Abstract

In this article we intend to explore the use of the prophetic statements in some epistemic models of XIVth-century theology. Specifically, we shall focus on Peter Auriol’s and William of Ockham’s theories : although they lead to different solutions, these theories are grounded on a common linguistic approach to the topic. For XIVth-century theologians, the prophecy becomes a kind of epistemic test, useful to verify coherence and firmness of the theories of knowledge. Peter Auriol manages to reconcile divine foreknowledge, future contingents and human free will with a distinction of epistemological levels. In the case of prophecies, God apprehends things and facts in the modes that are proper to his own knowledge, i.e. necessarily determined as true or false. This ensures a ground to the logic and ontological order of creation. In the same way, human knowledge apprehends in her own mode, i.e. with all the contingency of the events collocated in space and time, so securing the openness of the future and the freedom of the human will. For Ockham instead, in the wake of Duns Scotus’s definition of theology as practical science, prophetic statements have a pragmatic and semiotic nature. They are not principally descriptions or predictions of facts, but regulative signs : prophetic statements must so be intended as speech acts with a performative nature, that indicate to the viator how to rightly act and connect linguistic terms and factual events according to the simplicity of the order created by God.