The article intends to show: a) that the modist Martin of Dacia sides with the traditional reading of the first chapter of Aristotle’s De interpretatione that we find in masters of arts from the first half of the thirteenth century; and b) that the modist Boethius of Dacia is one of the first thirteenth-century scholars to depart from this reading. In fact, Boethius presents us with an account of propositional verification where the terms’ signification is not operational and where the immediate truth-maker of statements like ‘homo est animal’ is an external state of affairs. In Martin’s case, to the contrary, the terms’ signification is operational in his account of propositional verification and the immediate truth-bearer of such statements is a mental composition or division.

This is the 10 th volume in the series Investigating Medieval Philosophy, published by Brill, and consists of four, somewhat uneven, chapters. In the first chapter, Mora-Márquez begins by focusing on, and explaining in great detail, the two primary sources for thirteenth-century debates about signification, viz., Aristotle's Perihermeneias and Boethius' second commentary on the same. The most important passage in the former, which is examined at length, is the second sentence, where Aristotle says (and I paraphrase) that "written and vocal words are signs of concepts and things." Thanks to Boethius, however, we are informed of a discrepancy between Aristotle's account of language in his Perihermeneias and what he presents in his Categories, namely that in the Categories, things are immediately signified by words, whereas in the Perihermeneias, concepts are immediately signified by words. In time, this conflict developed into what Duns Scotus called a magna altercatio.

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The aim of this paper is to present a reconstruction of Olivi’s account of signification of common names and to highlight certain intrusion of pragmatics into this account. The paper deals with the question of how certain facts, other than original imposition, may be relevant to determine the semantical content of an utterance, and not with the question of how we perform actions by means of utterances. The intrusion of pragmatics into Olivi’s semantics we intend to point out may seem minimal today, but was of a certain importance at his time. Even if the conventional codes still play a role in his explanation of how words acquire a semantical content, both the intention of the speaker and the communication context in which this intention is being effectuated are essential features of the actual signification of names.

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