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On Signs
Roger Bacon's "Opus maius" represents an attempt to create a whole new vision of what Christian education should be, one centered on service to the Church. One chapter of this work, "On Signs," is the most comprehensive and innovative treatise on semiotics in the thirteenth century. To understand the myriad ways in which things and words signify, Bacon says, is "a thing of marvelous usefulness and beauty."
- GenresPhilosophy
160 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 2013
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34 people want to read
About the author
Roger Bacon
182 books45 followersborn perhaps 1214
died 1292
Opus Majus (1267) of English friar and philosopher Roger Bacon, known as "Doctor Mirabilis," argued that Christian studies encompass the sciences.
This Franciscan, a member of Order of Friars Minor, whose scholastic accolade means "wonderful teacher," placed considerable emphasis on nature through empirical methods. The works of Aristotle and later pseudo-works like those of Abu Ali al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham of Egypt inspire the modern method, which he in Europe earliest advocated, as people, mainly starting in the 19th century, sometimes credit him. From books, he, essentially a medieval thinker, obtained much of his "experiment" in the scholastic tradition, as more recent reevaluations emphasize. Reception of work of Bacon often reflects the central concerns and controversies over centuries, according to as a survey.
died 1292
Opus Majus (1267) of English friar and philosopher Roger Bacon, known as "Doctor Mirabilis," argued that Christian studies encompass the sciences.
This Franciscan, a member of Order of Friars Minor, whose scholastic accolade means "wonderful teacher," placed considerable emphasis on nature through empirical methods. The works of Aristotle and later pseudo-works like those of Abu Ali al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham of Egypt inspire the modern method, which he in Europe earliest advocated, as people, mainly starting in the 19th century, sometimes credit him. From books, he, essentially a medieval thinker, obtained much of his "experiment" in the scholastic tradition, as more recent reevaluations emphasize. Reception of work of Bacon often reflects the central concerns and controversies over centuries, according to as a survey.
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December 25, 2020
As everyone remembers, medieval civilization betokens the high-water mark of a symbolist mentality, what with heraldry, courtly romance and monkish preoccupation with the polyvalent religious imagery of scripture. Ancient man’s ascription of a mysterious fateful force behind the names of things revelatory of a hidden divine order had not yet seceded to the mere conventionalism of the modern man, whose calculative urge cannot brook any recalcitrance on the part of a nature in full possession of herself rather than bent to his devices and control. Therefore, the curious reader will surely take note when coming across the present opusculum on the theory of signs by the enigmatical thirteenth-century Franciscan friar Roger Bacon, extracted from his massive lifework, the Opus majus. Bacon receives accolades today for anticipating (in his primitive, idiosyncratic way) modern empirical science. For his life-project revolves around a new, purportedly more scientific foundation of philosophical culture than the received Aristotelianism of Bacon’s contemporaries, the proto-scholastics which he, with the support of the papacy, intends to place at the disposal of the church’s mission to proclaim the gospel, and indeed, his synthesis of Greek and Arabic sources introduced the field of perspectival optics into the Latin west and, what is more, he was among the first to stress the indispensability of experiment as opposed to a priori reasoning, if one wishes to find out how God, in fact, created the contingent world. A solo effort of an isolated man before his time, no matter how scholarly and industrious, is bound to remain but an adumbration of what was waiting in the wings for a more propitious occasion, or cultural milieu; but nobody can deny the impressive grandeur of Bacon’s vision.
Where semiotics fits into Bacon’s grand project: what distinguishes a text from any typical physical system is that the former is composed of words, and a word, after all, is a very curious thing. The extraordinary power of natural language derives from the circumstance that the word, unlike the components of a physical system (atoms, molecules, electron spins or what have you), refers to something beyond and outside itself in as much as it possesses a meaning either by its intrinsic nature or by virtue of having one imposed on it; in short, it is a symbol (employing the term in the loose sense one does these days in computer science). The so-called linguistic turn in twentieth-century philosophy is to be understood as motivated by a belated recognition of this defining feature of the linguistic, which plays an inestimable role in structuring reality as we human beings encounter it, comprehending not just the laboratory but also society and the world of ideas, after the rather-too-naïve reductive materialism of the nineteenth century had run its course. The medieval scholastics have an original point of view compared to ours (which is to say, by and large that of twentieth-century analytic philosophy), at once winningly down-to-earth and concrete yet simultaneously prone to lofty abstraction and excursions into speculative theology.
Thus, one will welcome the chance to immerse himself in an alien thought-world with Bacon’s De signis. The translator Thomas Maloney has outfitted this edition with a helpful thirty-page introduction and numerous explanatory notes at difficult places in the Latin original. Let the reader beware: Bacon’s exposition may strike one as outwardly dry, at first glance, but conceals a wealth of potential, if one were to follow through on the bearing on the spiritual life of Bacon’s views on semiotics. For, as anyone who says the divine office every day, as certainly would Bacon and his peers have done, knows, scripture is replete with pregnant poetic imagery and typological associations between the Old and New Testaments. Unfortunately, Bacon himself declines to enter very much into the mystical theology of symbols in the part of his Opus majus reprinted here (q.v., our review here of the mystical corpus of the Pseudo-Dionysius, which contains the background material Bacon presupposes). For an unsurpassable introduction into high scholastic theology with its strange manner of speaking about the simplicity of God and the weird predicate logic of propositional statements about the Trinity to which it leads, one could do no better than to consult Peter Lombard’s Sentences in four volumes; which everyone in Bacon’s audience would have known very familiarly as it then figured as the backbone of the scholastic curriculum. If one make due allowance for this context, he will be in a position to compensate whenever Bacon’s spare text, almost free of illustrative examples, may begin to seem listless.
What about the content of this notable text on signs? Proceeding from a definition of what a sign is which he invented independently of and partly against Augustine, Bacon takes up and comments extensively on topics such as the difference between natural versus imposed signs, equivocal versus univocal predication, the five modes of equivocation and the relation between it and analogy, the individual rather than conceptual referent of names and lastly co-signification, or the role played by the connotations of a term. Along the way, he introduces a lot of technical terminology and pauses here and there to dilate on various logical puzzles having to do with semiotics. Bacon’s discussion of a sampling of problems in semiotics is good for widening the scope of one’s perspective on the field, whether or not one agree with him on every detail.
A handful of critical remarks directed to Bacon’s implicit philosophical stance. One cannot but be struck by his insouciant presentism regarding the question of the possibility of predicating across being versus non-being. For Bacon, only the living Caesar could be construed as a being; after his death, he becomes a non-being, so that anyone speaking of the dead Caesar would technically be referring to a non-being. The same goes for anything else posited in the past or in the future. This oddity appears to be a symptom of a broader malady. From what one is entitled to infer from a text that does not enter into any philosophical issues per se, as being outside of its intent, Bacon’s metaphysics comes across as basically Scotist and friendly towards Avicenna. Were one, having assimilated Bacon’s views on the nature of signs, to set out to criticize them, perhaps here would be a suitable starting point. A Scotist, univocal metaphysics may be sufficient for grasping the essence of terms we employ in everyday life for things in our direct experience of the world, at least approximatively, but one suspects must fall radically short when it comes to speaking of the things of God. For then its inherent essentialism becomes a limiting factor. Would a more existentialist point of view on the nature of being such as is typical of Thomism issue in another, more adequate semiotics of the sign? This reviewer is by no means expert enough to answer a question of this sort, but perhaps one ought to look to Aquinas’ commentary on Lombard’s Sentences (comprehensive as it may be, the Summa theologiae itself eschews any extended and dedicated treatment of semiotics). Regrettably, however, Bacon himself in the present extract does not take up theology except cursorily.
General observations prompted by a preliminary reading of Roger Bacon on signs:
1) The medieval mentality eventuates in a completely different way of representing the world from ours, which latter is thoroughly, down to the root dominated by the mechanistic stance of the revolutionary science of the seventeenth century and by the regnant technological understanding of being allied with it (which Roger Bacon’s namesake Francis Bacon did so much to entrench in modern man’s outlook on the world). It will be well for us to attend to the medieval precedent because it draws attention to things we habitually overlook. The commanding authority of Aristotle disposes medieval men to a holistic outlook on the general features of reality that stands in sharp contrast with our instinctive reductionism, which can be traced back to the seventeenth century and perhaps whose most influential proponent would be Robert Boyle. But are we faced here with a strict either-or alternative? This reviewer thinks not. As an analogy, one could cite the Fourier transform. A given function can equally well be represented in ordinary or in reciprocal space. Why would one ever want to Fourier transform it into reciprocal space? The answer (as the great quantum physicist Niels Bohr understands very well) is that the ordinary spatio-temporal representation may indeed be convenient for getting an overview of what the function is, but that the reciprocal-space representation can often be far better adapted to characterizing its dynamics, or how it behaves under time-evolution. Each mode of description enjoys its respective advantages and disadvantages. For instance, one could not speak of a monochromatic light wave of a given frequency and wavelength unless it pervades all of space, but, of course, this situation never arises in our experience. Rather, when we talk of red, resp. blue light, we resort to an implicit approximation. By the way, this problem lies at the root of why quantum electrodynamics proves to be so devilishly difficult to bring under the aegis of mathematical physics and, to date, has defied all concerted efforts to do so – notwithstanding widely circulated statements to the contrary by poorly informed physicists.
Returning to the philosophical point of the analogy: neither a completely holistic nor a completely reductionistic theory would be adequate to a full account of reality. The unparalleled successes of the modern empirical sciences over the past four hundred years certainly argue that the scholastics were missing something when they too hastily placed themselves under the tutelage of Aristotle. But the other side of the coin is no less valid: what goes missing among those whose imaginations are circumscribed by an unreflectively reductionistic outlook is an illative sense for the full significance and import of things, what the medievals were so perceptively attuned to with their symbolist mentality. A symbol, after all, cannot possibly be reduced to atomic-level constituents, as it were, any more than the content of a literary text could be captured by regarding it as just a bag of words, ignoring all syntax and semantics; the mere attempt to do so would be hopelessly misguided. That all is why it behooves us to study Roger Bacon’s fundamental work on signs and to reflect with care on what it could mean for us today.
2) To pursue this theme a little further: the medieval scholastic tendency to view existing things holistically, from the standpoint of their unity, lends itself to a high-level description of the phenomena, without which we would be at a loss to understand what is going on. For instance, teleology, however much ideologically straightjacketed scientists of our day wrap themselves into contortions to deny, would appear to be indispensable to any coherent account of biological function in an organism. For similar reasons, the social sciences, if such they deserve to be called, cannot realistically proceed on the basis of a protocol language consisting of pure observation statements. Some feeling for what it means to be a human being, such as was always the preserve of the humanities, is necessary in order to formulate incisive concepts that are to have purchase in uncovering the regularities behind displayed conduct, either at the level of the psychology of the individual or at that of the sociology of society as a whole.
What about in physics? An anti-reductionistic viewpoint must complement the reductionistic, if only at the stage of concept formation. What Galileo overlooks with his polemical doctrine of the primary versus secondary qualities is that, if one throw out all knowledge of qualia, it is by no means clear that one can ever get back to them from a representation of the phenomena that is purely to be based on the supposed primary qualities of figure and motion. Descartes’ claim to have done just this in his physics (as elaborated in the Principia Philosophiae of 1644), after all, amounts almost entirely to an illusion, however fortunate it may have been in promoting the rise of a mathematical physics. Perhaps we can in comparatively simple systems having few relevant degrees of freedom, as notably encountered in the domain of celestial mechanics, but the greater the level of complexity, the less reason we have a priori to suppose it possible. For instance, how could Bardeen, Cooper and Schrieffer ever have arrived at their theoretical explanation of superconductivity in terms of the mechanism of Cooper pairing if they had forbidden themselves, on programmatic grounds, from appealing to the very concept of a phonon?
Perhaps we have strayed too far afield from Roger Bacon himself. But this reviewer, at least, wishes to point out these larger considerations so as to motivate anyone who might be hesitant as to its value, to engage in an assiduous study of this innovative and visionary work on signs.
Where semiotics fits into Bacon’s grand project: what distinguishes a text from any typical physical system is that the former is composed of words, and a word, after all, is a very curious thing. The extraordinary power of natural language derives from the circumstance that the word, unlike the components of a physical system (atoms, molecules, electron spins or what have you), refers to something beyond and outside itself in as much as it possesses a meaning either by its intrinsic nature or by virtue of having one imposed on it; in short, it is a symbol (employing the term in the loose sense one does these days in computer science). The so-called linguistic turn in twentieth-century philosophy is to be understood as motivated by a belated recognition of this defining feature of the linguistic, which plays an inestimable role in structuring reality as we human beings encounter it, comprehending not just the laboratory but also society and the world of ideas, after the rather-too-naïve reductive materialism of the nineteenth century had run its course. The medieval scholastics have an original point of view compared to ours (which is to say, by and large that of twentieth-century analytic philosophy), at once winningly down-to-earth and concrete yet simultaneously prone to lofty abstraction and excursions into speculative theology.
Thus, one will welcome the chance to immerse himself in an alien thought-world with Bacon’s De signis. The translator Thomas Maloney has outfitted this edition with a helpful thirty-page introduction and numerous explanatory notes at difficult places in the Latin original. Let the reader beware: Bacon’s exposition may strike one as outwardly dry, at first glance, but conceals a wealth of potential, if one were to follow through on the bearing on the spiritual life of Bacon’s views on semiotics. For, as anyone who says the divine office every day, as certainly would Bacon and his peers have done, knows, scripture is replete with pregnant poetic imagery and typological associations between the Old and New Testaments. Unfortunately, Bacon himself declines to enter very much into the mystical theology of symbols in the part of his Opus majus reprinted here (q.v., our review here of the mystical corpus of the Pseudo-Dionysius, which contains the background material Bacon presupposes). For an unsurpassable introduction into high scholastic theology with its strange manner of speaking about the simplicity of God and the weird predicate logic of propositional statements about the Trinity to which it leads, one could do no better than to consult Peter Lombard’s Sentences in four volumes; which everyone in Bacon’s audience would have known very familiarly as it then figured as the backbone of the scholastic curriculum. If one make due allowance for this context, he will be in a position to compensate whenever Bacon’s spare text, almost free of illustrative examples, may begin to seem listless.
What about the content of this notable text on signs? Proceeding from a definition of what a sign is which he invented independently of and partly against Augustine, Bacon takes up and comments extensively on topics such as the difference between natural versus imposed signs, equivocal versus univocal predication, the five modes of equivocation and the relation between it and analogy, the individual rather than conceptual referent of names and lastly co-signification, or the role played by the connotations of a term. Along the way, he introduces a lot of technical terminology and pauses here and there to dilate on various logical puzzles having to do with semiotics. Bacon’s discussion of a sampling of problems in semiotics is good for widening the scope of one’s perspective on the field, whether or not one agree with him on every detail.
A handful of critical remarks directed to Bacon’s implicit philosophical stance. One cannot but be struck by his insouciant presentism regarding the question of the possibility of predicating across being versus non-being. For Bacon, only the living Caesar could be construed as a being; after his death, he becomes a non-being, so that anyone speaking of the dead Caesar would technically be referring to a non-being. The same goes for anything else posited in the past or in the future. This oddity appears to be a symptom of a broader malady. From what one is entitled to infer from a text that does not enter into any philosophical issues per se, as being outside of its intent, Bacon’s metaphysics comes across as basically Scotist and friendly towards Avicenna. Were one, having assimilated Bacon’s views on the nature of signs, to set out to criticize them, perhaps here would be a suitable starting point. A Scotist, univocal metaphysics may be sufficient for grasping the essence of terms we employ in everyday life for things in our direct experience of the world, at least approximatively, but one suspects must fall radically short when it comes to speaking of the things of God. For then its inherent essentialism becomes a limiting factor. Would a more existentialist point of view on the nature of being such as is typical of Thomism issue in another, more adequate semiotics of the sign? This reviewer is by no means expert enough to answer a question of this sort, but perhaps one ought to look to Aquinas’ commentary on Lombard’s Sentences (comprehensive as it may be, the Summa theologiae itself eschews any extended and dedicated treatment of semiotics). Regrettably, however, Bacon himself in the present extract does not take up theology except cursorily.
General observations prompted by a preliminary reading of Roger Bacon on signs:
1) The medieval mentality eventuates in a completely different way of representing the world from ours, which latter is thoroughly, down to the root dominated by the mechanistic stance of the revolutionary science of the seventeenth century and by the regnant technological understanding of being allied with it (which Roger Bacon’s namesake Francis Bacon did so much to entrench in modern man’s outlook on the world). It will be well for us to attend to the medieval precedent because it draws attention to things we habitually overlook. The commanding authority of Aristotle disposes medieval men to a holistic outlook on the general features of reality that stands in sharp contrast with our instinctive reductionism, which can be traced back to the seventeenth century and perhaps whose most influential proponent would be Robert Boyle. But are we faced here with a strict either-or alternative? This reviewer thinks not. As an analogy, one could cite the Fourier transform. A given function can equally well be represented in ordinary or in reciprocal space. Why would one ever want to Fourier transform it into reciprocal space? The answer (as the great quantum physicist Niels Bohr understands very well) is that the ordinary spatio-temporal representation may indeed be convenient for getting an overview of what the function is, but that the reciprocal-space representation can often be far better adapted to characterizing its dynamics, or how it behaves under time-evolution. Each mode of description enjoys its respective advantages and disadvantages. For instance, one could not speak of a monochromatic light wave of a given frequency and wavelength unless it pervades all of space, but, of course, this situation never arises in our experience. Rather, when we talk of red, resp. blue light, we resort to an implicit approximation. By the way, this problem lies at the root of why quantum electrodynamics proves to be so devilishly difficult to bring under the aegis of mathematical physics and, to date, has defied all concerted efforts to do so – notwithstanding widely circulated statements to the contrary by poorly informed physicists.
Returning to the philosophical point of the analogy: neither a completely holistic nor a completely reductionistic theory would be adequate to a full account of reality. The unparalleled successes of the modern empirical sciences over the past four hundred years certainly argue that the scholastics were missing something when they too hastily placed themselves under the tutelage of Aristotle. But the other side of the coin is no less valid: what goes missing among those whose imaginations are circumscribed by an unreflectively reductionistic outlook is an illative sense for the full significance and import of things, what the medievals were so perceptively attuned to with their symbolist mentality. A symbol, after all, cannot possibly be reduced to atomic-level constituents, as it were, any more than the content of a literary text could be captured by regarding it as just a bag of words, ignoring all syntax and semantics; the mere attempt to do so would be hopelessly misguided. That all is why it behooves us to study Roger Bacon’s fundamental work on signs and to reflect with care on what it could mean for us today.
2) To pursue this theme a little further: the medieval scholastic tendency to view existing things holistically, from the standpoint of their unity, lends itself to a high-level description of the phenomena, without which we would be at a loss to understand what is going on. For instance, teleology, however much ideologically straightjacketed scientists of our day wrap themselves into contortions to deny, would appear to be indispensable to any coherent account of biological function in an organism. For similar reasons, the social sciences, if such they deserve to be called, cannot realistically proceed on the basis of a protocol language consisting of pure observation statements. Some feeling for what it means to be a human being, such as was always the preserve of the humanities, is necessary in order to formulate incisive concepts that are to have purchase in uncovering the regularities behind displayed conduct, either at the level of the psychology of the individual or at that of the sociology of society as a whole.
What about in physics? An anti-reductionistic viewpoint must complement the reductionistic, if only at the stage of concept formation. What Galileo overlooks with his polemical doctrine of the primary versus secondary qualities is that, if one throw out all knowledge of qualia, it is by no means clear that one can ever get back to them from a representation of the phenomena that is purely to be based on the supposed primary qualities of figure and motion. Descartes’ claim to have done just this in his physics (as elaborated in the Principia Philosophiae of 1644), after all, amounts almost entirely to an illusion, however fortunate it may have been in promoting the rise of a mathematical physics. Perhaps we can in comparatively simple systems having few relevant degrees of freedom, as notably encountered in the domain of celestial mechanics, but the greater the level of complexity, the less reason we have a priori to suppose it possible. For instance, how could Bardeen, Cooper and Schrieffer ever have arrived at their theoretical explanation of superconductivity in terms of the mechanism of Cooper pairing if they had forbidden themselves, on programmatic grounds, from appealing to the very concept of a phonon?
Perhaps we have strayed too far afield from Roger Bacon himself. But this reviewer, at least, wishes to point out these larger considerations so as to motivate anyone who might be hesitant as to its value, to engage in an assiduous study of this innovative and visionary work on signs.
September 7, 2022
This is probably one of the few works of the Middle Ages dedicated to semeiotics. Apparently, this was originally intended to be a part of Roger Bacon’s Opus Majus. At some point, it was apparently separated from it. It is entirely possible that even though it was intended to be added to a draft or later edition of the Opus Majus, Bacon simply didn’t add it. Bacon often revised his books. He also would take extracts from one work and insert it into another. It cannot be said exactly why this was not included in the editions of the Opus Majus that have come down to us. I have Belle’s edition of the Opus Majus and it isn’t in there, but one can definitely see where it would fit in the work.
Roger Bacon investigates a subject that was often central to the debates between sophists and philosophers in the days of Socrates. Words are often somewhat ambiguous. Context often reveals the intended meaning, but not always. Bacon uses Aristotelian categories to discuss this ambiguity, e.g. “man” is a species, but it is also used in reference to a particular “man.” Cicero can be used in reference to a non-living person that is buried in his grave; but he can also be referenced as a writer or even as sculpture that depicts him. The subject matter is interesting. It was taken up by Ramon Llull, and through him, you can extrapolate Bacon's influence on Giordano Bruno.
This might be a more thought-provoking work if it were read within the Opus Majus. I had started that work some time ago but never finished it. I may refer to this again when I dedicate myself to reading and finishing the Opus Majus. I give it around 4 stars. This was a novel subject during this period.
Roger Bacon investigates a subject that was often central to the debates between sophists and philosophers in the days of Socrates. Words are often somewhat ambiguous. Context often reveals the intended meaning, but not always. Bacon uses Aristotelian categories to discuss this ambiguity, e.g. “man” is a species, but it is also used in reference to a particular “man.” Cicero can be used in reference to a non-living person that is buried in his grave; but he can also be referenced as a writer or even as sculpture that depicts him. The subject matter is interesting. It was taken up by Ramon Llull, and through him, you can extrapolate Bacon's influence on Giordano Bruno.
This might be a more thought-provoking work if it were read within the Opus Majus. I had started that work some time ago but never finished it. I may refer to this again when I dedicate myself to reading and finishing the Opus Majus. I give it around 4 stars. This was a novel subject during this period.
May 31, 2022
I took a total flyer, thinking it would be a nice change of pace to delve into a new area of philosophy. In retrospect, this was not the best choice for that. Bacon has some interesting things to say about signification and ambiguity, but this is going to remain a book for specialists.
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