What a sign is
John of St. Thomas gives the classical definition:
A sign is that which makes present something other than itself to a cognitive power.
A sign, then, has three aspects: it makes something present to something else, what it makes present is something other than itself, and it makes that thing present to a knowing power, such as sight or the intellect. Smoke on a hill signifies fire to someone who knows that smoke comes from fire but it does not signify anything to a stone, since a stone has no cognitive power of any kind. (Sometimes, signs are said to "represent" something to us; but this does not mean they necessarily have a resemblance to the thing in question; it means something different; it means that they re-present or make present again the thing in question to the knowing power.)
There are three kinds of signs:
- Natural signs are caused by what they signify, and we know the sign first and then what it signifies. Smoke is a natural sign of fire, and tracks in the snow are a natural sign of the animal that made them.
- Conventional signs signify by agreement or by custom, so they can be given almost any meaning. A road arrow and the sounds of a spoken language are conventional signs. These signs are also called instrumental, because, like natural signs, they must first be known themselves before they lead us to something else.
- Formal signs make things present to us through themselves, through what they are in themselves. These are what our concepts are: formal signs. Note that when we understand a tree, we do not first notice our concept and then infer the tree; we know the tree through the concept, and we notice the concept only later, by reflecting on what we know.
So, a spoken or written word is a conventional sign, and a concept is a formal sign.
Our words, therefore, signify what we understand, and what we understand is the thing that we are speaking about itself, known through the concept. For this reason, the concept is that by which we know the thing, not something that stands in the way.
This order also shows something about the purposes of language. Socially, the first purpose of language is communication in human social groups and for common purposes. But language is very often the primary way that we make the world present to ourselves and only then the way we communicate what we have learned to others. Ultimately and at root, the mind understands things through its concepts but the mind uses language to give stability to its thoughts and make them easy to recall and the mind uses language further to give order to its various acts. Language is, therefore, the chief instrument that aids the mind in carrying out its effort to set our thoughts in order.
How the mind forms the concept within itself (the “inner word”) is a question about the soul rather than about logic. That is considered in philosophical anthropology and is not discussed here.
We now turn to each of the arts of the trivium in turn.
Continue to Grammar.