Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

622 E. Jennifer Ashworth
exponibles, insolubles, and obligations.
While much of the material found in the work of the Parisian authors, including
Domingo de Soto, stemmed from such predecessors as John Buridan, there
were original developments. For instance, in supposition theory logicians began
to use the letters of the alphabet as special signs, not only to allow different interpretations
of sentences of standard form but also, more importantly, to handle
sentences of non-standard form such as “Of every man some donkey is running”. 67
In particular, logicians wanted to explain how to provide contradictories for such
sentences which preserved the relevant truth conditions, and also how to analyse
them using the process called suppositional descent. The letter ‘a’ was used to
indicate that the term following it had merely confused supposition. For instance,
if one writes “a. man is not an animal”, this sentence turns out to be true because
if each of several men is identical to a different animal, it is true to say of each
animal that one or more men is not identical to that animal. The letter ‘b’ was
used to indicate that the term following it had determinate supposition. Accordingly,
“Every man is b. animal”, unlike “Every man is animal”, signifies
by virtue of the special sign that every man is identical to one and the same animal,
and hence is false. Subsequent letters of the alphabet were used to indicate
cases of mixed supposition, in which the type of supposition changed during the
stages of suppositional descent. The humanist Juan Luis Vives, who had himself
studied at the University of Paris, found this procedure particularly repellent. In
his diatribe Against the Pseudodialecticians he wrote “[. . .] a, b, c, d can make
those suppositions confused, determinate, and a mixture of both. Indeed you can
add more commixtions than any quack pharmacist ever made —e, f, g, h, i, j,
k— so that some of these men already have recourse to letters down as far as the
tenth letter of the second alphabet, dreaming up and combining wonderful kinds
of suppositions.” 68
Another development concerned the semantics of propositions (where ‘proposition’
means an occurrent declarative sentence, whether written, spoken or mental),
and the problem of what it is they might be said to signify. As Juan Dolz put
the question, “Does a proposition signify some thing or some things or in some
way [aliqualiter]? Is there to be given a complexum significabile or not, and if so,
is it to be distinguished from the significates of the terms of the proposition?” 69
Dolz and Fernando de Enzinas argued that indicative sentences signify aliqualiter,
in some way, rather than aliquid, some thing. 70 They explained this by arguing
that propositions are analogous to syncategorematic rather than to categorematic
67See E. J. Ashworth, “Multiple Quantification and the Use of Special Quantifiers in Early
Sixteenth Century Logic”, Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 19 (1978), 599–613; reprinted
as Study X in E. J. Ashworth, Studies in Post-Medieval Semantics (London: Variorum Reprints,
1985).
68Guerlac, Juan Luis Vives, p. 61.
69Johannes Dolz, Termini (Parisius [ca. 1511]), f. v ra. Note that the more usual phrase is
‘complexe significabile’.
70Dolz, Termini ; Fernando de Enzinas, Tractatus de Compositione Propositionis Mentalis
(Lugduni, 1528).