You have used a word for something you had never seen. You said glacier before you stood at one, and when you finally did, you knew what you were looking at. You have watched two people who share no language point at the same dog and make two different noises, and neither noise was wrong. You have taught a child dog on a spaniel and watched the child, a week later, say dog at a mastiff it had never met, correctly, without being told that mastiffs count.
None of that works if a word is glued to a thing. The noises differ and the dog does not. The child was not handed a list of animals; the child was given a name that already reached past the animal in the room. Something stands between the word and the thing, and it is doing work.
The last page ended on Kearns’s two examinations: we ask whether our words express what we are thinking, and whether they are adequate to the things we are thinking about. Two measurements mean three terms, not two. This page is about the order among them.
What a sign is
Start with the plainest definition, the one Andres gives when he introduces the vocabulary of logic:
sign — something relative which points out another thing to a knowing power.
Three parts, and all three matter. A sign is relative: it is not a thing standing on its own but a thing taken as bearing on something else. It points out another thing: what it delivers is not itself. And it points that thing out to a knowing power: a sign is a sign only for a mind that can take it. Smoke over a hill signifies fire to someone who can read smoke. To the hill it is only smoke.
Both a word and a concept are signs on that definition. They are not the same kind of sign, which is the whole subject of the next page. First the order they stand in.
The order of signification
Aristotle sets it out in the opening sentences of On Interpretation, the book that stands between the Categories and the logic of argument.
Now those that are in vocal sound are signs of passions in the soul, and those that are written are signs of those in vocal sound. And just as letters are not the same for all men so neither are vocal sounds the same; but the passions of the soul, of which vocal sounds are the first signs are the same for all; and the things of which passions of the soul are likenesses are also the same.
“Passions of the soul” is an unhelpful phrase in English, and Aquinas stops to fix it. It does not mean anger or joy. Here it means conceptions of the intellect, what we ordinarily call concepts. Aristotle uses the word passion, Aquinas explains, because a concept arises in us from the thing by a kind of impression: in coming to understand, the mind undergoes something.
So there are four items in an order. Writing signifies speech. Speech signifies concepts. Concepts are likenesses of things. Andres states the same order without the technical words, and adds the consequence:
words signify our thoughts about reality. The words may be different in different languages, but they all signify the same kind of thoughts because the thoughts are likenesses of the same reality.
That is the answer to the dog and the two noises. English and Latin differ at the first two levels of the order and agree at the last two. The sounds are local. What the sounds are for is not.
Why a word cannot skip the concept
It would be simpler if words just named things directly. Aquinas gives the argument that they cannot.
Therefore “passions in the soul” must be understood here as conceptions of the intellect, and names, verbs, and speech, signify these conceptions of the intellect immediately according to the teaching of Aristotle. They cannot immediately signify things, as is clear from the mode of signifying, for the name “man” signifies human nature in abstraction from singulars; hence it is impossible that it immediately signify a singular man.
Look at what the argument turns on. The word man does not mean this man. It does not mean the collection of all men either; you did not have to meet them to learn the word. It means human nature, taken apart from any particular bearer. But there is no such object lying about in the world. Outside the mind, every man is some particular man. Plato put the abstraction outside the mind and got a separate Form; Aristotle does not. So if the word means something general, and the world holds only particulars, then what the word means directly is in the mind, and the concept is what reaches the thing.
Hence the formula worth keeping: vocal sounds signify the conceptions of the intellect immediately, and things by means of them. Houser gives it as a section heading in his own textbook, Language Signifies Thought, Which in Turn Signifies Things. Andres and Walshe both put the same point as a description of what the logician works on: words insofar as they signify things through our thoughts.
This is not a retreat into the mind
Said carelessly, the order sounds as though we are shut inside our own heads, trading concepts and never touching anything. The tradition says the reverse, in the same passage. Concepts are likenesses of things, and Aquinas is explicit about which way the causing runs:
passion is from the impression of something acting, and hence passions of the soul have their origin from things.
Still, the worry is worth answering properly, because it is easy to slide from “the word means a concept” into “so what I know is my own concept.” Maritain heads that off with a distinction.
Take the concept first as a product: something the mind forms in itself in order to understand, which Maritain calls the mental concept, and which the tradition also calls the mental word. Of that he says:
it is a pure means, THAT IN WHICH we attain the thing or object, “id in quo intelligimus rem.”
Then take the concept as what is thereby understood — the nature or essence presented to the mind — which he calls the objective concept. And here is the sentence to hold on to:
it is essential to distinguish between these two accepted meanings of the word “concept,” and to remember that the “objective concept” is not that by which or in which we know but, on the contrary, it is THAT WHICH we know.
So the mental concept is not an object you inspect instead of the thing. It is what you see the thing by. Compare Houser’s bear: the process in the bear’s eyes is that by which the salmon is seen, and the bear looks at the salmon. A concept is a pure means in the same way. What you know is the thing, presented to your mind under some aspect. Nobody is shut in anywhere.
This is also why the passage can say concepts are the same for all men. Not because everyone happens to agree, but because a concept takes its measure from what is there. Of the three terms in the order, only the first is ours to invent.
Aquinas even says why the middle term had to be made public, and the reason is the one Kearns gives:
Now if man were by nature a solitary animal the passions of the soul by which he was conformed to things so as to have knowledge of them would be sufficient for him; but since he is by nature a political and social animal it was necessary that his conceptions be made known to others. This he does through vocal sound.
Seven centuries later Kearns argues from social animals to the same conclusion. Language exists because knowing is not enough for a creature that has to live with others.
What is ours, and what is not
One item in the order is our invention: the word. Aristotle makes the point when he defines the noun, and he is careful about it.
By a noun we mean a sound significant by convention, which has no reference to time, and of which no part is significant apart from the rest. The limitation “by convention” was introduced because nothing is by nature a noun or name — it is only so when it becomes a sign; inarticulate sounds, such as those which brutes produce, are significant, yet none of these constitutes a noun.
A dog’s whine signifies. It is not a word, because nobody assigned it. Words are assigned, which is why there are many languages, why a term can be coined, and why a definition can be sharpened. Kearns’s own example is the good one: astronomers have changed what they mean by planet, and in doing so changed nothing whatever about planets. The word was theirs to fix. What it takes to be one was not.
So the answer to “aren’t words arbitrary?” is that the sounds are, and nothing else in the order is.
A question nearby is left open here, and it is worth saying which kind of question it is. The mental concept is also called the mental word, verbum mentis, because, as Maritain puts it, the mind utters it within itself. How that uttering works — what the intellect does in forming the word, and how it stands to the public language we learned as children — is a question about the mind rather than about logic. Maritain sends it to psychology; Aquinas sends it to the study of the soul in the same breath as the passage quoted above. Chapter 2 of Principles of Discourse was to take it up and is unfinished, and the notes there are working notes. Nothing on these three pages depends on how it is answered. The third page says why declining a question at the threshold is ordinary practice rather than evasion.
Continue to What kind of sign a word is.