SOURCE: "Ockham on Mental Language" in Historical Foundations of Cognitive Science, edited by J. C. Smith, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990, pp. 53-71.

In the following essay, Normore describes Ockham's concept of mental language and its purposes, highlighting some problems and difficulties associated with it.

Thanks largely to the work of Noam Chomsky, we have witnessed over the last thirty years a revival of interest in two closely related ideas: that there is a universal grammar, a set of structural features common to every human language, and that the exploration of this grammar is, in part, an exploration of the structure of thought.

Fourteenth century grammarians and philosophers were also interested in this complex of questions, and debate about them raged as vigorously then as now. One tradition in this debate grew out of thirteenth century terminist logic and seems to have been given a distinctive shape by William Ockham...