Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

222 Terence Parsons
7 MODES OF SUPPOSITION: THE EARLY VIEW
7.1 Modes of Personal Supposition
Personal supposition occurs when a term is used to stand for things that it signifies
(according to nominalists) or for things that fall under the form that it signifes.
Terms with personal supposition may be divided into those that have discrete
supposition and those that have common supposition. Discrete supposition is
possessed by singular terms that are used personally. This includes proper names,
such as ‘Socrates’ or a simple demonstrative such as ‘that’ when it is the whole
term making up a denoting phrase, or a whole complex demonstrative such as
‘that donkey’ when it is the whole term making up a denoting phrase. Common
supposition is the kind of supposition that a common term has when it is the
whole term making up a denoting phrase (usually) with a quantifier word.
A common term which is used personally has what is called a mode of (common)
personal supposition. 73 A mode of supposition is something like a kind of
quantificational status. It is a status that a term has in a proposition based on
where it occurs in the proposition and what quantifier word occurs with it. There
are three modes of common personal supposition:
• Determinate Supposition
• (Confused and) Distributive Supposition 74
• Merely Confused Supposition
Determinate supposition has something to do with a term’s being existentially
quantified; a paradigm example is ‘donkey’ in‘Some donkey is spotted’. Distributive
supposition has something to do with a term’s being universally quantified;
a paradigm of distributive supposition is ‘donkey’ in‘Every donkey is spotted’.
Merely confused supposition is neither of these; it needs to be discussed. (An
example of a term with merely confused supposition is ‘donkey’ in‘Every animal
is a donkey’.)
Almost all authors agreed on the classification of terms of the Aristotelian standard
forms of categorical propositions: 75
73 Some authors (see Marsilius of Inghen 1 (57-59)) believe that terms used materially can
also be assigned a mode of supposition, since they are common terms. For example, in ‘Every
donkey in that sentence is bisyllabic’ theword‘donkey’ is a common term that stands for any
word spelled d-o-n-k-e-y. On this analysis, ‘donkey’ has distributive material supposition in that
sentence. Most authors either disagree with this view, or ignore it. According to some, even
discrete terms used materially are common terms, and can have modes of supposition, as in
‘Every this uttered this morning was the subject of the sentence in which it occurred’.
74 Some authors use ‘distributed’ and some use ‘distributive’; I use these interchangeably. (The
term ‘distributed’ may presuppose that a term cannot have that mode of supposition unless it
has been distributed by some distributing sign; see section 7.5 below.)
75 Exception: Peter of Spain T VI.6 (70-71) held that all predicates have simple supposition,
and do not have any mode of personal supposition. Some authors did not discuss the predicates
of particular negatives.