Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

266 Terence Parsons
Still other authors 138 defined merely confused supposition in terms of descent to
either a disjunctive or a conjunctive term. Since one or the other of these descents
is always possible, this is a redundant provision.
Of course, we are arguing about definitions, and Ockham may have intended
to let grammar decide what mode of supposition a term has. But he never says
anything like this. I doubt that he noticed this — and likewise for the other
authors who followed him in this.
Omitting the Ascent Condition As we have seen, Buridan did not go along
with Ockham in requiring descent to a disjunctive term. However, he did not
have anything to replace this condition by; in particular, he did not give an ascent
condition. This makes his merely confused supposition include every term that is
not determinate or distributive. This is a coherent way to define the modes, but
it seems to lump together quite different phenomena. On this account, all of the
underlined terms below have merely confused supposition:
Every donkey is an animal
Maria believes that every animal runs
Every man who sees every animal runs
On the account introduced in section 8.1, the first would be merely confused and
the others would lack a mode of supposition.
9 ISSUES ABOUT MODES OF SUPPOSITION
9.1 Refined Modes of Supposition
Various writers, focusing on Ockham’s account of merely confused supposition,
have noticed that there seems to be a gap in the definitions of the modes. On his
account we have:
Descent to a disjunctive proposition
Descent to a conjunctive proposition
Descent to a disjunctive term
But what about
Descent to a conjunctive term?
This possibility has been considered by both medieval 139 and contemporary logicians.
In modern times, Paul V. Spade [Spade, 2000] has argued that there aren’t
any examples of main terms with a mode of supposition outside of the traditionally
given ones. Given the modes as described in section 7.1, I agree (assuming that
the notation does not include non-extensional contexts).
138 Maulfelt; see [Read, 1991 77-82].
139 See discussion in [Read, 1991].