ABSTRACT
Being signs in the logical sense, concepts, for Ockham, are the primary objects of logic. Concepts are seen as the general categorematic terms of mental language, and the technical ideas of signification (significatio) and supposition (suppositio) serve in the Summa Logicae as the basis for a detailed nominalistic theory of truth-conditions for mental propositions. If mental language had no simple connotative terms, it would follow that there are no simple relational concepts; but, as is well-known since at least Bertrand Russell, it is logically impossible to construct all relational concepts exclusively from non-relational simple ones. Mental language, according to Ockham, is maximally economic: if a distinction between words has no semantical relevance, then there normally is no corresponding distinction in mentalese. The argument from exponibles and exponentes fails for the very same reason as the Spade-Adams-Normore argument: connotative terms cannot always be seen as strictly synonymous with their nominal definitions.
