Martin Lenz

In reply to the question whether articles of faith can be demonstrated, William of Ockham articulated a peculiar thesis: Even though it is impossible to prove articles of faith in this life, the blessed in heaven could demonstrate our creditive propositions. In contrast to traditional views, William held that both conclusions drawn in heaven and conclusions drawn in this life are subject to the same criteria. This assumption led to a controversy between William's contemporaries, namely, Walter Chatton and Adam Wodeham, who discussed whether theories of propositions are applicable to articles of faith. This essay tries to explain why the problem of demonstrating creditive propositions arose and in what way William's answer gave a new meaning to the dispute.

This paper reconstructs a controversy between a pupil of Alberic of Paris and Peter Abelard which illustrates two competing ways of reconciling different ancient traditions. I shall argue that their accounts of the relation between sentences and thoughts are incompatible with one another, although they rely on the same set of sources. The key to understanding their different views on assertive and non-assertive sentences lies in their disparate views about the structure of thoughts: whereas Abelard takes thoughts to be compositional, the opponent's arguments seem to rely on the premise that the mental states which correspond to sentences cannot be compositional in the way that Abelard suggested. Although, at a first glance, Abelard's position appears to be more coherent, it turns out that his opponent convincingly argues against weaknesses in Abelard's semantic theory by proposing a pragmatic approach.