History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps HoP 277 - Trivial Pursuits - Fourteenth Century Logic
May 7, 2017
The podcast explores the significance of logic in philosophy and the nominalism-realism debate. It discusses the issue of ambiguity in language and highlights the importance of context in interpretation. The views on the nature of propositions and logical inference are examined. The podcast also explores the game of obligations played by Scholastics in the 14th century.
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Supposition Explains Equivocation
- Terms can supposit personally or simply, changing what they stand for in context.
- Failing to track supposition leads to fallacies like equivocating 'human' between personal and universal uses.
Meaning Needs Both Intention And Convention
- Burley and Occam insisted on distinguishing strict meanings from figurative uses to interpret authoritative texts.
- John Burret argued signification depends on speaker intention and shared conventions between interlocutors.
Propositional Ambiguity Matters
- Fourteenth-century logicians began analyzing ambiguity at the level of whole propositions, not just single words.
- William Hatesbury's examples show sentences can mean different things depending on how we parse their propositional structure.