Page 296 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Language and Logic
i.e., that it is in some way predestined. Accounts of this argument are very sketchy, deriving from a not wholly convincing outline given some hundreds of years later by Epictetus, but it is fairly clear that Dio- dorus thought of necessity and possibility as applying to some such item as a sentence (or proposition or statement). He demies these notions in a temporal way, as would be expected if they are to serve in an argument for fatalism, so that, for example, necessity is that which is true and will never be false, whilst possibility is that which is either true or will be.
Later philosophers in this tradition came to think of the modal notions in a nontemporal way. Thus, necessity is defined as that which is true and does not admit of falsehood. Of course, unlike the Diodorus definition, this latter definition does not eliminate modality. For, one cannot so much as understand the definition without already possessing the idea of 'not admitting of falsehood,' and this latter notion is clearly itself modal, i.e., it means roughly 'cannot pos- sibly be false.'
See: Aristotle and the Stoics.
5. Roman, Medieval, and Renaissance Logic
Clearly it is impossible to include in this survey any detailed discussion of individual works. However, it is necessary to have some general idea about these periods in order to grasp the changes that came to take place later.
5.1 The Roman Contribution
The period from the second century BC to the sixth century AD was one of consolidation and transmission of ideas rather than innovation. Early in this period, Cicero provided some Latin translations of Greek work in logic, both Aristotelian and Stoic. In the second century AD, the physician, Galen, produced a number of treatises on logic, only a small portion of which survive, though they were influential in his time. And in the third and fourth centuries, writers such as Alexander of Aphrodisias, Sextus Empiricus, and Porphyry produced works which remain important sources for today's knowledge of Greek logic. It was in this period that the bitter rivalry between Ari- stotelian and Stoic logic was at its height. As was mentioned earlier, it is difficult to understand why there should have been such rivalry, since from today's perspective there is only one overall framework in which formal and informal logic is conducted. However, in the absence of some such framework, the clear differences in schools and personalities tended to exaggerate the smallest differences in content and presentation.
The culmination of this period comes with the work of Boethius (470-524 AD). It was his work which was to influence the whole of medieval logic, though this was more because of his scholarly abilities than
because they contained any advances. However, it is important to note that in several ways, his com- mentaries and glosses on Greek logic were responsible for the different emphases one finds in medieval logic. In particular, he did seem to think of logic as embed- ded somehow in the study of language, and he did preserve the discussion of conditional statements which eventually led to the study of so-called 'conse- quentiae' in the Middle Ages. Exactly in what way Boethius thought of the relationship between logic and language is not clear, since it is not clear whether he separated the idea of language from that of thought itself. But there is certainly a difference in emphasis between Boethius and his master Aristotle in this respect, and that was perhaps enough to encourage the kind of philosophy of logic and language that developed in the Middle Ages.
5.2 Medieval Logic
The logic of the Middle Ages is at once frustratingly stationary and full of fascinating detail of argument and discussion. Certainly, it is the one period in the subject which one cannot even begin to treat in a survey of this breadth. Indeed, a simple list of names of those who either wrote textbooks in the subjects or ventured speculations about this or that specific topic would be longer than there is place for here. For the obsession with detail and close argument that have come to be associated with the Middle Ages, especially in the later period after the firm establishment of the universities, is nowhere shown more clearly than in logic. Nonetheless, and leaving names aside, there are two main areas which were of special concern to log- icians in the Middle Ages, though the work done in these areas did little to change the fundamental role played in formal logic by the syllogistic.
The first of these was a study of the signification of words—a study now located firmly in the philosophy of language. The tortuous path of this work, and the myriad distinctions to which it gave rise, cannot even be summarized here. However, it is clear that whilst little was done to extend the range of formal logic beyond categorical and some conditional forms, this study (known as 'proprietates terminorum') had a depth and generality which went beyond anything in Aristotle. Worries about what kind of signification belonged to logical words, names, adjectives, the copula, and even worries about the levels at which linguistic items were discussed (as elements of sound, thought, or in terms of connection to universals or some such), all figured in these debates.
The second main area of inquiry was into the form and logic of conditional statements. The impetus for this study comes from Abelard who lived in the early part of the twelfth century. In his Dialectica he sharply distinguishes between the use of devices such as 'if... then' to indicate passages of argument and as devices for making complex statements out of simpler ones.
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