Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

98 Ian Wilks
mental acts; general terms achieve generality through selective attention of the
soul to some property of a thing and inattention to other properties. But what is
specially associated with the verb in a proposition is another kind of mental act
[Rosier-Catach, 2003a, p. 78]. It is not itself an understanding, and so involves
a different sort of act from the one that yields understandings. It is an act of
putting understandings into complete affirmative or negative propositions. The
understandings and the conjoining/disjoining are at root the same kind of item —
they are all mental acts — and fit together quite naturally. That is why the act
of conjoining/disjoining can be part of the understanding of the whole proposition
(another mental act) even though it is not itself an understanding.
Note that the juxtaposition of a name and a participle — which of course is
itself a name — can produce something whose semantic content seems very much
like that of a proposition. “Running man” (homo currens), for instance, seems to
involve same two understandings as “the man runs” (homo currit), and one can be
left wondering why the first is not just as much a proposition as the second. But
they are, of course, quite different. “Running man” leaves “the soul of the hearer
hanging, and it desires to hear something more” [Abelard, 1970, p. 148 (27–28)]. 28
But “the man runs” has a completeness about it that does not leave the hearer
hanging. This difference is due to the presence of a verb “runs,” which actually
predicates the semantic content that “running” only juxtaposes. The participle
does not serve as a sign of something’s being said of something else. The verb
does, and therefore possesses distinctive content not present in a name.
This distinctive content can be rendered explicit by re-writing a finite verb like
“runs” with a corresponding copula verb phrase: “is running.” To say that the
signification of a verb reduces to the signification of a name plus some additional
mode of signification seems to be confirmed by the fact that “runs” can be rendered
thus. This equivalent form gives us a name (“running”) plus an additional sign
(“is”) not having the signification of a name, but having obvious effect on the
overall signification of the phrase in which it appears. The copula seems to express
exactly that force of predication which the verb has in addition to its name-like
signification. What emerges from Abelard’s account of the verb, therefore, is an
account of the copula. The suggestion is that the copula expresses only a mode of
signification inherent in the whole verb phrase “is running,” and must be taken in
some way inseparably from “running” in the context of the whole phrase. Indeed
if it does only supply mode of signification — if its only semantic contribution is
indeed just to indicate predicative force — then it may seem appropriate to deny
it the status of an independent word. In that case it would be in effect a syllableequivalent
which happens by lexical convention to be written as a separated word.
This latter possibility — a minimalist account of the copula — is in fact endorsed
by Abelard in the Dialectica, by his construing the whole verb phrase as
28 Abelard is, of course, just invoking the psychological criterion employed by Aristotle [Aristotle,
1963, p. 45 (16b19)] to demonstrate the non-propositionhood of individual names: “When
uttered just by itself a verb is a name and signifies something — the speaker arrests his thought
and the hearer pauses — but it does not yet signify whether it is or not.”