Exclusive Company: Only and the Dynamics of Vertical Inference ...

26 Only and the Dynamics of Vertical Inference
—at crunch-rime, Peter once again retreats to a straightforward conjunctive
analysis on which (70a) is simply unpacked into a conjunction of the clauses in
( 7 ob-d).
(70) a. Man in so far as he is rational is tearful.
b. Man is rational.
c. Man is tearful.
d. Every rational [thing] is tearful.
It is against these conjunctive analysf that the treatment of what we might
call 'two-sided only' must be understood—and that of two-sided all as well. As
we have seen, the traditional account of universals is as bilateral as the
traditional account of exclusives; both Only A is B (Only As areBs) and EveryBis
A (All Bs are As) are taken to entail the existence of Bfs) while excluding the
possibility of any non-A B(s). 37 But even as the scholastics accepted the
unpacking of Tantum/Solus homo est rationalis into a conjunction of'homo est
rationalis' + 'nichil aliud ab homine est rationale', there are some suggestions
that these two components may not be on all fours:
It is asked why 'alone' [solus] is called an exclusive rather than an inclusive; for when someone
says 'Socrates alone is running', Socrates is included under running but the others are excluded.
It must be said that it is because the inclusion occurs not as a result of the force of the word but
as a result of the statement as it is before the 'alone' is inserted into it. The exclusion, on the
other hand ... does occur as a result of the force of the word ['alone']. (William of Sherwood,
Treatise on Syncategorematic Words, XI.6, in Kretzmann 1968: 71-2; cf. also St. Thomas Aquinas
(Pegis 1945) on only in Sutntna Theologica, la, q. 31, arts. 3, 4)
As we saw above in our exploration of the whiskey and Zantac examples, the
context in which only occurs may indeed entail inclusion, but not necessarily
because of the presence of only.
If the Williams of Ockham and Sherwood, Walter Burley, and their
colleagues had only taken the trouble to consult Grice on implicature, Lewis on
accommodation, and Stalnaker on assertion and presupposition, the reign of
the conjunctive analysis might have been far shorter-lived and the industry
devoted to explicating the relation between an only sentence and its prejacent
counterpart might have emitted fewer pollutants into the scholarly atmosphere.
Yet it must be conceded that the atmospheric conditions in the conjunctionalist
heyday had charms of its own, as Ockham's Summa Logicae makes clear.
After cataloguing various 'improper' senses of only, those which are taken with
restricted scope ('no more than [within a fixed domain]') as opposed to the
purely exclusive 'proper' sense, 38 Ockham (1980: 137) remarks that
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These are the senses, then, in which the exclusive expression can be taken improperly. And
perhaps there are still other senses in which it can be taken improperly. But since they are not
as widely used as the ones we have dealt with, I will leave them to the specialists.