What is Medieval Logic After All? Towards a Scientific Use of Natural Language

The Meanings of ‘Logic’ in the Thirteenth Century

“…14 From the ninth to twelfth centuries, the Latin World knew an array of classification schemes, accepted to a greater or lesser degree, but none of which survived very long. One of the principal difficulties that these classifications had to confront were the reconciliation of two models received from antiquity: a peripatetic scheme, with a bipartite division 11 Contemporary literature has inquired about the meaning of placing the Categories at the beginning of the Organon. See the appraisal of contemporary debates and medieval interpretations in [54].…”

“…One that might provide better understanding of what logic was for medieval authors, and how relations between logic and theories of language were understood during the Middle Ages. 1 Systematizing the results achieved in the last few years [11], summarized an influential line of interpretation, which defends a strong relation between medieval logic and theories of language, as follows:…”

“…Medieval thinkers developed their very sophisticated logic within a field characterized by a tension between two remarkable constraints; on the one hand, they obviously wanted to have at their disposal a language which would be sufficiently free from ambiguities and other semantic distortions to be suitable for the purposes of demonstrative science-this is what we could call the formal constraint of medieval logic; on the other hand, the language with which medieval logicians primarily worked (and worked on) was not an ideal, purely formal language but a natural (or semi-formal) one, namely Latin-this is what we could call the material constraint of medieval logic ( [11], p. 52). 2 The present article will not analyze medieval logic from a formal point of view.…”