The Semantics of Analogy: Rereading Cajetan's De Nominum Analogia

Chapter Five. Cajetan’s Semantic Principles

— 85 Chapter Five Cajetan’s Semantic Principles Introduction In response to objections to a semantic analysis of analogy, we began to examine Cajetan’s semantic principles in chapter 3. There I clarified that for Cajetan the concept was simply that which mediated thought; a concept is simply the intellectual intention by virtue of which someone understands something. Thus, we saw, the concept played a role in the general notion of signification. For signification is the function of a word that makes someone aware not of the word but of whatever is signified by the word. A word that signifies is a word that makes something known. That is to say, in the common medieval formulation traced back to Boethius, signification is the establishment of an understanding. This initial and partial clarification of Cajetan’s notion of the “concept” needs to be put in the context of a more ordered, if still sketchy, presentation of Cajetan’s semantic principles. The present chapter contains such a sketch, preparing the way for a consideration of Cajetan’s teaching on analogy by providing the philosophical context in which he offered that theory. Cajetan nowhere systematically articulates what we would call a theory of semantics, but his semantic principles can be reconstructed from a variety of his works. His commentaries on two logical works—Porphyry’s Isagoge and Aristotle’s Categories—are obvious sources.1 Much can be learned of Cajetan’s semantic principles also 86  — Cajetan’s Answer from his commentary on Thomas Aquinas’s De Ente et Essentia. All three of these works were completed within the few years before Cajetan wrote De Nominum Analogia. We can also learn about Cajetan’s semantic principles from his commentary on Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae , a work written several years later. These are the sources that inform the following outline of Cajetan’s semantic principles. Among the topics we will consider along the way is the relation between Cajetan’s semantic principles and metaphysics. So, for instance ,thischapteraddressestheontologicalcommitmentofCajetan’s logical “realism.” It also addresses a more particular issue, which will prove more directly relevant to the later discussion of analogy: the question of whether claims about terms denominating intrinsically or extrinsically are metaphysical claims, or more properly logical or semantic ones. Signification Cajetan’s notion of signification can be introduced by turning to his description of the subject matter of Aristotle’s Categories. Briefly, Cajetan explains that while the metaphysician considers things as they are, the logician considers things as they are understood and signified. As Cajetan describes it, in the part of logic that regulates the most basic intellectual act, simple apprehension, incomplex things are not united and distinguished with the conditions that they have in the nature of things, but as they are received by the intellect, that is, as they stand under the simple apprehension of the intellect, that is, as objects of simple apprehension of the intellect , and things so received are nothing other than things said by interior words, or (which is the same) things conceived by simple concepts; and things of this sort are nothing other than things signified by incomplex words (since words are signs of concepts and concepts [are signs] of things).2 This passage is illuminating in several ways. At the end, as an aside, Cajetan introduces what has come to be called the “semantic triangle”: Cajetan’s Semantic Principles — 87 word, concept, and thing. The discussion leading up to this helps us to understand how the three terms of this semantic triangle are related . The concept is equated with an “interior word,” which is just that which makes simple apprehension possible, in other words, that by which the intellect is made aware of something in some way. So in saying that “words are signs of concepts and concepts are signs of things,” we see that Cajetan means that a word signifies immediately an intellectual intention or “concept” that necessarily mediates understanding , and ultimately signifies what is understood by the mediation of that concept, that which the concept makes one understand. So a word immediately signifies a concept and ultimately signifies some “thing.” The things signified and understood are not concrete individuals, but what Cajetan will speak of as their “forms” or “natures.”3 It is important to note that in a strictly semantic context, such terms are not to be taken in their full, metaphysical, sense, but in an extended sense to cover whatever...