Introduction to Philosophy & Logic (1999)
Lecture 22: Equivocal Names, Figurative Speech, and Their Philosophical Functions

Transcript
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If you see this work of Plato called the Apologia, the Apology, Categoria was the name for accusation, legal accusation, right? Charging you with some crime, right? And Apologia is the name for the defense in the, what, courtroom, right? So it's not apology as they transliterate it, right? It's a legal defense. And Cardinal Newman wrote that work kind of defense of his life, even the Anglicans, it's Apologia, right? A defense, in a sense. But Socrates, in a way, in the Apologia, the Apologist, we call it in English, is defending himself in court, right? Not only against the charge, he's defending his whole life, right? As a philosopher. But Categoria was the opposite of Apologia, that's the accusation, right? And the reason why the word is Barava is that when I accuse you, I have to accuse you of something. You're a murderer, or you're a thief, or you're an embezzler. I've got to say something of you, right? And the categories is, what? The ten ways something can be said of individual substances, right? The highest, the ten needs, right? So a friend of mine kind of playing on the legal origin of it, he calls them the ten supreme accusations. Well, supreme means the highest, right? The accusation is the ten highest things I can say about you. The ten supreme accusations. It did come in from the court, right? You'll find, you see, that the words that we use in looking philosophy are often borrowed from practical things, huh? Just like the scientist borrows the word law, right? The word law comes from human society at first. So although the biologist and the chemist and the physicist talks about the laws of nature, we don't call them lawyers, do we? We don't see the legal profession, right? Although the whole talk is about laws. That Latin predicamenta? Yeah. Predi. Probably a E, predicamenta, huh? As opposed to predicamenta. Yeah, and again, I think the names here are a bit like the names of the figures of speech. They have something to do with the meaning of it, but they don't really, I don't think, bring out the distinction of the two, right? They're both taken from the word to be set up, predikare, right? Predicable means literally able to be set up, right? But that's true about these things, able to be set up something. Predicamenta maybe has more the sense of actually set up, but it doesn't really bring out the distinction between the two. I'm just familiarizing you with the way they're named in mind. So if you look at Albert the Great's paraphrase of the doctrine of these two works, in Latin one would be called the, you know, de predicamenta, and that's about genus, difference, species, property, accident. And then de predicamenta, and that's about substance, quantity, quality. Now, they'd often refer to the categories as the book of the ten names. Genus, not genus, no, substance, quantity, quality, relation. So the five and the ten names, right? Now notice a difference between the five and the ten names. The five names are names of, and the ten names are names of what? Yeah. Interesting, huh? What was that? The ten are what? Names of what? Yeah. Substance, quantity, quality, etc. The ten names, the ten categories, are names of things, right? Things, okay. Yeah. So I am a substance, right? I am a what? My health, right? Use a disposition. It's a quality, right? Okay. My size is a quantity, right? By being a father, or a teacher, or a son, right? By being taller or shorter than somebody, this is being towards something. By being in this room, right? These are all real, huh? But the eisagoge is about the names of what? Names, right? And sometimes you find in the Greek philosophers, and occasionally in Thomas, you have more of the sentences than the later ones, but they'll speak of the first placing of names, and the second placing of names, and they'll say the categories is about the first placing of names, okay? What does that mean, huh? Well, the simplest way of understanding it is that in the beginning there are no names at all, right? Remember how God led the animals by Adam and gave all names, right? I always call my wife that, you know, but therefore the father should be the child, right? His name took a job, right? But, it was a bad project, right? It was a bad project, but anyway. Oh, I'd have to figure it out, okay? But thus, in the beginning, there were things, but no names, right? And for many practical reasons, as well as later on, theoretical reasons, we're going to put a name upon these things, right? So, a place upon this animal, dog, right? And upon this animal, cat, and upon this plant, tree, it's all that place names upon things, right? And now we have not only things, but we also have names, right? And then we come back and place what? Names. Yeah. That's the second placing of names. Okay. Kind of a very concrete way of speaking, right, huh? Now, for the goodness of teaching about names, we could attach a couple things to what we've taken up here. One would be to talk about name equivocal, which could also, if you want to, you can say it equivocally of things, huh? Now, when we first distinguished genus, species, difference, property, and accident, these were five names, right, said univocally of many, what, things, right? Names said with one meaning of many things, right? But it's also possible to have, what, a name said of many things with different meanings in mind. You know what I'm saying there, huh? I see, said the blind man, but he couldn't see it all, right? Now, sometimes two things have the same name by chance, right? And then we call them purely equivocal, or equivocal by chance, right? But sometimes a name is equivocal by reason, huh? And these names are very important in philosophy, huh? The most common names, the names that are used everywhere, and also the names that are used in the axioms, right? And the names are used especially in wisdom, because it's about what is said of all. Those most common names are especially equivocal by reason, huh? So, we could, as we finish the teaching there, add a consideration here, name equivocal by reason, The other thing we might add is a little discussion of figurative naming, right? Figures of speech, right? Figurative naming. We call it figures of speech, huh? Now, it's very hard to get a universal understanding of these figurative names. When I asked M. Dionne this, he referred me to Quintilian, right, huh? Because Quintilian has a somewhat lengthy discussion of these things, but it's imperfect, I think, in many ways, as M. Dionne himself would agree when I talked to him about it. Okay? I think that what you should do with figurative names is to get an understanding of the most common ones. And I think there are five in number, right? The most common ones. And some of them have a name, and some of them don't. Some of them, the name has a name. Sometimes the way of naming has a name, right? Sometimes they have both, right? To give you exactly what I mean here. A metaphorical naming, right? That's one way of naming things figuratively. You can also name things by irony. But a name used metaphorically has a name. We call it a metaphor. I don't, to my knowledge, a name used ironically doesn't have a name. No name for it? I don't. We've spoken here a lot about Antonia Messiah, right? Antonia Messiah, I think, is naming a way of naming things, right? But what do you call something that, a name that's used in that way? See, I don't think Antonia means that. It doesn't have a meaning, because you have the dictionary, right? So I don't think that what is named by Tony Messiah has a name. That kind of name. That's, there are many things you'll find out that are names. I remember in class one day, we were talking about, what's the name for the desire for food? And they all said hunger, right? And what's the name for the desire for drink? I said thirst, right? And desire to know, wonder, right? And what's the name of such a desire? Somebody had a name. She'll say, lost it, I don't need a name for it. It doesn't have a name. I said, something that's well known and talked about. It doesn't have a name. You know, it doesn't seem to, huh? Usually, you know, Aristotle says things that come into our experience don't have names, right? You know, they're rare in our experience. Here's something that's very common, huh? But even equilateral triangle doesn't seem to have a name, because square has a name. A triangle doesn't have a name. So, now what's common to all figurative naming, or figurative speech, is that the meaning of the word is not the meaning of the speaker. That's the best way to look at it, huh? The meaning of the speaker is not the meaning of the word, huh? And if the meaning of the speaker became a meaning of the word, it would no longer be, what? Now, sometimes a dictionary is misleading in this way, right? Because if you look at the word pig in the dictionary, right? They might give as a meaning of pig, what? Glutton, right? But if that became a meaning of the word pig, then to call you a pig would be to call you a glutton. It would not be figurative speech anymore, okay? So, sometimes the metaphor becomes, like pig, is so common that people, you know, almost want to call that a meaning of the word, right? And there may be, you know, historically some words, some things are renamed, you know, metaphorically, or in some other figurative speech, right? And they didn't have any name themselves, right? So, that became their name, right? But then it's going to function as a thing's own name, and not as a, what? Metaphor, right? Okay? Let's see, at the end, I'll point out a little rule that, what atheists give us, right? You know, when he's opposed to, when a name is being named, you could have played by reason, and when it's being named figuratively. And here, it doesn't really, in many cases, have a name of its own, right? Here, it already has its own name, but you don't use its own name, right? You use the name of another thing, right? Now, I think the five most important kinds of figurative naming are, I'm going to give this an order here now, Synecdoche, which seems to name the name itself, and Tonomasia, and put those two together, because it's going to have something in common, as we'll see. And then you have the metonym, and metonymy, which is the name of the, what? Way of naming. Now, Synecdoche, in Tonomasia, I don't think there is, as I said, a name of the name, right? But a name of the way of naming, right? So maybe I make that a little more clear here, if I can. Let me make a little chart here, and put the name, and the way of naming, right? The way of naming, we're talking about figurative naming here. So metonymy is one way of naming things figuratively, right? And when a name is used in this way, it's called a metonym. Okay? And Tonomasia is another way of naming things figuratively. You'll find it in a big dictionary that we're in, Tonomasia. It's a small dictionary. I don't know myself of a name used in this way. Synecdoche, I think, is more the name of the name. Then you have the metaphor. We can speak of metaphorical naming. We can use a phrase like that. And then you have irony. These five, I think, are the most common. And maybe I'll need to go to text here, where I talk about these five, and give you a few, you know, out-of-hoc references in Thomas. But you'll find Thomas very often referring to one of these five, right? There's a text, as I mentioned, in one of the epistles of St. Paul, where St. Paul uses irony in this letter, right? And Thomas wants to explain that St. Paul is not saying anything false. Although he's using irony, right? He's praising them when actually it's reversed, right? Did you not go into this somewhat and you're forward to the Bible? Maybe you did, yeah. Did that distinguish these five? Not so much. But that's a very interesting text. I think it's in that thing I'm going to leave you with. But Thomas explains that when a man speaks figuratively, right, the meaning of his words is not the meaning of the speaker, right? But an intelligent listener will gather the meaning of the speaker through the words, right? And he contrasts irony in metaphor there that you're a text on, okay? It won't come down to what they are. Now, Synecdoche and Antonia Messiah, in these cases, the relation of the two is that of what? Part and whole, right? But in the case of Synecdoche, it's a composed whole in its part. Composed whole. In the case of Antonia Messiah, it's the general in particular. It's in there for the universal whole in its part. Now, the composed whole is the first meaning of whole in the part. The composed whole is a whole, which is what composed means, put together from its parts, right? And they sometimes call it integral whole, right? So, if you give the name of a composed whole to one of its parts, or vice versa, that's an example of what's Synecdoche. Now, if you give the name of the general to the particular, or the name of the particular to the general, this is an example of Antonia Messiah, okay? Now, as you can see in the English word particular, it comes in the word part, right? So it's like a part, but it has a secondary meaning of the word part. The Greek word for general comes in the Greek word for whole, right? So they call this universal whole. Now, I'll give you an example of Synecdoche, right? Well, the one that everybody talks about in the Gospel of St. John is, and the word was made, what? Flesh. What does that mean? Yeah, it was made man, yeah. Now, sometimes in Scripture, man is called flesh. All flesh must come to thee, right? Sometimes man is called soul in Scripture. Well, then you're giving the name of the part to a whole, right? Now, some, you know, one of the heresies you have in the early church is those who say that Christ didn't have a human soul, in place a human soul was the word. Well, they're taking it as being said non-figuratively, but it's being said in the form of a, what? Synecdoche, right? But no, Synecdoche is a very common thing in real life, huh? He's a brain, huh? If a part of the man stands out for some reason, right? He's so smart, right? He's a brain. Is he a brain? You're giving the name of a part to the, what, hole? A part that can be used in the hole, right? I suppose, by the way, muscles. Hi, you muscles. Because somehow, his muscles stand out, right? You don't challenge him, right? Or sometimes, you know, there's a guy who comes in, you know, at the time when they've got to kick the field goal or kick the extra point, you know, and he never misses, right? That's what you call him, the toe, right? You don't call that sometimes, it's smart, right? Because some of that stands out, right? Some of these great wine connoisseurs, you know, they can sniff a wine and tell you not only what grape it is, but what country it came from and what county, you know? And they're really good at this, right? So you might call him the nose, right? The nose, right? Okay. So those are all examples of, but Synecdoche, you'll find them very often in daily life, right? In a way of doubt, nobody says, you know, reason more than anything else is man. That's the Synecdoche, huh? Now, we're more apt to name the whole from the part, but if you name the part from the whole, right, then that would still be the same figure of speech, huh? Now, in Tone of Messiah, we often do both, huh? We give the name of the general to the particular and vice versa, right? Okay. And so, almost in, you know, several of the Christians, St. Paul, and many other places, Thomas will explain how the word Christ is said, what? In Tone of Messiah, right? Christ means, what? Anointed, right? But we use Christ meaning, what? One man in particular, right, huh? Okay. Because among all those who are anointed, all the kings and priests and prophets that are anointed in the Old Testament, for example, he stands out, right? He's anointed with the Holy Spirit, right? So, that's an example of the Tone of Messiah, or the Bible in English, huh? Bible means what? Book, yeah. So, say this is the Bible, we're saying, we're using the general name for one particular book, because among all books, this stands out, because it is the word of God, huh? Okay? If a student is chasing girls, an amorous, we might call him, what? A Don Juan, or a Romeo, right? Or a Casanova, or something, right? And then we're transferring, in a sense, the name of a particular but famous lover, right? Romeo, or Casanova, Don Juan, using that instead of the general name, right? So, he's not Romeo, he's a lover. That's what he is. So, to call him a lover, would be to use non-feative language, right? That's why he's a lover, right? That's what we call for, to say he's a Romeo, right? Or someone who's hesitant and slow to act, they call it Hamlet sometimes, right? Okay? So, they may take somebody famous in history, like Casanova, or some fictional character, like Romeo, right? But someone who, what, stands out, right? So, this, again, is, again, common, huh? Early 50s there, and I was just interested in politics. He used to call Senator Taft, Mr. Republican, right? And so, Dirksen nominated him at the 50th dimension, he says, I give you, what, Mr. Integrity, Mr. Republican, my friend, Bob Taft, right? Don't look at you. But he's called Bob Taft, that's non-figurative, right? But Mr. Republican, it's kind of, but, well, they're all kind of Republicans, all conventional Republicans, right? But he is Mr. Republican, right? It's like you say, Mr. Baseball, or Mr. something, right? You see? I told him to see it. So, it is a very common thing, huh? One thing that's kind of interesting when you look at the epistles and so on in the New Testament, it's just Peter and Paul who are called apostles. And so, they're called the apostles by Antonin Messina. A lot of times, they see John Paul II refers to Peter and Paul as the, what, the princes of the apostles, right? Okay. But sometimes, they're called simply the apostles, huh? So, Thomas Aquinas often refers to Aristotle as the philosopher, right? And he refers to St. Paul as the, what? The apostle, yeah. Instead of St. Paul, I would say the apostle. Kind of capital A, right? He's the apostle of the Gentiles, right? So, that's very common. So, I put those two together, they're different, but they're both involved whole and part, right? But one, the integral whole, or composed whole, and the other universal whole. Do you see that? That's very close, because you're naming a whole from its part, or vice versa, right? Now, in metonymy, you have one thing is something of the other. It's not a whole or a part, compared to, right? But it's something of the other, right? There seems to be, I don't know, at least three or four examples of metonymy. Sometimes, a very common one that Thomas refers to is when you transfer the name of the container to the contained, or vice versa. So, you've got the container and the contained. Now, if you say, this is a holy place, or this is a wicked place, Thomas says, well, the place is not wicked, but the people in the place are wicked, right? But now you transfer it from the contained to the what? Container, right? Or you call this an unhappy age. Was the age the time unhappy? No. But the people or the events are unfortunate. Another way, sometimes, the name of the cause or the effect when it's transferred to the other. Shakespeare often, sometimes he'll signify the cause by a noun, and the effect, he'll use an adjective, or vice versa. You'll have the effect named by a noun, and it's caused by a, what? Adjective, right? So you might speak of scornful pride. Well, scorn is really the, what? Effect of pride, right? It's not pride itself, right? Disgraceful action, right? The action leads to disgrace, right? So, you find this in scripture. Sometimes it says time of the time of the time of the time of the time of the The earth prays the Lord. Somebody would take that as being, what? Metonym, right? It's not the earth that's going to praise the Lord, but those who are, what? On the earth, right? Okay. Now, in the case of metaphor and irony, you have something, or one is not a part of the other, or something of the other, right? But there's a likeness, or a, what? Opposite, right? Okay. And so, when the husband or the lover calls his beloved honey, right? That's an example of a, what? Metaphor, right? Okay. And even sweet is an example of a metaphor, right? The metaphor is based upon some kind of, what? Lightness, right? Again, this is very common, right? When I say, you're a pig because you eat too much, right? Okay. Or you're a rat because you did something. It's beautiful, right? These are all examples of metaphors. They're very common. To express our emotion. Thomas, in the commentary of the Psalms, he has the fullest explanation of the metaphor of sweet that I've ever seen. And he's explaining the text there, you know, taste and see how sweet is the Lord, right? And so, he says three things about the sweet, right? One is that the sweet is pleasant. Pleasing. A second thing he says about the sweet is, is that it calms us, right? Now, you can see that, you know, how when the police in the old days, that was a common thing, they find a kid and they can't, he's lost, right? He's crying and bawling, right? And they got to find the parents. Now, you can stop the kids from crying and bawling. They can buy them an ice cream cone or something, right? See? Or if you're driving across country, the little kids in the car, you know, it's good to have a little bit of candy in them, right? And when they get too restless, he'd pass back some candy and then they're quiet, you know, for a while, see? Okay? And the third thing about the sweet is, it's kind of what, it's refreshing, right? That's why you have candy in the factories and so on, right? You know, people going down the machine and getting a candy bar, so you can keep going, right? He says, the sweet then is pleasing, right? Restful, right? And what? Refreshing, right? What you see, things then are sealing God, right? So the beautiful is called sweet sometimes, right? Shakespeare said the same, your beautiful form, he says your sweet form, right? It's pleasing to the eyes, right? It's a sight for our eyes, as we say, it's refreshing, right? And that's why we often describe the beautiful as what? Restful, don't we, right? And if you go to some place, you know, and there's a beautiful scenery, it's just so restful, you know? Don't you see that, right? So it's pleasing, restful. I used to study in this little room there in the College of St. Thomas Library, right? And there's big famous painting on the wall there, and I sit there reading, I woke up, and I looked up, you know? The eyes get kind of tired reading, and you get kind of tired. Kind of pleasing to look at this painting in front of you, you know? Kind of restful, right? Kind of refreshes you, you know? And you can go back, right? So metaphor is based on likeness. Irony is based on what? The opposite, right? So if you're mean to me, and you know the way you're being mean to me, and I say, gee, you're nice. The example I always give to students is, I come in on a weekend, and you're under the table, they're drunk, and I say, what a fine example of an assumption of a college student, you know? But everybody knows that I don't mean what my words mean, right? I mean the opposite, right? So in the case of irony, I mean the opposite of what my words mean. In the case of metaphor, I mean something like what my words mean, but it's not the same thing. In the case of metonomy, that's a little more obscure, exactly how many cases are. But the most common examples I find in Thomas is for contain or contain, one is transferred to the other, right? And then he speaks maybe of cause and effect, one is said to the other. But it's not the key in a ton of mesia, it's relation of whole and part, but the two kinds of whole, composed whole, universal whole, right? I think those are the most common kinds. Something like hyperbole is finding references to hyperbole, you know, where someone says, I told you a million times not to leave here, such and such. And everybody knows that, you know, you haven't told the person a million times, right? That's obviously a figure of speech, right? Or is it one different from all of these? Maybe it is. It's something like this metaphor because you've told them many times, right? And you're taking, you know, a large number, right? But obviously, maybe it's got a little different basis for it, right? I'll murder you if you do that again, right? You know? Well, you don't really mean that. You know? But we're trying to, you know, make it very emphatic, you know? But these five are the ones that you mean the most, I think. I think, I find, you know, in Tone of Messiah, the metaphor of most of all scripture, you know, which you find in Synecdoche a lot, sometimes in Metonymy, right? And sometimes arguments, they say Thomas is defending, you know, Paul from this idea of saying something false, right? To speak ironically is not to speak falsely, right? Socrates uses irony there in the Apology, right? He proposes as a reward that he'd be pensioned off, right? I mean, it's a punishment, right? That he'd be pensioned off, right? Nobody knows he's proposing a reward rather than a punishment, huh? So I'll leave this little text here, okay? It's not that finished, but... Okay. It's got some of these texts here. And let's spend a little bit. The word figure of speech and so on. Okay. Look at that text that you're asking for. It's right there. Okay. The Corinthians, yeah. Okay. As I say, to talk about the figures of speech is really more proper to rhetoric and to the poetic art, right? If they want to use these primarily. The poet most of all, right? For him, his great glory is in his metaphors and that sort. But in rhetoric, we use metaphors sometimes too, right? So Nixon said the democratic programs are retreads, right? Oh. And the deal. And Caracol said that the young men killed in battle it's as if spring had been taken out of the year, right? So that's a famous metaphor. Let's go back now to the other topic here. I don't know if it's very important. And the idea of name equivocal by reason. If you say that a name is univocal, you'd mean that it had only one meaning, right? If you say that a name is equivocal, you mean it has, what? More than one meaning, right? And then we distinguish between a name equivocal by reason and a name equivocal by chance. Sometimes they call a name equivocal by chance purely equivocal, right? And sometimes you see a name equivocal by reason called analogous name, right? And I prefer to call it name equivocal by reason because analogous comes from the Greek word for proportion, right? And that's only one way of naming things because it couldn't be by reason to name them by proportion, right? So this here, I think, is a better way of stating that.