Abelard's distinction between signifying understandings and signifying the world collapses if the world is only accessible to language through the very understandings he seeks to exclude.

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Abelard: # Abelard Peter Abelard (1079–1142) was a French philosopher and theologian who became famous for his brilliant teaching at the University of Paris and for his tragic love affair with Héloïse, a student who became a nun. He developed new ways of thinking about logic and reasoning, and challenged church authorities by questioning whether blind faith alone was enough—he believed people should use their minds to understand religious beliefs. His life and ideas made him one of the most influential and controversial thinkers of the medieval period.
Distinction collapses(the philosophical claim being made about Van Cleve's two categories): When two things that were thought to be different turn out to be the same thing, or no longer meaningfully different.
epistemology(Contrasted with purely descriptive scientific inquiry): A normative enterprise that tells us how we ought to reason from evidence and how we ought to justify our beliefs, as distinct from merely describing how we do reason or justify beliefs
signifying the world(contrasted with signifying understandings)

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