For various reasons, the late thirteenth century saw an increased interest in epistemology. One of the reasons for this were certain developments of new theories of mental representations and intentionality. Some of these developments were due to problematic features of, on the one hand, Aquinas’ view of mental representation and on the other, of Henry of Ghent’s interpretation of Augustine’s view of divine cognition. Aquinas seems to have held that the intelligible species is supposed to play a dual role both as a universal common to all of us thinking it and as my individual thought. One and the same entity seems not to be able to fulfill both these roles. Henry on the other hand reinterprets Augustine’s doctrine of divine ideas and introduces a distinction between the ideas and the divine nature. The ideas are possibilia or the natures of possible things to be created (de Rijk 2005:81-84). Both of these views contribute to the introduction of a distinction between the vehicle and the content of a representation.
The distinction developed by Henry in relation to the divine nature was almost immediately taken up into the debates about human cognition. It was applied to Aquinas’ theory of mental representation, taking the conformality view a step further by introducing a distinction between the thing representing and the thing represented. John Duns Scotus was instrumental in adapting this view to human cognition. Scotus’ implemented Henry’s distinction and treated the thing that does the representing as a mental act or concept, which ontologically speaking is an accident of the mind, and the thing represented as the form of the object thought about (which is why this is still a conformality account of mental representation).
Scotus claimed that the accident or mental act is subjectively in the soul, whereas the object being represented is present objectively, or has objective being in the mind. He also said that the object exists sub ratione cognoscibilis seu repraesentanti or ‘‘in keeping with the nature of something cognizable or represented” (Ord. I, d. 3, pars 3, q. 1, n. 382) to express the content side of the mental representation. Scotus thus had a clear way of expressing what Brentano later called intentionality, that is, the way the object of thought exists in the mind. It has objective existence in the mind on his view, which later came to be regarded as the mark of the mental (see Normore 1986; Pasnau 2003; King 2007).
Although the advantages of this approach over Aquinas’ are clear, problems remained concerning the ontological status of these mental contents. The medieval debate here is famous and features a wide variety of opinions (for a survey, see Tachau 1988). Scotus himself says that thought objects have a diminished kind of being, which is supposed to be a state between real being and no being at all. Ockham would later subject this view to much criticism.
World History
