Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

The Development of Supposition Theory in the Later 12 th through 14 th Centuries 223
• The subjects of universals and the predicates of negatives have distributive
supposition.
• The subjects and predicates of particular affirmatives, and the subjects of
particular negatives, have determinate supposition.
• The predicate of a universal affirmative has merely confused supposition.
7.1.1 Deriving the Classification
DISTRIBUTED
Every S is P No S is P
MERELY CONFUSED
Some S is P Some S is not P
DETERMINATE
Usually the three-part classification of terms results from two bifurcations: personal
supposition is divided into determinate versus confused, andconfused is
divided into distributed-and-confused versus merely confused. 76
COMMON PERSONAL SUPPOSITION
DETERMINATE
CONFUSED
DISTRIBUTED MERELY CONFUSED
The issue of how to decide whether a term is determinate or confused, and
distributive versus merely confused, is a central concern of the theories.
7.1.2 What are the Modes of Supposition for?
What is the point of classifying terms into the above categories? The most popular
application of the modes of common personal supposition is to analyze fallacies
76 So the ‘merely’ in ‘merely confused’ contrasts with the ‘distributed’ in ‘distributive and
confused ’. The term ‘confused ’ does not here mean ‘bewildered’; it means something more like
‘taken together’. (The Latin transliterates as ‘fused with’.)