More puzzling for the modists were cases where language doesn’t look as if it even could correspond to the world under any mode of being. To what does the word “nothing” refer, or the word “matter,” assuming, as the medievals did, that matter is pure potentiality? Again, the role of mental concepts could come to the rescue here. By negating concepts that do refer to reality, the mind is capable of forming notions of potentiality, nothingness, or privation, even though no such absences really exist outside the mind.9 This solution could also be used to handle “empty” words like “centaur” or
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