Duns Scotus on the Semantic Content of Cognitive Acts and Species

Scotus holds that dispositional and occurrent cognitions (intelligible species and acts of cognition, in the medieval jargon) are qualities that inhere in the soul. These qualities have semantic or conceptual content. I show that such content is nothing in any sense real, and that this content consists either in the relevant quality’s being (factually) measured by an extramental object, or in its being such that it would be measured (counterfactually) by such an object in the case that there were such an object. The measurement relation, in the case of an intelligible species, is secured by the species’s internal structure; in the case of an act of cognition, it is secured either by some sort of (non-causal) relation to a species, or by a (non-causal) relation to an external object.