Adam Wodeham on the Meaning of Declarative Sentences

In the Middle Ages, the view that complexa or declarative sentences, mental, spoken, or written, have a peculiar significate which is fundamentally different from the significate of simple acts of apprehending with their corresponding expressions had as its most notable defenders Peter Abelard and Gregory of Rimini. The question whether there was a continuous line of thought connecting these two authors has become susceptible of a somewhat less speculative answer since relevant texts of William Crathorn and Adam Wodeham, who advocated a similar doctrine several years before Gregory of Rimini, have been made available. In this article, it is submitted that Wodeham’s theory should be viewed in the light of the debates concerning the identity of the articles of faith and the immutability of God’s knowledge that had begun in the course of the twelfth century. Wodeham rejected both the view that the object of assent is the complexum whose formation is presupposed by the act of assenting and the view that it is the thing signified by the subject-term of such a complexum. Instead, he argued for a theory according to which the object of assent is the total significate of a proposition and according to which this significate is a mode of being that essentially includes a complexio or predicative combination and the time consignified by the copula, and cannot, therefore, be subsumed under any of the Aristotelian categories. Nearly all the crucial theses and arguments involved in this position can be traced back to the traditional debates concerning the articles of faith and God’s knowledge. So, if there is a connection between Abelard’s doctrine and the views defended by 14th-century authors, it is most likely to lie in the writings containing those debates.