  William proposes a representationalist theory of cognition. He holds that it is not things or states of affairs themselves that are in the intellective power but rather signs or intelligible forms that serve to represent them. He takes these signs to be mental habits, that is to say, not bare potentialities but potentialities most ready to be actualized. Propositions are those complexes formed from signs through which states of affairs are represented to the mind. Although William speaks of these signs as likenesses, he is well aware of the difficulty in thinking of concepts as such, and he concludes that in fact there need not be a likeness between a sign and that of which it is a sign (OO II suppl. 214b; Teske 2000, 454).