Paradoxes of signification

Abstract

Ian Rumfitt has recently drawn our attention to a couple of paradoxes of signification, claiming that although Thomas Bradwardine's "multiple-meanings'' account of truth and signification can solve the first of them, it cannot solve the second. Bradwardine's solution appears to turn on a distinction between the principal and the consequential signification of an utterance. The paradoxes of signification were in fact much discussed by Bradwardine's successors in the fourteenth century. It is shown that Bradwardine's account of signification turns not on a distinction between principal and consequential signification, but between partial and total signification, and that accordingly his solution, unlike those of his successors, does not fall prey to Rumfitt's paradoxes.