Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

246 Terence Parsons
one may descend to
Not this man is running or not that man is running, etc, for all the
men.
and the original proposition is entailed by any disjunct.
8.2 Clarification of the Definitions
Some clarifications of the definitions are necessary.
8.2.1 The nature of ascent and descent
The first point has to do with the nature of the inferences involved in ascent
and descent. Consider the following explanation of why ‘donkey’ is distributed in
‘Every donkey is an animal’. From:
Every donkey is an animal
one may infer
This donkey is an animal and that donkey is an animal and... for all
the donkeys.
This does not mean that if the displayed conjunction contains a term for every
donkey then ‘Every donkey is an animal’ entails ‘This donkey is an animal and
that donkey is an animal and...’, for the former sentence does not entail the
latter. What is meant instead is that from the truth of ‘ Every donkey is an
animal’, together with the information that ‘This donkey is an animal and that
donkey is an animal and . . . ’ contains a term for each donkey, one may infer
that the disjunction is true. The inference is from the generalization plus the
information about the exhaustiveness of the disjunction to the disjunction. This
is how the test should be understood.
8.2.2 Occurrences of terms have modes of supposition
Second, the classification into modes of suppositions is a classification of occurrences
of terms, not of their types. In particular, in the proposition
Every donkey is a donkey
there are two terms, each of which has its own mode of supposition: the subject
term has distributed supposition and the predicate term has merely confused
supposition. You can’t just ask for the mode of supposition of ’donkey’ inthe
proposition without specifying which occurrence is meant.