Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

Logic in the 14 th Century after Ockham 461
• every non-ultimate significate in a conjunctive way — confused distributive
material supposition, for example with ‘Every man is a monosyllabic word’,
meaning that every single occurrence of ‘man’ is monosyllabic (cf. [Marsilius
of Inghen, 1983, 59]).
Indeed, in these divisions we see the recognition of individual concepts, inscriptions
and utterances as legitimate members of the ontology (something that was
already crucial for Buridan), and the possibility of talking about them in a much
more refined way. With these divisions, we can attribute a certain property to
one specific occurrence of a term, to some or even to all its occurrences; in other
words, here we certainly have a conceptual predecessor of the important token-type
distinction, which was to be fully developed only in the 20 th century.
Marsilius’s reformulation (or, perhaps better put, improvement) of supposition
theory so as to attribute the so-called modes of personal supposition to material
supposition as well seems to have become the standard practice in the 15 th century.
It is symptomatic that Paul of Venice, in his very influential Logica Parva [Paul
of Venice, 1984, 147], also adopted these distinctions of modes of supposition for
material supposition.
2.1.4 Problems and solutions for the negation
Both in Buridan’s treatise on supposition and in the part of Ockham’s Summa
Logicae dedicated to supposition (the last chapters of Part I), one of the main
topics are the syntactic rules determining which mode of (personal) supposition
a term has on the basis of the syncategorematic terms present in a proposition
(quantifying terms such as ‘some’, ‘every’, negating terms etc.) and word order.
We learn for example that an affirmative sign of universality (‘every’) causes the
term immediately following it to have confused and distributive supposition, and
that it causes a term mediately (i.e. not immediately) following it to have merely
confused supposition (so in ‘Every man is an animal’, the subject, which follows
‘every’ immediately, has confused and distributive supposition, while the predicate,
which follows ‘every’ mediately, has merely confused supposition). We also learn
that a negative sign of universality (‘no’) causes all terms following it (immediately
and mediately) to have confused and distributive supposition, and that when the
negation is placed relative to the copula (as in ‘A man is not a stone’), it causes
the predicate to have confused and distributive supposition. As for determinate
supposition, it occurs when a term immediately follows a sign of particularity
(‘some’) or when it does not follow any syncategorematic term (as in ‘a man is an
animal’).
But matters become significantly more complicated once one departs from the
four traditional propositional forms (‘Every A is B’, ‘Some A is B’, ‘No A is B’and
‘Some A is not B’), especially when iteration of syncategorematic terms occurs.
As argued by Parsons in [Parsons, 1997] and in his piece in this volume, in the 14 th
century it became current to classify the modes of personal supposition globally
rather than locally, as had been done in the 13 th century — that is, taking into