We find grammatical commentaries close to Roscelin’s approach saying that words have always been introduced to signify some particular substance. Only afterwards do they come to signify other, similar things.6 Someone somewhere would have first used the word “human” and meant by it one particular human. Perhaps it was Adam referring with surprise and delight to Eve, who had just been produced from one of his ribs, and thereafter, as a matter of convention this same word “human” was applied to anything else that seemed to be similar to the first thing that bore the name of human. This does seem
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