Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

194 Terence Parsons
example, personal supposition is not necessarily supposition for persons, as is
clear in ‘No stone is a crystal’, in which neither ‘stone’ nor‘crystal’ supposits for
any person.
There are difficulties in defining exactly when a certain kind of supposition is
present, even when it is clear in practice what the intended answer is supposed
to be. For example, you cannot define material supposition as a case in which a
word supposits for itself, because of examples like:
Some words are nouns
Here, ‘word’ is used personally, not materially, even though it supposits for itself
(because it supposits personally for all words, including the word ‘word’). Likewise,
you cannot define simple supposition in terms of a word’s suppositing for a form,
because in
Every species has a genus over it
the word ‘species’ is used personally, not simply, even though it supposits (personally)
for forms. These were not difficulties in practice, and so I won’t dwell on
the problem of definability. 44
4.2 Material Supposition
If you want to say something about a word, you can use the word itself to do so
— this is material supposition. An obvious example is “Homo est nomen” {“Man
is a noun”}. In modern English we usually put a mentioned word in quotation
marks, or in italics, or in another font — or we do nothing at all and just rely on
context to make it clear that we are mentioning the word. In medieval times there
were no italics or quotation marks, and so one needed to rely on context to tell
when a word is being taken to stand for itself, or for other words of the same type,
or for the spoken version of the word (if it is written), or for words with the same
root and a different inflection. Any of these uses are called material supposition.
In contemporary analytic philosophical writing there is a convention that using
a word to mention itself is a kind of misspelling — for proper spelling, the word
must be lengthened by adding quotation marks to it. This changes it to a different
word; for example, these are two completely different words:
44 See discussions in Buridan SD 4.3.2 (257): “Another doubt is: “How does the subject
supposit in the proposition: ‘A noun is a conventionally significative utterance’?–it appears that
it supposits materially, as it supposits for itself and for many other terms.” I say that it supposits
personally, for it does not supposit for itself because it is such an utterance, but because the term
‘noun’ along with many other terms are the ultimate significata of the utterance ‘noun’. In the
same manner also, in the proposition ‘Every utterance is a sound’ the terms supposit personally,
even if they supposit for themselves, for they supposit for themselves only insofar as they are,
together with other utterances and sounds, the ultimate significata of the utterances ‘utterance’
and ‘sound’.”
Ockham SL I.64 Handles cases of the above sort by the addition of the qualification at the
end of this account: ”a term supposits personally when it supposits for the thing it signifies and
does so significatively.” He does not define ‘significatively’.