LOGIC AND LANGUAGE language that regional languages derive their signiWcance The mental language contains some, but not all, of the grammatical features studied by the modists Thus Mental contains nouns and verbs, but not pronouns and particles The nouns have cases and numbers, and the verbs have voices and tenses, but there are not diVerent declensions of nouns and conjugations of verbs as in Latin grammar If two Latin expressions, or two expressions in diVerent languages, are synonymous with each other, then, according to Ockham, they will correspond to one, not two, elements of Mental It follows that in Mental itself there is no such thing as synonymy Other logicians in later ages have from time to time endeavoured to construct ideal languages in which there is no ambiguity or redundancy Modern formal logics can be looked at as such idealizations of certain fragments of natural language: the propositional connectives like ‘and’, ‘or’, and ‘if ’, the quantiWers like ‘all’ and ‘some’, and various expressions concerned with tense and moods Ockham deserves credit for being a pioneer in pointing out the idealization that is involved in applying formal logic to natural language, even if we may smile at his readiness to transfer idiomatic features of medieval Latin into the universal language of the mind It is one thing when a logician constructs an ideal language for a particular purpose, as an object of comparison to draw attention to features of natural languages that are ambiguous or invite confusion It is another matter when logicians—medieval or modern—maintain that their ideal language is somehow already present in our use of natural language, and contains the ultimate explanation of the meaningfulness of the way we use words in everyday speech If this was Ockham’s intention, then his invention of Mental was futile, for it serves no such explanatory purpose In the Wrst place, there is a problem about the nature of the mental entities corresponding to spoken and written nouns Ockham himself seems to have worried about this, and to have changed his mind on the topic at least once Initially he identiWed the names of mental language with mental images or representations These were creations of the mind—‘Wctions’ that serve as elements in mental propositions, going proxy for the things they resembled Fictions could be universal in the sense of having an equal likeness to many diVerent things 145