Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

180 Terence Parsons
that is not a man. Because of the restrictions by tenses and modalities (section 5)
this ambiguity is usually cancelled out in actual use. For example, in the sentence
‘Every non-donkey is grey’ the present tense of the sentence (and its lack of a
modal word) restricts the supposition of the subject to presently existing things.
And when you limit all the things that aren’t donkeys, including nonbeings, to the
existing things among them, you get the same class as when you limit the beings
that aren’t donkeys to existing things. It is an interesting question as to whether
Peter’s ambiguity is always cancelled out in this way.
2.6 Complex Terms with Modifiers
We have been considering terms consisting of a single word — a noun or something
behaving like one. Some terms are complex. The simplest examples are nouns
modified by adjectives or participles: ‘grey donkey’ or ‘running donkey’. In simple
cases their semantics is clear: ‘grey donkey’ stands with respect to a time for
whatever ‘grey’ and ‘donkey’ both stand for with respect to that time. (Or perhaps
for whatever the substantivated version of ‘grey’ and ‘donkey’ both stand for with
respect to that time.) The combination of ‘running’ with ‘donkey’ is similar. In
more complicated cases a more roundabout account needs to be given. Probably
the complex term ‘donkey seeing every horse’ needs to be counted as a “reduced
relative clause” — ‘donkey which is seeing every horse’. We turn now to relative
clauses.
2.7 Relative Clauses and their derivatives
2.7.1 Restrictive Relative Clauses
Relative clauses come in two forms: restrictive and nonrestrictive:
The woman who left early was miffed. RESTRICTIVE
The woman, who left early, was miffed. NONRESTRICTIVE
We will only discuss restrictive relative clauses. Restrictive relative clauses make
complex terms. In distinguishing restrictive from nonrestrictive relative clauses
Buridan says:
[In ‘A man who is white is colored’] there is one predicate here, namely,
‘colored’, which by the mediation of the copula is predicated of the
whole of the rest as of its subject, namely, of the whole phrase: ‘man
who is white’; for the whole phrase: ‘who is white’ functions as a
determination of the subject ‘man’. And the case is not similar to ‘A
man is colored, who is white’, for there are two separate predicates
here, which are predicated separately of their two subjects, and there
is not a predicate here which would be predicated by the mediation of
one copula of the whole of the rest. And although these [propositions]
are equivalent, they are not equivalent if we add a universal sign. For