Page 513 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

It is important to note that supposition was con- sidered a prepositional property of a term. The iso- lated noun 'man,' for instance, has no supposition at all. Thus medieval authors from the late twelfth cen- tury onwards distinguished themselves by a 'con- textual approach' to supposition (see Rijk 1967:113- 117). They assigned a referential function not to single words but to the parts of a proposition. Oneexception to this general rule is the 'natural supposition' which was defined by Peter of Spain as the acceptance of a common substantival term for all those individuals which participate in the universal form signified by the term. So the term 'man' supposits naturally—i.e., by itself, without a prepositional context—for all past, present, and future human beings participating in the universal man. Many fourteenth-century logicians however, including William of Ockham, Walter Bur- ley (ca. 1275-1344/45), Marsilius of Inghen (ca.1330- 96), and Albert of Saxony (d.1390), rejected such non- propositional supposition (see Rijk 1973:45).
The principal threefold division of supposition was followed by a subdivision of personal supposition. This second part of supposition-theory was an attempt to 'descend' by logical inference from the referring term to its ultimate, singular referents (see Spade 1988). Only some terms (e.g., 'Socrates' in 'Socrates is running') have a 'discrete supposition' that is, a reference to one precise thing. Other terms have a 'common supposition' since they stand for a plurality of singular things. Such a common supposition is either determinate (determinate?) or confused (con-
fusd). In the proposition 'A man is running' the subject has a determinate common supposition, because there is no indication which man is running, so that the proposition can be verified by any single instance, and we can say 'This man or that man or some other man is running.' But in the proposition 'Man is an animal' the subject has a confused common supposition since every man is an animal, and we have to say 'This man and that man and that man, etc., is an animal,' i.e., we distribute the common term to singularreferents.
Supposition-theory provided not only, a detailed theory of reference but also served as the basis for a theory of truth-conditions. According to Ockham, a singular, particular, or universal affirmative prop- osition is true if and only if the subject and the predi- cate terms supposit for the same thing (see Adams 1987:385-96; Perler 1992:109-25). 'Socrates is white,' for instance, is true if and only if'Socrates' and 'white' stand for the same individual thing. It is clear, however, that 'white' does not stand exclusively for an individual thing but also indicates that this thing has a certain property. Ockham took account of this difference by introducing a distinction between absol- ute and connotative terms: 'Socrates,' an absolute term, supposits for Socrates and signifies the sub- stance Socrates. But 'white,' a connotative term in this proposition, stands for Socrates and connotes (or
signifies secondarily) the quality white; 'white' can be nominally defined as 'something having whiteness.' Thus 'white' stands for Socrates, but by virtue of its connotation it makes one think of the whiteness inhering in Socrates. This explanation is intended to avoid positing a universal for which 'white' would have to supposit.
In the middle of the fourteenth century, logicians paid special attention to the semantic function of verbs expressing an epistemic act ('to know,' 'to doubt,' 'to recognize,' etc.). John Buridan (1295/1300-58) claimed that these verbs always imply an appellatio rationis of the terms with which they are combined. But this appellatio applies differently to the terms pre- ceding and following the verb. For example, in 'I recognize the approaching man' (Cognosce ven- ientem') the verb makes the postposited term name (appellare) only the ratio that someone is coming, whoever that person might be. In 'Regarding the approaching man, I recognize him' (' Venientem cogno- sco') instead the verb makes the preposited term name all the rationes of the approaching person. So the second proposition expresses not only that I recognize that someone is approaching, but also that I recognize this person as having certain features, for instance, as being my teacher or my father (see Nuchelmans 1988:68-71). This is an attempt to explain how the word-order affects the semantic function of a par- ticular class of terms. Such an analysis may thus be recognized as a transition from a theory of terms to a theory of propositions, since it establishes the proper- ties of one term by analyzing the syntactic structure of the proposition in which the term is used.
3. The Semantics of Propositions
When the medievals analyzed a proposition (prop- ositio) they were not speaking of the mere content of an indicative sentence (the standard twentieth-century philosophical use of'proposition') but of a predicative composition of terms accompanied by an act of judg- ing or asserting. After Abelard, two opposing theories were put forward in order to explain the function of the copula 'is' in 'S is P' (see Malcolm 1979). Accord- ing to the inherence theory (defended by the majority of the thirteenth-century authors), the copula indi- cates that the referent of the predicate inheres in the referent of the subject; e.g., in 'Socrates is a man' the copula indicates that the species man is in the individual Socrates. The identity theory, on the other hand (held by most fourteenth-century authors), claims that the copula just points out that subject and predicate refer to the same object; in 'Socrates is a man' the copula makes plain that 'Socrates' and 'man' are both referring to Socrates who is an individual man. The two explanations of the semantic function of 'is' are obviously based on divergent ontological conceptions. Whereas the inherence theory posits a universal existing in an individual substance, the
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