ABSTRACT
Ockham's approach can still be of great relevance with respect to certain deep concerns that are at the forefront of today's interest in cognitive sciences and philosophy of mind. Ockham's theory saliently incorporates a close analog for each one of these: concepts are taken to be mental signs for things, their signification is made to depend upon causal connections, and they are insistently described as combinable with each other into syntactically structured units comparable to the sentences of a language. The basic apparatus Ockham postulates is a complex causal network of mental states. Why exactly should such concepts signify individuals that are essentially similar to each other rather than any other arbitrarily chosen bunch, is something Ockham does not explain in any detail. Ockham ends up with three basic categories of simple concepts, which he respectively calls 'absolute' terms, 'connotative' terms, and syncategoremata.
