Semantic Themes in the Twelfth-century Debate on Universals

Abstract

Porphyry’s problem can be seen as that of the reference of nominalized forms of common nouns and adjectives; scholars ask themselves, from a metaphysical point of view, how these entities combine to justify the truth of a categorical sentence. This perspective prevails in the Middle Ages after the semantic turn of the twelfth century: If we want to account for the truth, we must account for the relation of meaning, we must say for what kind of objects the expressions of natural language and in particular the general ones can stand. I would like to show how the various theories proposed have been criticized because they were questionable, that is, the position of the metaphysical problem contrasts with the non-metaphysical way we commonly have of speaking of general terms and the truth of sentences.

Keywords

• universals
• porphyry’s problem
• metaphysics
• meaning
• philosophy
• history of philosophy
• porphiry
• porphirius