Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

The Development of Supposition Theory in the Later 12 th through 14 th Centuries 217
6.1.2 The non-thing view
In contemporary semantics many people think that a that-clause stands for an
abstract proposition, something like a Fregean thought or perhaps a Russellian
proposition. Abelard has a view something like this. He holds that an accusativeinfinitive
construction supposits for “non-things which are not nothing”. A “nonthing”
is something that is neither a substance, nor a quality, nor any other sort
of thing that falls within the Aristotelian categories of what there are. To say
that these things are “not nothing” is to clarify that saying that an accusativeinfinitive
supposits for a non-thing is not a roundabout way of saying that it
doesn’t supposit for anything. Granted, it does not supposit for any thing, but
‘thing’ has a restricted use here.
Abelard argues that we should acknowledge such non-things:
We often call by the name ‘cause’ what are not any thing. For example,
when we say “He was flogged because he does not want to go to the
forum.” ‘He does not want to go to the forum’, which occurs as a
“cause” here, is no essence. [Spade 1994, 42]
Although Abelard does not put his view in semantic terms, Adam Wodeham
does. He says that an accusative-infinitive can supposit for itself, or for what the
corresponding proposition signifies:
A distinction must be drawn . . . because man-being-an-animal can
supposit for and be taken for the dictum of a proposition, and in this
sense it is indeed complex or incomplex. Or it can be taken for that
which is signified by such a dictum, in which case it is neither complex
nor incomplex, but is something signifiable by the complex — for
example, by the complex Manisananimal. 68
The expression ‘man-being-an-animal’ is a translation of a Latin phrase ‘hominem
esse animal’, which also translates as ‘a man to be animal’. This expression can
supposit for what is signified by the proposition ‘A man is an animal’. It would
also normally be translated by a that-clause, so the view as pertaining to English
would be that the that-clause ‘that a man is an animal’ supposits for what ‘A man
is an animal’ signifies. When pressed to say just what [a] man to be [an] animal
is, he says (again, the accusative-infinitive is translated as a participial phrase):
we should say that man-being-an-animal is not a thing (aliquid) or
a substance, but is instead man-being-something and man-being-asubstance-or-accident.
. . . One sign signifies adequately not substance
but something-being-a-substance and so forth, whereas another sign
signifies something-not-being-a-substance and so forth. . . . You will
say: man-being-an-animal is either something or nothing. I say that
68 In Pasnau [2002, 337]. Wodeham speaks of what is signified by the dictum ofaproposition,
which would be the actual accusative-infinitive clause, but his example makes it clear that he is
discussing what is signified by the proposition itself.