Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

The Development of Supposition Theory in the Later 12 th through 14 th Centuries 177
case shows up on the denoting phrase that binds the variable in it; the parasitic
term itself is not grammatically affected. For example, in the above example, ‘every
donkey’ receives accusative case, while ‘some seeing-y-thing’ is simply nominative.)
Turning ordinary transitive verbs into participles plus copulas maintains the
principle that a categorical proposition consists of terms plus some syncategorematic
signs plus a copula. In this sense, one can maintain that the copula is the
only true verb. However, it does not maintain the principle that a categorical
proposition contains two terms, the subject and the predicate. For analyzing a
transitive verb produces a new term. For example, in ‘Every horse a man is seeing’
there are three terms: ‘horse’, ‘man’ and ‘seeing’. This becomes important
when truth conditions are stated for categorical propositions, since they are almost
always stated for propositions with only a subject and a predicate. 26 One might
hope to see truth conditions for a proposition with three terms, or a recursive
specification of truth conditions that would extend to more than two terms. So
far as I know, nothing like this appears in any currently edited manuscript. 27
2.4 Using unanalyzed verbs
We have seen how a verb other than the copula can be decomposed into a copula
plus a common term used indefinitely. The idea is neat in theory, and it was often
used to illustrate the claim that there is only one real verb, the copula. However, in
practice, authors tended to treat verbs as if they could be taken to form categorical
propositions without being analyzed into a denoting phrase and a copula. I will
often follow this practice in quotes and examples.
2.5 Infinitizing Negation and Conversion
In English we have a prefix ‘non’ which goes on the front of a noun to indicate
things that the noun does not apply to, as in ‘Every nonstudent had to pay’. There
is no danger of this prefix being confused with the negation ‘not’, because they
are spelled differently and do not occur in the same places in sentences. In Latin
however (and also in Aristotle’s Greek) these two items were spelled the same:
‘non’. Further, if this particle occurs in front of a noun there is no way to tell
from the spelling whether it is meant to be prefixed to that noun or whether it
is merely a preceding word. So some effort had to be put into distinguishing the
readings of a sentence such as
Non homo est animal
which is ambiguous between ‘Not: a man is an animal’ and ‘A non-man is an
animal’. Aristotle called a term prefixed with ’non’ an “infinite” term. (He did not
explain the meaning of ‘infinite’.) Medieval authors called this prefix “infinitizing
negation” and called the separate word ‘non’ “negating negation”.
26 Indeed, they tend to be stated only for the original four Aristotelian forms.
27 But much work is still undiscovered and/or unedited.