The medieval sophismata literature is a genre of academic argument that began to take shape by the early twelfth century, grew in importance in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and lasted to the end of the Middle Ages. This chapter offers only the briefest overview of that literature. Although some overall patterns can be discerned, the boundaries of the genre are ill-defined and seem to have been so even in the Middle Ages. Still, it is clear that sophisms were the occasion for drawing many subtle distinctions and pursuing theoretical issues in a variety of fields.

BACKGROUND

Sophismata is the plural of the Greek singular noun sophisma. Originally, the words did not have the derogatory sense of the modern English ‘sophism’ or ‘sophistry.’ Instead they referred to whatever a sophistēs or “sophist” produced. A “sophist” was anyone who dealt in “wisdom” (sophia) in a very broad sense of the term. The word was applied, for example, to Homer and to the Seven Sages of ancient Greece. By the time of Socrates, however, ‘sophist’ had come to be used especially to refer to those who used debate and rhetoric to defend their views and who offered to train others in these skills. Because they accepted payment for their services, and because some of them employed their skill to pursue unjust cases in courts of law, the term acquired the connotation of someone who uses ambiguous, deceitful and fallacious reasoning to argue a point.

Standard histories have long recognized that the three most important figures in the philosophy of the High Middle Ages were Thomas Aquinas (1224/5-74), John Duns Scotus (c. 1266-1308), and William of Ockham (c. 1288-1347). Of the three, Aquinas is comparatively well known to modern readers, whereas Scotus and Ockham largely remain mere names.

Even Aquinas, however, is more foreign to students than Plato and Aristotle are, much less Descartes or Hume. Indeed, as Kretzmann and Stump have observed in The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas, such unfamiliarity is characteristic of all medieval philosophy. This sad fact is partly due to the scarcity of translations but more fundamentally to the lack of reliable modern editions of primary texts and thus of good critical analyses and studies of them in the secondary literature.

The situation does not arise from any lack of raw materials but instead, it might be argued, from just the opposite. There are many early printed editions from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries and an enormous number of surviving manuscripts of medieval philosophy and theology. But the early editions are often unreliable, whereas the manuscripts frequently present wildly different versions of the same work. They are written in a highly compressed and arcane system of abbreviation, a kind of shorthand that requires special training to read; early printed editions often retain the same system. Frequently the manuscripts are incompletely cataloged or not cataloged at all, and thus their contents are discovered only by chance.

The first thing one learns about William of Ockham's philosophy is usually that he was a “nominalist.” But sometimes it is not explained just what Ockham's nominalism was. For medieval nominalism, like its modern namesake, took many sometimes surprising forms.

At least two distinct themes in Ockham’s metaphysics have been called nominalism: (1) his rejection of universals and their accoutrements, like the Scotist formal distinction, and (2) his program of what can be called “ontological reduction,” namely his eliminating many other kinds of putative entities, whether universal or not, and in particular his cutting the list of real ontological categories from Aristotle’s ten to two: substance and quality (plus a few specimens of relation in theological contexts). Although I will say something about both themes in this chapter, the emphasis will be on the second.

These two themes are independent of one another. One might deny the reality of universals, as Ockham did, yet maintain that individual entities are needed in more or fewer categories. Thus, John Buridan rejected universals as resolutely as Ockham ever did but thought there are real, irreducible entities in the category of quantity, which Ockham denied, as well as in the categories of substance and quality. Conversely, one might think some of the categories in Aristotle’s list can be reduced to others while insisting that universals, not just individuals, are needed in some or all the remaining categories. Thus, Ockham’s contemporary Walter Burley thought the categories could be reduced to the same list of three Buridan allowed, but he was a realist about universals.

The nature and history of insolubilia

Medieval literature on ‘insolubles’ began to appear by the early thirteenth century at the latest and continued to the end of the Middle Ages. Insolubles were primarily certain sorts of self-referential sentences, semantic paradoxes like the ‘liar paradox’ (‘What I am now saying is false’). But few authors tried to give a rigorous definition, so that other more or less unrelated kinds of paradoxes were also treated under this heading.

Three periods may be distinguished in the medieval insolubilia literature: (1) from the beginnings to ca. 1320; (2) the period of the most original work, from ca. 1320 to the time of the Black Death (1347–50); (3) after ca. 1350, a period of refinement and elaboration but, with a few exceptions, little that was new.

Resolutions in terms of cassation

Several approaches may be distinguished during the first period. One was called ‘cassation’ – i.e., nullification. On this theory, he who utters an insoluble ‘says nothing’. The earliest known text adopts this view, and by ca. 1225 it was said to be ‘according to the common judgement’. Nevertheless, it soon died out and seems not to have been revived until David Derodon in the seventeenth century. It is not clear how the theory is to be taken. In the middle thirteenth century a text attributed to William of Sherwood discussed several views that might be considered versions of cassation, including one theory that insolubles for semantic reasons fail to be sentences, so the he who utters them ‘says nothing’. This theory has modern parallels, e.g., in Fitch 1970.

The old and the new responses

The obligations-literature appears to have entered a new phase with the Oxford Calculators, centred at Merton College in the 1320s and 1330s. Although the Mertonian Thomas Bradwardine seems to have contributed little to the development of obligations, his contemporary Richard Kilvington was more innovative in this regard, in ways described in Part A of this Chapter.

We are in a somewhat better position to assess the contribution of Roger Swineshead to obligations. Swineshead certainly appears to have been part of the intellectual circle with which Kilvington and Bradwardine are associated, and he may well have studied with them. Probably sometime after 1330 and before 1335, Swineshead wrote his pair of treatises on obligations and insolubles. There is reason to speculate that some of the most characteristic features of Swineshead's Insolubilia grew out of reflection on Kilvington's Sophismata. It is possible that this is true of Swineshead's Obligationes as well, but that remains to be established.

Swineshead's Obligationes is markedly different from earlier treatises in the genre. So true is this that Robert Fland, writing some time between 1335 and 1370, distinguishes two separate traditions in the obligations-literature. One of these traditions he calls the ‘old response’ (antiqua responsio); it conforms to the views of Burley, to those of the treatise attributed to William of Sherwood, and to those found in most if not all of the other early treatises. The second tradition Fland calls the ‘new response’ (nova responsio); it appears to have originated with Swineshead.

Two senses of ‘term’

Medieval philosophers and logicians used the word ‘term’ (terminus) in several senses, two of which are especially pertinent to this discussion. Strictly speaking, a term is what is subjected to the predicate or predicated of the subject in an ordinary categorical proposition – the subject term or the predicate term, the two ends (termini) of the proposition. In this sense whole phrases may be terms, but only certain sorts of words – nouns, adjectives, and verbs – can serve by themselves as terms. Less strictly, and in the later Middle Ages more prevalently, a term is any word at all, regardless of propositional context. In this discussion ‘term’ will be used in the less strict sense unless otherwise noted.

Signification as a psychological and causal property of terms

There are two basic properties for the medieval semantics of terms: signification and supposition. Signification is a psychologico-causal property of terms – a fact responsible for many disagreements and tensions in medieval semantics. The main source for the notion of signification was Boethius' translation of De interpretatione 3, 16b 19: ‘[Verbs] spoken in isolation are names and signify something. For he who speaks [them] establishes an understanding and he who hears [them] rests’. Hence ‘to signify’ something was ‘to establish an understanding’ of it. The psychological overtones of ‘to signify’ are similar to those of the modern ‘to mean’. Nevertheless, signification is not meaning. A term signifies that of which it makes a person think, so that, unlike meaning, signification is a species of the causal relation.