Abstract

The second chapter spells out Buridan’s conception of logic as a practical science, teaching us, as logica docens, to heed the valid rules of reasoning embedded in our logical practice, logica utens. The chapter also deals with the particular difficulties of Buridan’s approach, considering his idea of the radical conventionality of written and spoken languages, consisting of token-symbols that owe their meaningfulness to the natural representational system of the human mind. This is the fundamental idea that naturally leads to the nominalist conception of a mental language. On this conception, mental language itself is a compositional semantic system of naturally representative token-symbols, the singular mental acts of singular human minds.