Abelard's ideas about language, and his closely related thinking about human perception and cognition, bear on his ontology in two distinct ways. Abelard held that every thing which exists is a particular substance or a particular differentia or a particular accident. He also recognized, as he could hardly fail to do, that universals play a central role in language and in thinking. How is the disparity to be explained? This, for Abelard, was the nub of the problem of universals, his treatment of which will be analysed in chapter 8, after his views on perception and cognition have been presented in chapter 7. But, in the course of thinking about ontology between the time of the Dialectica and the mid-1120s, Abelard decided that there was another disparity between language and how things are, which he had not earlier recognized. He now decided that there are accident words of various sorts to which no particular forms correspond in the world of things: many sorts of particular accidents which had featured previously in his ontology are therefore eliminated. But, as will emerge, Abelard only goes part of the way towards explaining how statements using these accident words remain able to assert truths about the world of things.

This chapter will trace and discuss this development. It will begin by describing the idea of ‘denomination’, much used in twelfth-century logic to analyse the meaning of statements. Although denomination could not play exactly the same part in his theory of predication as it could in that of realist contemporaries, Abelard too initially shared what might be called the ‘semantics of denomination’.