Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

Peter Abelard and His Contemporaries 99
semantically equivalent to a single word, and the copula as semantically equivalent
to a syllable within that word: “When ‘is a man’ is said, or ‘is conceivable’ or
‘is white,’ let us understand as one word ‘to be a man’ or ‘to be white’ or ‘to be
thinkable”’ [Abelard, 1970, p. 138 (15–17)]. 29 This move is in keeping with a more
general tendency of Abelard in the Dialectica to preserve as rigorously as possible
the Aristotelian distinction between syllables, words and phrases: words contain
only non-significative elements (syllables) and phrases contain only fully and independently
significant words. A word like respublica (treasury) is compounded
from the words res (thing) and publica (public), whose meanings are obviously
relevant to the meaning of the compound, but do not directly determine it; that
is, its meaning is not a direct additive product of theirs. So Abelard stipulates that
its meaning is not a product of theirs at all. The word is taken as a single semantic
unit, and its seeming constituent words are accordingly regarded as individual
syllables, and not as retaining any distinct meaning therein [Abelard, 1970, p. 115
(20–23)]. He proceeds to make this sort of stipulation not only for individual words
but whole phrases. A phrase like “dead man” contains an adjectival opposition, in
that men are by definition alive, and so “dead man” is a contradiction in terms. 30
Abelard resolves the contradiction by claiming that the meanings of constituent
words are not preserved in the phrase, stipulating rather that the constituents are
to be taken as meaningless syllables, with meaning conferred only upon the phrase
taken as a whole. A similar analysis is attempted in explaining why “good harpist”
describes a harpist good at harp-playing, as opposed to a harpist good in a more
general — perhaps moral — sense [Abelard, 1970, p. 116 (31)–117 (1)], and also
in explaining the meaning of quantified subject phrases (“all men,” “some men,”
and “no men”) in syllogistic propositions [Abelard, 1970, p. 188 (26-32)]. 31
Elsewhere Abelard reverts to a less radical view: that the signification of words
is affected by context, and words used in context often have their received signification
altered by other words in their vicinity. This view is less radical because it
falls well of short of saying that the words actually cease to be word-equivalents,
and play the role of syllable-equivalents instead. It is simply an account of the
transference (translatio) of signification, not the outright loss of it. 32 This account
proves useful for Abelard outside of his work as a logician. In a theological setting,
for example, he can argue that God’s being three persons does not imply that
God is three (i.e., three things), because “three” in “three persons” has different
signification than when used in isolation [Abelard, 1969a, p. 269 (134–38); Wilks,
29 In the translation of [Kretzmann, 1982, p. 509], the phrases are actually rendered as single
words: “to-be-a-man,” “to-be-white” and “to-be-thinkable.”
30 An account of the long history of commentary on this example is provided in [Ebbesen, 1979].
31 Abelard does not account for prepositions and conjunctions in this way, however. Since the
approach of the Dialectica does not allow for any intermediate stage between meaningless syllables
and independently meaningful words, he is faced with the choice of construing prepositions
in either one way or the other. So he attempts to construe them as independently meaningful.
See [Wilks, 1998a, p. 184] and [Wilks, forthcoming].
32 This important notion has been variously treated: [de Rijk, 1962, pp. 51–56, 94–98], [Jolivet,
1982, pp. 279–84], [Mews, 1987, pp. 23–25], [Rosier, 1988], [Wilks, 1998a], [Rosier-Catach, 1999],
and [Wilks, forthcoming].