From the Tree to the Labyrinth (67 page)

Among the signs
ordinata ab anima
are words and other visible signs of a conventional nature, such as the
circulus vini
or barrel hoop that taverns displayed to identify themselves, and even the goods displayed outside shops, inasmuch as they signify that other members of the same class to which they belong are on sale within. In all of these cases Bacon speaks of
impositio,
that is, of a conventional act by means of which a given entity finds itself having to stand for something else. Clearly, for Bacon convention is not the same as arbitrariness: the merchandise on display is chosen conventionally but not arbitrarily (the objects act as a kind of metonymy, the member of the class for the class as a whole). The
circulus vini
too is designated as a sign in a conventional and nonarbitrary manner, inasmuch as it points to the hoops that hold the barrels together, and acts simultaneously as both synecdoche and metonymy, representing a part of the container that holds the wine ready to be sold.

But in
DS
most of the examples are taken from verbal language and hence, if we wish to follow Bacon’s line of thought, it would be better not to stray too far from what is probably the paramount example of a system of conventional and arbitrary signs.

Bacon, however, is not so naïve as to say that words signify exclusively individual and concrete things. He contends that they name objects, but these objects may also exist in a mental space. Signs in fact can also name nonentities, such as infinity, a vacuum, the chimera, and nonbeing itself (
DS
II, 2, 19; see also II, 3, 27, and V, 162).

This implies that, even when words signify species, this occurs because they point extensionally to a class of mental objects. The relationship is always extensional, and the correctness of the reference is guaranteed only by the actual presence of the object signified. A word is truly significant if, and only if, the object it signifies
is the case
—if nothing else if it is the case that it is thought.

Admittedly, Bacon says (
DS
I, 1) “non enim sequitur: ‘signum in actu est, ergo res significata est,’ quia non entia possunt significari per voces sicut et entia,” but this position cannot be equated to Abelard’s insistence that even an expression like
nulla rosa est
signifies something. In the case of Abelard
rosa
was significant insofar as
significare
was considered from an intensional point of view, and, within this framework, the name signified the concept of the thing, even if the thing did not exist or had ceased to exist. Bacon’s position is different: when one says “there is a rose” (and when there being a rose is the case), the meaning of the word is given by the actual concrete rose, but when one makes the same affirmation and no such rose exists, then the word
rose
does not refer to an actual rose, but to the image of the supposed rose that the speaker has in mind. There are two different referents, and in fact the sound
rose
itself is a token of two different lexical types.

Let us weigh carefully the following passage. Bacon states that “vox significativa ad placitum potest imponi … omnibus rebus extra animam et in anima,” and he admits that we may name conventionally both mental entities and nonentities, but he insists on the fact that it is impossible to signify with the same
vox
both the individual object and the species. If, to name a species (or any other mental passion), one intends to use the same word already used to name the corresponding object, we must set in motion a
secunda impositio
(
DS
V, 162).

What Bacon intends to clarify is that, when we say “homo currit” (“the man is running”) we do not use the word
homo
in the same sense as in the sentence “homo est animal” (“man is an animal”). In the first case the referent of the word is an individual, in the second a species. There are then two equivocal ways of using the same expression. When a potential customer sees the barrel hoop advertising wine in a wine shop, if there is wine, then the hoop signifies the actual wine. If there is no wine, and the customer is misled by a sign that refers to something that is not the case, then the referent of the sign is the idea or image of wine that has taken shape (erroneously) in the customer’s mind.

For the people who know there is no wine, the hoop has lost its ability to signify, in the same way in which, when we use the same words to refer to things in the past or the future, we do not use them in the same sense as we do when we refer to actual things that are present. When we speak of Socrates, referring, that is, to someone who is dead, and express our opinions about him, in reality we are using the expression
Socrates
with a new meaning. The word “recipit aliam significationem per transsumptionem,” it is used in an ambiguous way compared with the meaning it had when Socrates was alive. “Corrupta re cui facta est impositio, non remanebit vox significativa (
DS
IV, 2, 147). The linguistic term remains, but (as Bacon remarks at the beginning of
DS
I, 1) it remains only as a substance deprived of its
ratio
and of the semantic correlation that made its material occurrence a word.

In the same way, when a child dies, what is left of the father is the
substantia,
not the
relatio paternitatis
(
DS
I, 1, 38).

When we speak of individual things, “certum est inquirenti quod facta impositione soli rei extra animam, impossibile est (quod) vox significet speciem rei tamquam signum datum ab anima et significativum ad placitum, quia vox significativa ad placitum non significat nisi per impositionem et institutione,” while the relationship between the mental species and the thing (as the Aristotelian tradition was also aware) is psychological and not directly semiotic. Bacon does not deny that species can be the signs of things, but they are so in an iconic sense: they are natural signs, and not signs
ordinata ab anima.
The
vox
thus signifies only the individual thing and not the species (
DS
V, 163). As has already been demonstrated, when we decide to use the same term to name the species, what we have is a second imposition.

Bacon subverts, then, once and for all the semiotic triangle implicitly formulated since Plato, according to which the relationship between words and referents is mediated by the idea, the concept, or the definition. At this juncture, the left-hand side of the triangle (the relationship, that is, between words and concepts) is reduced to a merely symptomatic phenomenon (see
Figure 9.6
).

Figure 9.6

In
Chapter 4
, on the barking of the dog, we raised the question of whether Bacon had relied on Boethius’s translation of
De interpretatione
16a, in which both
symbolon
and
semeion
were translated into Latin with the same word,
nota,
or whether he might not have gone back to the original, concluding from it that words are first and foremost in an exclusively symptomatic relationship with the passions of the soul. Accordingly, he interprets (
DS
V, 166) the passage in Aristotle from his own point of view: words are essentially in a symptomatic relation with species, and at most they can signify them only vicariously
(secunda impositio),
while the only real relation of signification is that between words and referents. He disregards the fact that, for Aristotle, words were, so to speak, symptoms of the species with reference to a temporal sequence, but that in any case they
signified
the species, to the point that we can only understand things named through the mediation of species already known.

For Aristotle, and in general for the medieval tradition prior to Bacon, extension was a function of intension, and in order to ascertain whether something was in fact the case, one had first to understand the meaning of the statement. For Bacon, on the other hand, the meaning of the statement is the fact of which the referent is the case.

What is of most interest to Bacon is the extensional aspect of the entire question, and this is why the relationship of words to what is the case looms so large in his treatise, while the relationship of words and their meaning becomes at best a subspecies of the referential relationship.

We can thus understand why, in the context of his terminology,
significatio
undergoes a radical transformation from the meaning it had had until now. Before Bacon,
nominantur singularia sed universalia significantur,
but with Bacon and after him
significantur singularia,
or at least
significantur res
(though a
res
may be a class, a sentiment, an idea, or a species).

Duns Scotus and the Modistae represent a sort of highly ambiguous fringe between the extensional and intensional positions. In the Modistae we encounter a tortured dialectic between
modi significandi
and
modi essendi.
Lambertini (1984) has demonstrated how this point continues for the most part to remain ambiguous, not only in the original texts, but also in the context of modern and contemporary interpretations (see also Marmo 1994).

In the works of Duns Scotus too, we come across contradictory statements. In support of the extensionalist point of view, we find: “verbum autem exterius est signum rei et non intellectionis” (
Ordinatio
I, 27), while on the other hand, in support of the intensionalist position, we find “significare est alicuius intellectum constituere” (
Quaestiones in Perihermeneias
II, 541a). There are, however, passages that seem to espouse a compromise solution, opposed to be sure to that of Bacon, according to which, though the thing may be subject to transmutation, this is no reason for the
vox
that signifies it to change, because the thing is not signified insofar as it exists, but insofar as it is understood to be an intelligible species (
Quaestiones in Perihermeneias
III, 545 et seq.).

Thus there are scholars who would place Scotus among the extensionalists. Nuchelmans (1973: 196), for instance, referring to the commentary on the sentences (
Opus Oxoniense
I, 27, 3, 19), declares: “Duns Scotus already affirmed that what is signified by the vocal utterance is a thing rather than a concept.” For others, such as Heidegger (1915),
¹¹
Scotus is very close to a phenomenological view of meaning as a mental object. And finally, there are still others, like Boehner (1958: 219), who have no qualms about confessing their ongoing perplexity.
¹²

There has been considerable discussion as to whether Ockham’s extensionalist theory is really as straightforward and explicit as might appear at first sight. If we consider in fact the four meanings of
significare
proposed by Ockham (
Summa logicae
I, 33), only the first has an unmistakable extensional sense. Only in this first meaning in fact do the terms lose their ability to signify when the object they stand for does not exist.

That said, even though we cannot be completely certain that Ockham used
significari
and
denotari
(invariably in the passive form) exclusively in the extensional sense,
¹³
nevertheless in many passages he did use the two terms with this meaning.

What happens with Ockham—and had already happened with Bacon—is that the semiotic triangle is turned completely on its head once and for all. Words are not connected first and foremost with concepts and then, thanks to our intellectual mediation, to things: they are imposed directly on things and on states of affairs; and, in the same way, concepts too refer directly to things.

At this point, the semiotic triangle would look like
Figure 9.7
: there is a direct relation between concepts and things, given that concepts are the natural signs that
signify
things, and there is a direct relation between words and the things on which they impose a name, while he relation between words and concepts is completely neglected (see Boehner 1958: 221 and Tabarroni 1984).