LOGIC AND LANGUAGE Whether ‘being’ is analogous or univocal is a murky question not because of diYculties about analogy but because of the almost universal opacity of the medieval notion of being If we are talking about existence, as expressed, say, in the sentence ‘There is a God’, then the question whether being is an analogous or univocal predicate does not arise since attributing existence to something is not a matter of attaching a predicate to a subject But, in Scotus at least, ‘to be’, period, seems equivalent to a vast disjunction of predicates: ‘to be a horse, or a colour, or a day, or ’ and so on ad inWnitum So understood, ‘to be’ seems clearly univocal Suppose that there were only three items in the universe, A, B, and C The predicate ‘ is either A, or B, or C’ seems to attach in exactly the same sense to each of the three items Modistic Logic Scotus did not make any substantial contribution to formal logic, though his metaphysical ideas on the nature of power and potentiality were to have a signiWcant long-term eVect on modal logic He was, however, long credited with an interesting work on the borders of logic and linguistics, a Grammatica Speculativa that the young Martin Heidegger took as the subject of his doctoral thesis The work is now regarded as inauthentic by scholars, and attributed not to Scotus but to his little-known contemporary Thomas of Erfurt, writing about 1300 The work is important as representative of a new approach to logic, adopted by Radulphus Brito (d 1320) and a number of thinkers in the late thirteenth century, known as ‘modistic logic’ in contrast to the ‘terminist logic’ which we have seen in the works of Peter of Spain and William Sherwood Rather than studying the properties of individual terms, these modist logicians studied general grammatical categories—nouns, verbs, cases, and tenses, for instance—which they called modi signiWcandi, or ways of signifying Meaning, according to the modists, was conferred on sounds by human convention, which they called ‘imposition’ The unit element of meaning was the dictio, ‘diction’ A single diction might embrace many diVerent verbal forms: the cases of a Latin noun, for instance, plus the adjectives and adverbs associated with it A favourite example was the diction for pain, which included the noun ‘dolor’ in its diVerent cases, the verb for feeling 142