William Ockham and Mental Synonymy. The Case of Nugation

In recent years an important point of discussion among the scholars of William of Ockham has been the possibility of accounting for a reductionist interpretation of Ockham’s mental language. Especially, the debate focused on the legitimacy of eliminating connotative simple terms from mental language by reducing them to their nominal definitions, on the argument that such terms and their definitions are synonymous and no synonymy occurs in the mental. In my paper I argue for championing the synonymy between connotative simple terms and their nominal definitions (against Claude Panaccio's interpretation), but at the same time for qualifying their synonymy (against Paul Vincent Spade's interpretation). My point is that they can be said to be semantically but not epistemologically synonymous. Such a crucial distinction explains why Ockham posits both in the mental.