  Medieval logicians insisted that original imposition had to be carried out by someone (or some group) with special authority, and this produced some puzzles about our use of proper names. If the word ‘lion’ signifies a particular species of animal, then we can say that lions are always lions, but is Mary always Mary? Buridan devoted one of the sophisms in his Summulae de Dialectica to the question of whether one can truly say “Ba will be baptized” (where ‘ba’ was deliberately chosen as a nonsense syllable), given that ‘ba’ does not signify a boy before his baptism takes place. He concluded that the sentence in question had no truth-value, though both “‘This boy is ba’ will be true tomorrow” and “This boy will be called ‘ba’” could be true. Paul of Venice asked what would happen if, after being baptized ‘Socrates’, a person was consistently called ‘Plato’ by a whole community, and even forgot his original name. Paul thought that the person would still be Socrates, since only the original baptism involved the appropriate authority. On the other hand, legitimate changes were possible, as when a newly elected pope takes on a new name. As a result of these various remarks, it seems that Mary is not Mary before she is named, and she can cease to be Mary if she is given a new name by someone with authority.