ABSTRACT
What is the relation between our words and the world to which those words seem to refer? What is the relation between our thoughts and the things which those thoughts might be said to be about?
Such is perhaps the central question of philosophy, that can be redescribed in different ways depending on what historical moment one chooses to address and what theoretical paradigm one chooses to pose that question within. For the Presocratic Parmenides, it is the question of the sameness between thought and Being, or between thinking and that which is; for Plato, it is the correspondence between the intellect and the forms; for Aquinas, it is the adaequatio between the intellect and things; for Descartes and post-Cartesian philosophy, it becomes the basic question of modern epistemology: namely, what is the relation between the subject and the objects that appear to the subject, or again what is the relation between our mental representations and that which they are intended to represent, or again what is the relation between our conscious intentions and the objects of those intentions?
