De Grammatico

A whole dialogue built on one Latin word, asking whether a man who knows grammar is a substance or a quality.

Latin, the original language

First published: 1080(aged 47)
Original language: Latin

Overview

A student brings his teacher a puzzle about a single word: grammaticus, which in Latin means a grammarian, someone who has learned to read and write. He wants to know whether a grammarian is a substance or a quality. Every grammarian is a man and every man is a substance, so it seems a substance; but the word is said of a man because of the knowledge he has, and knowledge is a quality. Aristotle had used the same example in his Categories for words formed from other words, grammarian from grammar, and Anselm knew Aristotle's logic through the Latin translations and commentaries of Boethius. The dialogue's answer is to keep two things apart: what a word signifies and what it names. Grammaticus signifies the quality of knowing grammar and names the man who has it, and a long run of apparent contradictions comes apart once the two are tracked separately. Anselm kept the work apart from his other dialogues. In the preface to On Truth he calls it useful for those being introduced to dialectic, the art of logical argument, and says it belongs to a different field from his three dialogues on Scripture. Its date is disputed. Some scholars place it around 1060, which would make it the earliest of his surviving works; others put it decades later. Its modern reader arrived in 1964, when the logician Desmond Paul Henry published a translation and study, The De Grammatico of St Anselm, and analysed it with the formal systems of the Polish logician Stanisław Leśniewski. Others have since doubted that Anselm was committed to anything so systematic.

Key concepts

What is the difference between what a word signifies and what it names?

A word signifies what it brings to mind by itself, and it names what people actually call by it in ordinary speech. “Grammarian” signifies knowledge of grammar, because that is all the word contains. It names a man, because a man is what we call a grammarian. The two can come apart, and once they are tracked separately the dialogue’s contradictions dissolve one after another.

What are a “substance” and a “quality”?

These are two of the categories Anselm takes from Aristotle. A substance is a thing that exists in its own right, such as a man or a horse. A quality is something a substance has, such as being white or knowing grammar, which cannot exist on its own. The puzzle arises because “grammarian” seems to belong to both lists at once.

What is a derived word, like “grammarian” or “white”?

A derived word is one formed from another word to describe what has the thing the first word names: grammarian from grammar, white from whiteness. Aristotle used the grammarian as his example of such words. They are hard to classify because they point two ways at once, to the quality and to whoever has it, which is why Anselm builds the whole dialogue around one of them.

What does a syllogism need its shared term to do?

A syllogism draws a conclusion from two premises that share a term, as in “every man is an animal, every grammarian is a man”. Anselm insists that the shared term must be shared in meaning and not only in sound. If the same word carries two senses, nothing follows, and if two different words carry the same sense, the argument can still work. Many of the student’s paradoxes rest on this mistake.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

What a Word Means and What It Names

Is a grammarian a thing or a quality of a thing? The puzzle sounds idle, but the answer decides how any word built from another word, like white from whiteness, connects language to the world.

The student’s puzzle comes with proofs on both sides, and Anselm lets them run until they seem to show that a grammarian is not a man. His way out is to track two jobs a word does. “Grammarian” signifies the knowledge of grammar, a quality, and names the man who has it, a substance. Told only that something white is shut in a house, nobody learns there is a horse inside. A syllogism, he adds, needs its shared term to be shared in meaning and not merely in sound, and most of the student’s paradoxes fail exactly there.

semantics
signification
predication
reference
naming
meaning
substance
quality
accident
categories
aristotle
syllogism
middle term
fallacies
ambiguity
ordinary language

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 41
distinct concepts: 51
by passages held, corpus-wide: #676

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “semantics” and “signification”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 21 pairings. 33 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
semantics	signification	10
predication	semantics	7
categories	signification	6
reference	signification	6
semantics	substance	6
reference	semantics	5
categories	predication	4
logic	semantics	4
predication	signification	4
categories	semantics	3
logic	predication	3
logic	signification	3
predication	substance	3
reference	substance	3
semantics	syllogism	3
signification	substance	3
categories	substance	2
predication	syllogism	2
categories	logic	1
categories	reference	1
predication	reference	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1076 Monologion
The earliest of Anselm's books about God and the longest he wrote at Bec, composed in the mid-1070s while he was still prior there.
LA
1078 Proslogion
The book by which Anselm is known: twenty-six short chapters composed at Bec in 1077 and 1078, a year or two after the Monologion.
LA
1078 Reply to Gaunilo (Liber apologeticus contra Gaunilonem)
A treatise Anselm did not choose to write: his answer to a critic of the Proslogion, in which he restates its argument point by point.
LA
1080 De Grammatico (De grammatico) you are here LA
1080 On Truth (De veritate)
The first of three dialogues Anselm wrote at Bec in the 1080s and later arranged as a set, with On Freedom of Choice and On the Fall of the Devil.
LA
1085 On Freedom of Choice (De libertate arbitrii)
Builds on the definition of justice reached in On Truth, and supplies the account of the will that On the Fall of the Devil then tests on the first sin of all.
LA
1085 On the Fall of the Devil (De casu diaboli)
The longest of the three dialogues from Bec and Anselm's fullest account of evil, worked out on the case of the angels who fell.
LA
1094 On the Incarnation of the Word (Epistola de incarnatione Verbi)
A letter turned treatise, begun by the abbot of Bec around 1092 and finished by the Archbishop of Canterbury two years later, addressed to the pope.
LA
1098 Why God Became Man (Cur Deus homo)
The founding text of the satisfaction theory of the atonement, in two books, completed during Anselm's first exile from England.
LA
1099 On the Virgin Conception and Original Sin (De conceptu virginali et de originali peccato)
A sequel to Why God Became Man, written a year later for Boso, the questioner of that dialogue, to give a second answer to a question it had raised.
LA
1102 On the Procession of the Holy Spirit (De processione Spiritus Sancti)
Given first as a speech at a council and written up four years later: the treatise in which Anselm argues not with a pupil or a critic but with another church.
LA
1107 De Concordia (The Compatibility of God's Foreknowledge, Predestination, and Grace with Human Freedom) (De concordia praescientiae et praedestinationis et gratiae Dei cum libero arbitrio)
Anselm's last completed treatise, written in 1107 and 1108 after his second exile, and his answer to a question the student had raised in On Freedom of Choice more than twenty years before.
LA

— or open another of their works