Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

216 Terence Parsons
I believe that he is a cleric
I believe him to be a cleric
An accusative-infinitive construction is so-called because the subject is in the accusative
case (‘him’ instead of ‘he’) and the verb is in the infinitive (‘to be’ instead
of ‘is’). It is apparent that accusative-infinitive constructions behave semantically
much like that-clauses; the major difference is that the tense of an embedded
accusative-infinitive clause is parasitic on the tense of the main verb, whereas the
main verbs of that-clauses have tenses of their own. 66
In medieval Latin, that-clauses are rare, and accusative-infinitives are the norm.
People who translate Latin regularly translate Latin accusative-infinitive constructions
into English that-clauses. Scholars who translate semantic essays also generally
do this as well. This causes trouble only when the author is explicitly
discussing the syntactic form of the accusative-infinitive. I will use the accusative
infinitive form.
Accusative-infinitives occur in sentences in positions where regular terms occur
with personal supposition. For example, in ‘Socrates believes a proposition which
Plato utters’ the complex phrase ‘proposition which Plato utters’ would normally
be taken to supposit personally for propositions that Plato utters. The question
naturally arises, then, of whether accusative-infinitives supposit, and what they
supposit for. I will discuss three positions on this.
6.1.1 Ockham’s view
The most well-known view is that of Ockham. He holds that we tend to interpret
accusative-infinitives materially: they supposit not for themselves, but for
the corresponding indicative propositions. So ‘him to be a cleric’ supposits for a
proposition of the form ‘he is a cleric’. 67 The objects of belief, then, are these
propositions. If the propositions are the mental ones of this form, then this is
not very different from the modern view that propositions are abstract entities
that are expressed by written and spoken propositions. (On the medieval view,
mental propositions are “signified by” spoken ones, or the spoken propositions are
“subordinated to” the mental ones.) If Ockham meant that accusative-infinitive
constructions materially supposit for spoken or written propositions, then you get
something like the modern view that the objects of belief, etc, are sentences.
66 Often the “independent” tense of a that-clause is, semantically, interpreted parasitically. For
example, in ‘She believed that he was mad’ the time of the being mad is usually understood to be
the same as the time of the believing, or understood to be previous to the time of the believing.
It is not usually just any time prior to the utterance of the sentence. The time of the being
mad in accusative-infinitive ‘She believed him to be mad’ must be taken to be the time of the
believing.
67 This is part of a general treatment of accusative infinitive clauses: SL I.67 (198) “Likewise
in ‘A man to run is true’ the subject ‘a man to run’ does not supposit for itself but for the
proposition ‘A man runs’, which it does not, nevertheless, signify. [I have changed the translator’s
that-clauses to accusative infinitives and removed interior quotation marks.]