Therefore, the following five doctrines are offered as a reconstruction of an argument, an argument that will be developed throughout this book, and whose genealogy from ancient Greece to Alan’s late twelfth-century France will be explained as much as possible:

1. The cosmos is guided by a rational principle (the logos), which ensures the ultimately providential nature of the universe and all that happens within it.
2. The summum bonum is to live in accordance with that rational principle—though we have to understand the cosmos to do so.
3. Language maps isomorphically to reality, so to study language is to study reality. However, as time passes and humans degenerate, the relationship between language and reality becomes increasingly distant.
4. Bad grammar leads to mistaken ideas about reality; misunderstandings about reality lead to false jassent to impressions, and false assent in turn causes unethical behavior.
5. Grammar and ethics are linked in such a way that deficiencies or strengths in one imply deficiencies or strengths in the other.

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The Stoics have been credited with introducing this distinction into logic, specifically to solve the Elektra paradox (Allwood, Andersson, and Dahl 125-7). As Allwood, Andersson, and Dahl relate, the Elektra para- dox can be summarized as follows:

1. Elektra does not know that the man in front of her is her brother.
2. Elektra knows that Orestes is her brother.
3. The man in front of her is identical to Orestes.

Conclusion: Elektra both knows and does not know that the same man is her brother.

The solution to this paradox rests on the difference in reference in the first two premises. Both have the same extension; that is, the set of individuals to which the terms refer is the same, the individual Orestes. But they have different intensions: in one, the intension of Orestes is "the man in front of her," while the second, the intension is "her brother."

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Speaking more abstractly, the teacher claims, […] "by the fact that someone does something, he says and signifies that he ought to do it." […] Going one step further he claims, […] "There is true and false signification in the existence of things too, since by the fact that a thing is, it says it ought to be." […] This claim, that actions and things signify truth, simply by virtue of happening or existing resembles the Stoic notion that chance does not exist, but rather that all things and actions are tied in a great benevolent chain of fate.

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