James Ross

(? - 2010)

The attention of philosophers. linguists and literary theorists has been converging on the diverse and intriguing phenomena of analogy of meaning:the different though related meanings of the same word, running from simple equivocation to paronymy, metaphor and figurative language. So far, however, their attempts at explanation have been piecemeal and inconclusive and no new and comprehensive theory of analogy has emerged. This is what James Ross offers here. In the first full treatment of the subject since the fifteenth century, he argues that analogy is a systematic and universal feature of natural languages, with identifiable and law-like characteristics which explain how the meanings of words in a sentence are interdependent. Throughout he contrasts his with classical and medieval views.

analogy, the similarity along with difference, among meanings, among sorts of thinking, and among realities. Analogy theory ori­ginated with *Aristotle in its three main parts: analogy of meaning, analogous thinking, and analogy of being. There were some ante­cedents in *Plato, where the names of Forms and of participating things are the same but differ in meaning, and the notion of ‘being’ is said to differ with what we are talking about, for example Forms versus physical things (Sophist). Systematic use of the three elem­ents to unify philosophy and to resolve problems is, however, Aristotle's invention along with the idea that *metaphor is a species of analogy. Aristotle distinguished what were later called analogies of attribution, based on causation, signs, symptoms, and represen­tations (medical skill, medical supplies; hat/head cover, hat/in pic­ture), from analogy based on proportionality, A: B :: C : D; where the common implicit predicate is related in meaning (supplied food.

To avoid the deadends, I redeploy[52] the idea that integral human freedom (and understanding) has two modes. One is "natural" and the other "supernatural," though dividing the matter that way supposes the "natural" is the residue after the integrated whole is lost, because the supernatural[53] contains the natural "eminently" the way olympic winning routines envelop the qualifying skills.[54] In my account, humans were never "merely" objects in nature at all-- that is, objects, alongside stones and tigers and dinosaurs, that are entirely consequences of matter and biotic life, or explicable the way trees and volcanos are. Humans never had a "completion"-- a fulfilment-- that can be defined by conditions of earthly life or attained by "flourishing," as other living things do.[55].

This paper enlarges the analogy of meaning doctrine to show that it is a general, law-like linguistic phenomenon, and not peculiar to philosophy. The theory of forms, considered as active, repeatable, intelligible structures of things (accessible as such to intelligent beings alone), is basic to ground the sciences of nature and to an account of knowledge. Aquinas’s accounts of real natures, universals, natural and angelic things, causation, abstraction, knowledge, etc. are grounded in the theory of forms. The theory of forms can be adapted to discern and even invent intelligible structures; thus we can account for real and common natures. Structures that are explanatory of the behavior of things, and are not themselves reductively explicable in terms of their own material components, are the constitutive structures of things and processes. There are real common natures of both things and processes, but ‘being common’ is the resultant of the physicalmultiplication of repeatable (because receivable) intelligible structure. Thus the commonness of a nature, like being human or being a chicken, is not antecedentto the individuals, as Plato thought, but consequent upon them.

Philosophy, as Aquinas, and many others, described it-- as a demonstrative progression from self-evident premises to evident (or even necessary [Scotus]) conclusions,-- is rarely attempted nowadays, even by "scholastic" philosophers. Demonstrative success,-- that is, entirely to eliminate competitors to one's conclusions, -- is not the expectation now, nor has it been the achievement of philosophers historically. Thus, some restrictions upon starting points may be relaxed as unnecessary, e.g. that they be self-evident.