Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

454 Catarina Dutilh Novaes
Conjunctive Disjunctive
Nominal XXXXXXX Merely confused
Propositional Confused and distributive Determinate
Naturally, since nominal disjunctive descent is always possible, merely confused
supposition is not defined as the supposition of a term whenever nominal disjunctive
descent is possible (otherwise all terms would have merely confused supposition);
rather, it is (usually) defined as the supposition of a term when only
nominal disjunctive supposition is possible. Similarly, determinate supposition is
not defined as the supposition of a term whenever propositional disjunctive descent
is possible; rather, it is defined as the supposition of a term when propositional disjunctive
descent is possible but not propositional conjunctive descent (otherwise
the categories of confused and distributive, and determinate supposition would
overlap — cf. [Read, 1991b, 74]).
It is easy to see why at first no interest was paid to nominal conjunctive descent:
it does not correspond to any of the terms in the four traditional categorical propositional
forms. Accordingly, since it was tacitly assumed that all other propositions
could be in some way or another reduced to one of these four forms, it was thought
that only those three kinds of personal supposition were required to account for
the supposition of terms in propositions.
But even at its early stages, the suppositional framework was also applied to
cases other that these four traditional propositional forms. For example, in the
case of exceptive propositions of the form ‘Only S is P ’, it was recognized that S
has merely confused supposition (cf. [Marsilius of Inghen, 1983, 59] — see below).
In other cases, it was necessary to bend the concepts of the modes of personal to
such an extent (for instance, by rephrasing the original sentence so that it would
fit into one of the recognized propositional forms, but with rather implausible
results) that one cannot help but wonder whether supposition theory with only
these three modes of personal supposition was complete in the sense of being able
to account for all, or at least most, propositions. But, since in most formulations
of the modes of personal supposition merely confused supposition was in practice
a ‘catch-all’ category (cf. [Read, 1991b, 75]) (since nominal disjunctive descent is
always possible, as noted above), in the end no semantic phenomenon was excluded
from the taxonomy with these three modes of personal supposition.
But at some point in the first half of the 14 th century, some authors were led
to acknowledge at least the logical possibility of a fourth mode of descent, namely
nominal conjunctive descent. According to [Read, 1991b, 74], the first mention to
nominal conjunctive descent that we know of is to be found in Thomas Maulevelt’s
De Suppositionibus: there, Maulevelt says that when merely confused supposition
occurs, nominal disjunctive as well as nominal conjunctive descent are possible.
Maulevelt’s example of the supposition of a term which is best accounted for by
nominal conjunctive descent instead of nominal disjunctive descent is ‘Socrates