ABSTRACT
This chapter elucidates how the Ockhamistic doctrine can coherently equate the intuitive and abstractive acts of cognition with significant terms, capable of occurring, in person so to speak, within mental propositions. It establishes a number of non-trivial points about how Ockham's theory of concepts maps the cognitive states corresponding to intellectual intuitions and abstractions into logical or semantical categories. Contrary to what several recent commentators have suggested, Ockham's theory of concepts can legitimately be labelled as a brand of representationalism. In the natural order of things, intuitive cognition always corresponds to the simple and immediate grasping of something which is actually present to the agent. The possibility of a properly singular abstractive cognition of something is left open, nevertheless, but it can only be reached, Ockham says, through an appropriate combination of simple terms, none of which would itself be properly singular. The process of formation of the universal is exactly the process that leads to abstraction.
