The next section of Boulnois’s L’Être et représentation, barely over a page in length, begins to develop the relation between signification and representation.
“What is a sign? What is signification?”
“If, according to Bacon, the sign and the concept represent, we cannot directly identify signification and representation. Signification is not a special case of representation. But by another detour, we will come to concentrate representation in intellection. If the sign is a thing that, as Augustine says, presents itself to sense, it also presents an other to the spirit — it presents and it represents. The Baconian analysis opens the way for the formula of Scotus: ‘Signifying is representing something to the intellect’. Signification is a representation. In every proposition, the term represents in act all the signifieds. The sign is a substitute for the thing, which allows it to be rendered present to thought so that the latter can conceive it. It implies two distinct relations, to exterior things and to the concepts of the intellect.”
“This distinction recalls the distinction between reference and the semantic field, or, in medieval terms, between supposition and signification. In simple supposition, a term supposes for what it signifies: it recalls all the supports designated by its signification. On this point two interpretations confront one another. For one tradition of logic (called ‘Parisian’), supposition is the act of taking the place of the referent, of being an intentional and semantic back-reference (supponere pro). For another tradition (called ‘Oxonian’), supposing is being the subject of a predicate in a proposition, according to an extensional and syntagmatic presentation (supponere sub). This delimitation seems insufficient, for it obliges us to consider Scotus as Parisian more than Oxonian! He declares in effect ‘The common term supposes for all the supports’ that it recalls. Thus, the common term, ‘when it is not specified by some added [term], supposes absolutely [for] its [common] signified’. Supposition reveals itself as strictly indifferent, with neither priority nor pre-eminence of one support over the others: the term supposes ‘equally for all the [individual supports] that are equally related to its signified’. This indifference is also an indifference to their existence or nonexistence: the term ‘supposes for all the supports, existent or nonexistent’. It refers equally to each one of them. Every universal is distributed in its inferiors, since all the supports are of the same kind and of the same degree supports which the common term recalls. The theory of representation recovers the concept of supposition and takes over the whole weight of the reference of a term in a proposition” (pp. 24-25, my translation, brackets in original).
Next in this series: Scotist Semiotics?
The Postmodern Peripatetic 