William of Ockham Quotes on Truth
William of Ockham’s Summa Logicae (c.1323) and the Quodlibetal Questions gave fourteenth-century scholasticism its most rigorous statement of nominalist truth-theory and the parallel logical analysis from which the principle of parsimony (Ockham’s razor) takes its philosophical seriousness. The central thesis is that the bearers of truth are not the independently existing universals the realist scholastic tradition had analyzed but the propositions formed in mind from the natural signs of the things they signify — with the corresponding logical-semantic apparatus of supposition theory supplying the analysis of how the terms of a proposition stand for the singular things on which the truth of the proposition turns. The framework, defended against the realist alternatives of Scotus and the older Thomist tradition, shaped late medieval and early modern logic, the broader nominalist tradition through Buridan and Gabriel Biel, and the early modern semantics descending from Hobbes and Locke.
Quotes
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“Plurality is not to be posited without necessity.”
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate -
“It is vain to do with more what can be done with fewer.”
Frustra fit per plura, quod potest fieri per pauciora. -
Attributed to William of Ockham:
“Nothing is to be posited as necessary in nature unless it is established either by self-evidence, or by experience, or by the authority of Sacred Scripture.”
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Attributed to William of Ockham:
“All things are possible to God which are not contradictory.”
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“Intuitive cognition is such that when some things are cognized, of which one inheres in the other, or one is spatially distant from the other, or exists in some relation to the other, immediately in virtue of that non-propositional cognition of those things, it is known if the thing inheres or does not inhere, if it is spatially distant or not, and the same for other true contingent propositions, unless that cognition is flawed or there is some impediment.”
Opera Theologica (1986), edited by Gedeon Gal, Vol. I, p. 31. -
“It is on account of theology alone that any assertion whatsoever should be called catholic or heretical. For only an assertion which is consonant with theology is truly catholic, and only one which is known to be opposed to theology is known to be heretical. For if some assertion were found to be opposed to decrees of the highest pontiffs, or also of general councils or also to laws of the emperors, nevertheless, if it were not in conflict with theology, even if it could be considered false, erroneous or unjust, it should not be counted as a heresy.”
Vol. I, Book 1, Ch. 2 , as translated by John Kilcullen and John Scott (2003).