Abstract

Thomas Aquinas gives us many reasons to think that conceptual thought is linguistic in nature. Most notably, he refers to a mental concept as a verbum or word. He further says that such concepts may be either simple or complex, and that complex concepts are formed out of simple ones, through composition or division. These complex concepts may either affirm or deny a predicate of a subject. All of these claims suggest that conceptual thought is somehow language-like. Moreover, Aquinas would have been led in this direction by several venerable traditions. Augustine, for instance, speaks of “the word that we speak in our heart, a word which is not Greek nor Latin nor part of any other language.” And Aristotle, at the beginning of his De interpretatione, says that spoken words are symbols or signs of mental concepts; later generations would take this claim to warrant a treatment of mental concepts as themselves a kind of language. But how exactly should we understand this apparent connection in Aquinas between thought and language?