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  • Ockham on Concepts
  • Rondo Keele
Claude Panaccio . Ockham on Concepts. Ashgate Studies in Medieval Philosophy. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2004. Pp. xi + 197. Cloth, $79.95.

At the simplest level, Ockham on Concepts is just what its title suggests: an interpretation and reconstruction of the views of William of Ockham (d. 1347) on the subject of conceptus. Claude Panaccio is a well-respected scholar who has done foundational work on this topic for years. Ockham's opinions on the nature of concepts have been an important area of research for decades, in part because his theory of concepts went through several stages of development, and charting these stages played a central role in dating his texts.

Beginning in the 1970s, Ockham's theory of concepts received extraordinary philosophical attention by several distinguished scholars who began to see that one could incorporate his remarks on concepts with his opinions on certain distinct but related subjects, thus reconstructing for Ockham a fully integrated epistemological outlook comprising (in addition to a theory of concepts): (1) his nominalist project in metaphysics (especially the rejection of extra-mental universals), (2) his theory of intuitive cognition, (3) the grammar of mental language, and also (4) his views on the function of mental language. These venerable scholars—chief among them Paul Vincent Spade—created a coherent, unified interpretation of these Ockhamist elements.

At a second, deeper level, Ockham on Concepts is a rebuttal of Spade's interpretation. For in the course of his reconstruction Spade attributed two central attitudes to Ockham: (1) there can be a project of ontological reduction in which all connotative (and so all relational) terms can be evacuated of ontological import in virtue of their synonymy with their own definitions; (2) an idealized view of mental language (viz. that it is a Fregean "logically perspicuous language"), and that in particular mentalese can include no synonymous (because redundant) simple mental terms. And since, in the context of Ockham's famous ontological reduction project, connotative terms must reduce by synonymy, and since nothing synonymous with something else is mentally simple, it follows immediately, said Spade, that there are no simple connotative (and so relational) terms in Ockhamist mental language. However, since a mental language without simple relational terms would be logically crippled, according to Spade's interpretation Ockham's epistemological outlook must be counted as an interesting failure.

Enter Panaccio. By focusing his attention on internal ontology instead of external ontology—in short, on Ockham's nominalist theory of concepts instead of Ockham's general ontological reduction of Aristotle's ten categories—Ockham on Concepts challenges Spade's assumptions and derives a very different picture. In particular, Panaccio found very strong textual evidence that, according to Ockham, there can be synonymy in mental language. Some fundamental reordering of the tradition is therefore implied, and for this reason alone the book is recommendable to specialists.

Having rescued Ockham's theory from an ultimately damning interpretation, Panaccio argues not only that he has a better reconstruction of Ockham, but also that Ockham has a better theory of concepts than most moderns. Stripped to its essentials, at the third and most broadly relevant level of Panaccio's book we find this thesis: in coming to grips [End Page 659] with Ockham's theory of concepts one discovers how to heal important rifts in the current philosophy of mind. In particular, Ockham's theory of concepts is a coherent epistemology capable of reaching the holy grail of modern philosophy of mind, that is, one capable of showing us "how to reconcile a thoroughly causal picture of the natural world with the intentionality and intelligence of the human mind" (181). It is this level of Ockham on Concepts that makes it attractive for non-specialists.

According to Panaccio the heart of Ockham's account is the nominalist insight that a general concept of X can be regarded merely as the act of thinking of Xs, and that nevertheless this act of thinking of Xs can serve syntactical functions in the mind, that is, an act of thinking can be part of a proper language of thought, and can serve all the functions expected of a general concept. Rather than a...

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