Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

Peter Abelard and His Contemporaries 103
content and the sort of force with which it is asserted or otherwise put forward.
The content may be contained in an incomplete phrase like “running man” and
put forward with no sort of force at all. But when a verb is in place to mark
the relevant disposition of soul the corresponding force is brought to bear upon
the content. In the case of assertion we have seen that this is a function not of
the mental acts of conception which constitute the basic signification of verbs and
names alike, but rather a function of the mental act supplementary to those, which
marks the predicative relation and operates as a mode of that basic signification.
Presumably this holds for the other kinds of complete phrase as well; in each
case, it may be supposed, their distinctive force arises from a specific mode of
signification through a specific way of inflecting or otherwise presenting the verb.
So the sentential content of “Socrates is coming” is put here with assertive force,
but could be put otherwise with interrogative, imperative, precative or optative
force (respectively: “Is Socrates coming?”, “Socrates, come!”, “Socrates, please
come,” and “Would that Socrates would come”). 41
For the logician, of course, it is only the first of these five kinds of force —
assertive — that constitutes an appropriate object of interest [Abelard, 1970, 152
(27–8)], the others being relegated to non-dialectical subject matters. Abelard
has shed much light on how individual words combine to be productive of the
propositions they compose. He must now turn to the special semantic properties
of propositions themselves. The point of departure is the Boethian definition of
the proposition as that which “signifies a truth or a falsehood” [Abelard, 1970, p.
153 (33); Boethius, 1990, p. 2]. To grasp the special character of the proposition
as a semantic unit accordingly requires some insight into what is meant by “true”
and “false.”
To this end, Abelard suggests a key distinction: “Just as names and verbs have a
twofold signification — of things and understandings — we also grant that propositions
have a twofold signification: according to the understandings composed of
the understandings of their parts, and according to their dicta” [Abelard, 1927,
p. 367 (9–12), Abelard, 2006, 04.26]. Individual names generate understandings
and name things, and in some sense the same can be said of propositions. But
what has so far been said about the semantics of stating has focussed on understandings
only. The key question has been how the combination of words into
phrases is made meaningful by the combination of their associated understandings
into larger conceptual structures. But this cannot be the whole picture. To satisfy
their full semantic function, names are normally expected to refer. Likewise,
to satisfy their full semantic function, propositions are normally expected to be
true. Just as there must be something for the name to refer to, there must also
147]. Martin Lenz argues that for Abelard the true criterion of completeness is not the fact that
the listener does not expect to hear more (the “suspense-criterion”), or the fact that the phrase
contains a finite verb (the “grammatical criterion”), or the fact that it signifies a predication
(the “logical criterion”), but the fact that one of the propositional attitudes is expressed [Lenz,
2005, pp. 381, 383].
41 For Abelard’s examples (which do not, as mine do, use the same content throughout) see
[Abelard, 1970, p. 151 (6–15)].