the term is used. But the grammarians go further, emphasizing that speaker and listener are engaged in a cooperative enterprise. The speaker tries to make his meaning clear, and the listener seeks an interpretation of his words that will make sense. This is one reason our attempts to communicate aren't tripped up by the many ambiguities found in natural languages. But with all the best will in the world, some ways of using language are bound to cause philosophical controversy. One case that gave the grammarians trouble was the apparently innocent word whiteness. The standard modus story here would be that there are various modes of being picked out by forms of the word white. There is the adjective white, which is applied to a substance qualified by the accident of whiteness. There is the process of acquiring such an accident, which we call whitening. And then there is the accident itself, which is the whiteness in a substance. But can't I also use the word without thinking of any white thing in particular? It's this usage that seems to be at stake when I say something like, I don't look good in white, or, white is the mixture of all other colors. Images like these can clearly be true, though my first example wasn't. I happen to be one of those people who can wear anything. But what are these statements about? While some were prepared to admit that whiteness is something out there in the world, Boethius of Dacia was reluctant to do so. For him, this is another case where a word refers to something in the mind, in this case an abstract generalization produced by the mind based on experiences of particular white things. A similar problem concerned terms like human, giraffe, or animal. On the one hand these can name individual things out in the world, like Groucho Marx and Hiawatha. On the other hand, they are the names of species and genera which are found in many things, because not only Groucho is a human but also Harpo, Chico, and all the rest of us. This led the grammarians to weigh in on the long-running problem of universals. Among the modists, perhaps the most innovative view was that of Rodolphus Brito. At first, his solution may seem like Boethius of Dacia's idea about whiteness. Rodolphus appeals to the modist theory of the mode of understanding and explains that the mode of understanding relevant to genera and species is the one that responds to the similarity between, for instance, one human and all other humans. However, he insists that this mode of understanding is grounded in the nature of the external rings. We can all generate a general, common notion of humanity in our minds. So Rodolphus is adopting what we might call a moderate realism concerning universals. Our universal ideas are not mere figments like our ideas of chimeras or centaurs, nor are they mere abstractions like Boethius's whiteness. When we think of the human species, we are attending to humans as they are alike to one another and not only as if they were alike to one another. We can also signal to other people that we have in mind whatever is common to all humans by adding the word every, which is what we do in order to make a universal statement, like every human is an animal, or every human should watch the Marx Brothers movie Animal Crackers. Rodolphus's solution is classic modism. It distinguishes the levels of language, concept, and reality, but sees intimate connections between these three levels. Of course, that connection isn't always present. We do talk about chimeras that even say things that are meaningless or horror of horrors ungrammatical. But the whole point of modism is to reveal how the connections work when things go well. Still, we can see easily how the tools of speculative grammar could be turned in a more skeptical direction. If you think that universals have no basis in reality, you might argue that phrases like every human express only modes of understanding and not modes of being. You might emphasize the arbitrariness of language and of the mind. In short, you might think less like a 13th century philosopher and more like a 14th century philosopher. The metaphysical and epistemological confidence of the later 13th century will not be shared by subsequent generations. But we're not ready for the 14th century quite yet. We have yet to cover two most important scholastic thinkers to come along in the generation after Aquinas and Bonaventure, namely Henry of Ghent and John Dunne's Scotus. And even before that, I want to give you a reminder that it wasn't only the schoolmen who were thinking about philosophy at this period. Since we've been thinking in this episode about language, I thought it would be a good time to have a break from university life and look at a work of vernacular literature that has much to say about philosophy, even though historians of philosophy haven't had much to say about it in return. Next time, our topic won't be the flowering of scholasticism. We'll be talking about an actual flower, and in fact some actual de-flowering as we turn to a French epic of courtly love, the Romance of the Rose, here on The History of Philosophy without any gaps.