Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

678 Russell Wahl
...the words “true religion” signify but a single and unique religion,
which is in truth the Catholic religion, since that is the only true one.
But because each nation and each sect believes that its religion is the
true one, these words are highly equivocal in people’s mouths, although
by error. And if we read in a historian that a prince was zealous about
the true religion, we could not know what was meant unless we knew
this historian’s religion. For if he were a Protestant, it would mean the
Protestant religion; if he were an Arab Moslem who spoke thus about
his prince, it would mean the Moslem religion; and we could judge
that it was the Catholic religion only if we knew that the historian was
Catholic. (67)
Jean-Claude Pariente has noted that Arnauld used this distinction in his controversy
over the refusal of the Jansenists to sign the formulary, and says it anticipates
Keith Donnellan’s distinction between referential and attributive uses of descriptions.
17 His description of Arnauld’s own account of the distinction, though, suggests
a closer connection to the distinction made between speaker’s reference and
semantic reference, although the two are related. 18
Given the account of a proposition as either an affirmation or a denial of the
relation of two terms, it is clear that negation will be seen as part of the copula.
However, whether a proposition is universal or particular on this account appears
to be a function of the subject term. Each idea or term, whether general or
singular, has an extension as well as a comprehension. One way of limiting or
further determining that extension was to form a complex idea which has a greater
comprehension and cuts back the extension. The other way was to join to it “only
an indistinct and indeterminate idea of a part, as when I say, some triangle ...”
(59). The view here is that the quantifiers ‘all’ and ‘some’ are not part of the
propositional form, but attach to a term as a way of determining its extension.
So that ‘all men’ is a complex term in the proposition “all men are mortal”, as is
“some men” in “some men are over six feet tall”. While this is the official view of
the Port-Royal Logic, in practice they treat propositions, and not merely subject
terms as universal or particular.
While each idea has an extension, Arnauld and Nicole mark the distinction of
universal and particular propositions as a distinction of whether the terms are
“taken” throughout their entire extensions or only through an “indeterminate
part” of that extension. 19 In fact, the Port-Royal Logic defines the distinction
17 [Pariente, 1985, 206]. The reference is to [Donnellan, 1966].
18 Quoting from texts collated by Father Quesnel and reprinted in Volume 22 of [Arnauld,
1775-1783], Pariente marks the distinction between which object is actually determined by the
property and which object is thought of by the person who utters the description. This way of
making the distinction appears closer to the distinction between speaker’s reference and semantic
reference. See [Kripke,1977] and [Donnellan, 1978].
19 “. . . les termes universels peuvent être pris ou selon toute leur étendue, en les joignant aux
signes universels exprimés ou sous-entendus, comme omnis, tout, pour l’affirmation; nullus, nul,
pour la negation, tout homme, nul homme . . . Ou selon une partie indéterminée de leur étendue,
qui est lorsqu’on y joint le mot aliqui, quelque, comme quelque homme, quelque hommes, ou