As is well-known, what set the stage for all semantic considerations in the Middle Ages was Aristotle's "semantic triangle", the conception sketched at the beginning of his On Interpretation, according to which words immediately signify the concepts of the mind and it is by the mediation of these concepts that they signify the things. Aquinas comments on the relevant passage as follows:
Therefore 'passions of 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. The Platonists for this reason held that it signified the separated idea of man. But because in Aristotle's teaching man in the abstract does not really subsist, but is only in the mind, it was necessary for Aristotle to say that vocal sounds signify the conceptions of the intellect immediately and things by means of them.[7]
So signification is dependent on acts of human thought: by our words we signify whatever we can think of, whether it actually exists or not. For there is no doubt that we can think of something that does not exist, whence, on this conception, it follows that our words also can signify something that does not exist. Thus it is no wonder that at another place Aquinas writes as follows:
In response we have to say that there is a three-fold diversity between things signified by names. For some are in total, complete being outside the soul; and such are complete beings, as a man or a stone. Some have nothing outside the soul, as dreams or the imagination of a chimera. And some have some foundation in the reality outside the soul, but their formal account [ratio] is completed by the operation of the soul, as is clear in the case of universals. For humanity is something in reality, but there it is not universal, for there is no some humanity outside the soul common to many, but as it is conceived by the intellect, by the intellect's operation a further concept [intentio] is adjoined to it, on account of which it is called a species.[8]Linkback:
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