Articulating Ockham’s Semantics of Connotative and Oblique Terms

Abstract

In Book II of the Summary of Logic, William Ockham discusses the truth-conditions for various kinds of propositions (propositiones). Anchoring Ockham’s truth-conditions is a “co-supposition thesis”: an affirmative proposition is true if and only if there is at least partial overlap among the supposits (supposita) of its terms. The co-supposition thesis applies straightforwardly when the terms of the given proposition are all nouns in the nominative case. But complications arise when the predicate is an adjective or in an oblique case. My primary goal here is to explain Ockham’s semantics of oblique terms. Along the way, I also aim to shed some additional light on the semantics of connotative terms. To accomplish these goals, I will make use of the formal language Linguish, developed in Terence Parsons’s groundbreaking Articulating Medieval Logic. I will present two treatments of oblique terms in Linguish, which I will call the verbal and the nominal treatments. I will show that the parasitic terms employed in the nominal treatment can be applied to articulate effectively Ockham’s semantics of connotative terms, but neither the verbal nor nominal treatment provides an effective articulation of Ockham’s semantics of oblique terms. After arguing that Ockham can be understood as a moderate modist whose account implicitly relies on non-reified modes of signifying to differentiate the various morphosyntactic properties of terms, I will present a modal treatment of oblique terms that incorporates modes of signifying into the syntax and semantics of Linguish. This amended version of Linguish retains the effective articulation of the semantics of connotative terms but also, I suggest, better articulates Ockham’s semantics of oblique terms.