Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas

Titel: Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas

Stichwort: inneres Wort: Wirkursache (causa efficiens) -> äußeres Worte; Syllogismus: inneres, vorgestelltes, äußeres Wort

Kurzinhalt: Gegensatz und Beziehung zw.: inner - outer word, inner word is an efficient cause of the outer, the inner word is what can be meant (significabile) or what is meant (significatum) by outer words, and inversely ...

Textausschnitt: 6/1 The first element in the general notion of an inner word is had from a contrast with outer words - spoken, written, imagined, or meant. Spoken words are sounds with a meaning: as sounds, they are produced in the respiratory tract; as possessing a meaning, they are due to imagination according to Aristotle, or, as Aquinas seems to have preferred, to soul; it is meaning that differentiates spoken words from other sounds, such as coughing, which also are produced in the respiratory tract.1 Written words are simply signs of spoken words;2 the issue was uncomplicated by Chinese ideograms. A similar simplicity is the refreshing characteristic of the account of imaginatio vocis:3 a term that seems to embrace the whole mnemonic mass and sensitive mechanism of motor, auditory, and visual images connected with language. Finally, the outer word that is some external thing or action meant by a word is dismissed as a mere figure of speech.4 (14; Fs)

7/1 There is a twofold relation between inner and outer words: the inner word is an efficient cause of the outer; and the inner word is what is meant immediately by the outer. The aspect of efficient causality seems to be the only one noticed in the commentary on the Sentences: the inner word is compared to the major premise of a syllogism; the imagined word to the minor premise; and the spoken word to the conclusion.5 Later works do not deny this aspect6 but I think I may say that subsequently the whole emphasis shifted to the second of the two relations mentioned above. Repeatedly one reads that the inner word is what can be meant (significabile) or what is meant (significatum) by outer words, and inversely, that the outer word is what can mean (significativum) or what does mean (significant) the inner word.7 (14f; Fs)

8/1 There is no doubt about this matter, though, frankly, it is just the opposite of what one would expect. One is apt to think of the inner word, not as what is meant by the outer, but as what means the outer; the outer word has meaning in virtue of the inner; therefore, the inner is meaning essentially while the outer has meaning by participation. That is all very true, and St Thomas knew it.8 But commonly he asked what outer words meant and answered that, in the first instance, they meant inner words. The proof was quite simple. We discourse on 'man' and on the 'triangle.' What are we talking about? Certainly, we are not talking about real things directly, else we should all be Platonists. Directly, we are talking about objects of thought, inner words, and only indirectly, only insofar as our inner words have an objective reference, are we talking of real things.9 The same point might be made in another fashion. Logical positivists to the contrary, false propositions are not meaningless; they mean something; what they mean is an inner word, and only because that inner word is false, does the false proposition lack objective reference.10 (15; Fs)

9/1 Such is the first element in the general notion of an inner word. It is connected with the well-known anti-Platonist thesis on abstraction that the mode of knowing need not be identical with the mode of reality, that knowledge may be abstract and universal though all realities are particular and concrete. It also is connected with the familiar Aristotelian statement that 'bonum et malum sunt in rebus, sed verum et falsum sunt in mente.'11 Because outer words may be abstract, and true or false, because real things are neither abstract nor true nor false, the immediate reference of their meaning is to an inner word. (15f; Fs)