William of Ockham held in his career two different theories about the nature of concepts. According to the first theory, concepts are forged by the mind and "terminate" the mental acts which produce them. Th is so called "fictum"-theory was abandoned, and Ockham held another theory, according to which concepts are identified with the mental acts themselves. While I think this is a correct description of the evolution of his philosophy, there is one aspect that has gone so far (almost) unnoticed : in his later theory, not only concepts do not terminate mental acts, but nothing seems fit to play this role. Mental acts are no longer "terminated" by anything. Th erefore, as the theory of concepts changes, there is also a change in the theory of mental acts. Th is last change explains the disappearance of the vocabulary associated with the verb "terminare" in the exposition of the mental act theory.
According to John Buridan, the time for which a statement is true is underdetermined by the grammatical form of the sentence -the intention of the speaker is required. As a consequence, truth-bearers are not sentence types, nor sentence tokens plus facts of the context of utterance, but statements. Statements are also the bearers of logical relations, since the latter can only be established among entities having determined truth-conditions. This role of the intention of the speaker in the determination of what is said by an utterance is not isolated in medieval semantics.
Mathematics Subject Classification (2000). Primary 03A05.
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