  For Buridan, linguistic confusion is the source of many of the traditional problems of metaphysics and natural philosophy. His approach is broadly nominalistic, but Buridan's nominalism is more of a parsimonious way of doing philosophy than a doctrine about the ontological or metaphysical status of universals.  For example, when a cause is understood as being actual rather than merely potential, does our conception of it qua cause change in any way? Aristotle leaves this ambiguous in Metaphysics V.2, but some medieval philosophers thought it necessary to posit an additional state of affairs to explain the dynamic aspect of causality, i.e., the fact that a contingent state of affairs needs to be brought about by some agent. Thus, if we think of God as the cause of Socrates, there must be something else, God's-being-the-cause-of-Socrates (deum esse causam Sortis), distinct from both God and Socrates, to account for his existence. This ‘something else’ then becomes not only what is signified by the proposition ‘God is the cause of Socrates’ (complexe significabile), but also the proper object of our knowledge that God is the cause of Socrates. Buridan replies by arguing that philosophers who think this way do not know how to interpret human discourse. They take everything too literally. But we should not be misled by what a proposition literally says, or seems to say, into thinking that there must be some new kind of entity corresponding to God's being the cause of Socrates, especially since such reifying moves do not help us to understand what is happening when a cause actually causes (QM V.7–8: 30va–33ra).