  The last sentence of Porphyry’s text ties the ontological notion of an individual to a collection of properties, and as a corollary, it can be taken to tie the notion of an individual term to a descriptive phrase. However, there was fairly general agreement that a collection of properties could not constitute an individual, and there seems to have been no attempt to make the description of these properties into a definition of the individual, or to see them as providing the primary signification of singular terms. In the twelfth century, Abelard pointed out at some length in his Dialectica that Socrates is the name of an individual substance and that the accidents associated with him by some description cannot enter into the imposition of the signification of the name, else the name would be equivocal through time. Socrates was called Socrates before he became a poet (or musician) and after he ceased to be the son of Sophroniscus (presumably by the latter’s death).  The notion that one could define an individual by giving a list of common properties was also ruled out by Priscian’s account of names (see §4), and the resulting distinction between primary and secondary signification.