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This is the first time on the Web for Ockham's commentary on Aristotle's <i>Perihermaneias</i> (<i>De Interpretatione</i>, <i>On Exposition</i>). The Latin (section (book I, sections 2 to 12) is transcribed from the Latin edition of A. Gambatese and S. Brown, the translation into English is mine (also a first, I think – it is ironic that most of Ockham's work has never been translated into his own native language – a version of which he would have certainly spoken, being alive when Chaucer was born in 1345).
This section of the commentary is interesting for its extended discussion of 'mental language'. This is the idea that there exists in the mind (or 'in the soul') a language of conceptual terms, corresponding to the language of written and spoken terms. Conceptual terms are the 'mental words' that the blessed Augustine (<i>De Trinitate</i> XV), says do not belong to any language because they remain only in the mind and cannot be spoken outwardly, although utterances are pronounced outwardly as if signs subordinated to them.
Mental terms signify the same things as spoken and written ones. Thus, the mental term <i>dog</i> signifies a dog, just like the written term 'dog'. But the mental term signifies a dog naturally, primarily, and without any need for agreement or convention, whereas the written term signifies it by convention, and secondarily. The concept signifies naturally whatever it signifies, but a spoken or written term signifies only according to voluntary imposition.
Ockham discusses this idea in much-quoted sections of the <i>Summa Logicae</i>,
also available in the Logic Museum <a href = "ockhamlogicalform.htm">here</a>.
But he leaves the question of what these mental terms might be. Here, he gives an extended treatment of the question, although it is one which, he says, belongs to metaphysics rather than logic.
In <a href = "#I2">section 2</a> ('on the order of utterances and of concepts in signifying') Ockham discusses the 'order of signifying' of spoken terms and concepts in the mind,
a question which much occupied the minds of medieval philosophers. Is it words or concepts which primarily signify? He argues that it is primarily a concept that signifies a thing. A word, by contrast, primarily signifies a concept, but secondarily (via the concept) signifies a thing. Thus if there were to be a change in what the concept signified, this would immediately result in a change in what the word signified, without any new imposition or institution to established the meaning of the word.
