Peeling away words

Foucault says that the rise of Modernity is occasioned by a peeling off of language from the world.

I find this an extraordinarily exciting idea, suggesting for the medieval an entirely different conception of language, what it is and does. It suggests a 'non-representational' view of language, of words. Words do not stand for things. Sentences do not 'represent' states of affairs.

He says we think of language as an apparatus of signs through which to order the world. He says the medieval mind thought of words as things, just as pebbles and weeds are things.

What can we make of this?

I can think of points that seem germane.

The first is that when the medieval logicians are talking seriously about the validity and invalidity of arguments, they speak, by and large, of syllogisms, and at least some among the scholastic figures we know about spoke of the key terms in syllogisms not as words but as 'terms'. And they spoke of them not as representing this or that but as presenting forms.

I am thinking of William of Shyreswood. He says that it is terms that syllogisms relate and that a term necessarily has 'significatio '. The Kneales tell us that to have significatio is to 'convey' or 'present' a form. (The Development of Logic, p.247.)

The concept of a form in Scholastic thought is not the concept of a representation of a thing. It is a complex concept, but one aspect of it is that the form is thought of as making a thing the sort of thing that it is. What makes a particular assemblage of flesh and bones a horse is its form.

The implication is that when a term 'conveys' or 'presents' a form the recipient is involved in sharing whatever it is that makes the thing the sort of thing that it is, that is , it becomes, while it remains its recipient, a thing of the same kind as the thing whose term it is receiving. If I am considering the term horse I am for that time in some sense a horse. Aquinas for one had the good grace to blench at the baldness of this conclusion, and added that though I was a horse insofar as I shared the form of a horse I was so in a completely different way from the way in which a horse was a horse. (Kenny puts it more sympathetically in Aquinas on Mind.)

(Of course the term 'term' probably means something significant)

I have referred simply to terms in syllogisms so far. But the essential point applies I think to the Scholastic conception of language in general.

The intellect is the faculty which gives us the ability to talk. The agent intellect is our power of abstraction: we abstract from a particular thing its 'species'. And, I think it is fair to say in this context a thing's species is its form. (Kenny, AM, p45/6)

Does this mean that for the Scholastics language items belonged to the world just as stones and weeds do?

I think probably Yes. They are conveyances not marks.

And the significance is great. Human beings as Scholasticism sees him or her is not restricted to dealing with the world exclusively via intermediaries (ideas and words). Their dealings are direct, and intimate. As they go about, in perception and thought as well as in talk they share the being of the things they encounter. There is no Cartesian camera obscura, no prison of the mind from which consciousness can never escape, no sense of the mind as a unbreachably private place from which unlike Mr Badger we can never sally forth.

People often interpret this shift as of enormous significance for us all, as though we feel through everything we do and everything we think and feel the alienation from the world and especially from each other that is undoubtedly there in the Cartesian theory. Perhaps they are right.

It's surely significant that there's what could be a parallel revolution in the understanding of mathematics. To quote from Thinking Machines:

"...mathematics provides the paradigm of thought as representational - once it frees itself from the conception that it is about things or lines or shapes. This liberation occurred first in the sixteenth century innovation of François Vieta, who proposed that we should let marks stand as 'representatives' and thus invented a mode of thinking that dealt with symbols: and symbols were manifestly different from the plurality of things that they indifferently stood for. Viteta's algebraic symbols were ready colonists of the new territory, the mind.' (VP, Thinking Machines, Oxford, 1987, Basil Blackwell, p. 18.):

That's my first thought.

The second is that the Ancients didn't seem to acknowledge any distinction between 'a word and what the word signifies.' (The Development of Logic, p.26.)

But I have yet to make this presentable.