Like most of the medieval logicians, Brinkley acknowledges three ontological types of terms: inscriptions, vocal sounds, and concepts (mental terms), and just like Ockham - the target of most of his criticisms otherwise -, he defends the thesis of semantic subordination of the two conventional types of terms (written and spoken) to the natural signs constituting mental language: a sign S1 is semantically subordinated to a sign S2 iff S1 and S2 signify the same thing x and S2 can signify x without S1 but not vice versa (Cesalli 2004:460). The impositio nominum relates a vocal sound to a thing and not to a concept, although the relation to a thing depends on a concept of that thing: the imposition presupposes the cognition of the thing to be named. As far as extra-mental terms are concerned, the difference between signification and supposition is twofold: on the one hand, the former is conventional whereas the latter ‘‘arises from the nature of the thing’’ (‘‘suppositio non oritur exprincipio voluntatis, sed ex natura rei’’ De suppositionibus, 1): once a vocal sound has been imposed, its actual use within a proposition casts it into formal, objective relations, which do not depend on any convention: as Brinkley puts it, the validity of the inference ‘‘a man is running, therefore Socrates, or Plato, or... is running’’ is objectively secured. On the other hand, signification is a dyadic notion, and supposition is a triadic one: to signify, for a term, means to be related to an intellect (namely to the intellect of the hearer) and to a thing; to supposit, for a term, means to signify and to be related to another categorematic constituent (subject or predicate) of a proposition. Brinkley’s idea that signification involves a relation to the intellect of the hearer (‘‘terminus autem significans necessario includit duos respectus: unum ad intellectum sui significat, et alium ad rem quam significat’’ De terminis, 1, Gal and Wood 1980:80) is close to the one found in the first lines of Roger Bacon’s De signis (“signum est in praedicamento relationis et dicitur essentialiter ad illud cui significat’’). As for Brinkley’s typology of supposition, the cases of material and simple supposition have to be briefly addressed. We saw in the previous section that in the De universalibus, Brinkley considers that homo in homo est species has material supposition, whereas this sentence is a classical example for simple supposition. In his tract on supposition, Brinkley says that simple supposition is the case when a ‘‘common term stands for a thing as non-restricted, i. e. for a thing really communicable to many’’ (“suppositio simplex est quando terminus communis supponit pro re ut non contracta sive pro re pluribus communicabili ex parte rei’’ De suppositionibus, 3) and gives the example homo est primo risibilis. Therefore, Brinkley considers the term species as strictly metalinguistic although he acknowledges real universal things. Finally, Brinkley criticizes the notion of material supposition because if a term would really stand for himself, then supposition would not be relational anymore; but according to its definition, it has to be relational (De suppositionibus, 2; on Brinkley’s theory of signification and supposition, see Cesalli and Lonfat, forthcoming).
World History
