Compendium of the Study of Theology

Book excerpt: In Part I the author draws on classical authors to illustrate three causes of error in his time and underscores the need for an integral understanding of the signification of terms. In Part II he proposes six themes: a new classification of signs; a theory that common terms signify principally objects, not concepts; connotation as natural signification; common terms signifying an entity and a nonentity are equivocal; terms can lose their signification; a non-Aristotelian classification of equivocation in six modes. Bacon was a very original semanticist and some of his theories helped pave the way for Ockham a few decades later. This treatise opens many windows on to the debate on semantics in the late 13th century.