Cervelli, Persone e Società ***ABSTRACTS
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Brains, Persons, and Society *** ABSTRACTS Cervelli, Persone e Società ***ABSTRACTS |
Arianna
Betti
Vrije
Universiteit Amsterdam
Therefore,
Gregory of
Rimini’s (tantum) complexe significabilia
are not States of
Affairs
According to a fairly
common view among analytic philosophers and historians of
logic,
states of affairs
were already present in the philosophical scene as early as the
Fourteenth
Century, with
Adam Wodeham’s and Gregory of Rimini’s complexe
significabilia (Élie 1936, Nuchelmans
1973, Simons 1988, Schabel 2001). Some have
gone
further than this,
and tried to show that states of affairs were already
acknowledged
by
Aristotle, either as truth-bearers (Crivelli 2004) or as the total
objects
of meaningful
sentences functioning as truth-bearers (Simons 1988).
The
aim of this paper is
to refute this kind of views, by focusing on a theoretical
analysis
of what states
of affairs are rather than on the exegesis of various passages.
I
shall first introduce
a check-list of states-of-affairness, that is, a cluster of criteria
to
decide whether this
or that entity is a state of affairs, instead of a proposition
or
instead
of a complex (a
notion which is quite close to that of states of affairs, but by no
means
the same notion).
The check-list will be the focus of the paper and will
include
(1) six
semantical roles that states of affairs, propositions and complexes can
or
cannot play
(Sentence-sense and Judgement-content, Truth-bearer, Sentenceobject,
Truth-maker,
Sentence-subject
and Judgement-subject, Judgement-object).
Here
I shall take the
list given in Simons 1988 as a starting point; (2) five ontological
characteristics
that all
states of affairs show (formal structure, reticulation of
components,
non-mereological composition, ontological heterogeneity and
metaphysical
heterogeneity). The ontological framework is new and is fundamental
to
distinguish states of
affairs from the cognate notion of complex.
On
the basis of the
semantical and ontological criteria I propose it will turn out
that
Gregory of Rimini’s
complexe significabile and similar entities (as «totalia
significata
propositionis»,
sentence-senses/judgement-contents; truth-bearers and bearers of
modal
properties;
judgement-objects and objects of propositional attitudes, and of
science)
are
propositions, that is, Bolzanian Sätze an sich (Church’s
“propositions
in
the
abstract sense”, the
Stoics’ lekta), and so are Crivelli’s “Aristotle’s States of
Affairs”.
Simons’ “Aristotle’s
States of Affairs” (), instead, will turn
out
to
be complexes.
REFERENCES
Crivelli,
Paolo (2004). Aristotle
on Truth. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press
Élie,
Hubert (1936) Le
signifiable par complexe – La proposition et son objet –
Grégoire de Rimini,
Meinong, Russell, Paris, Vrin
Nuchelmans,
Gabriël
(1973) Theories of the Proposition: Ancient and Medieval
Conceptions of the
Bearers of Truth and
Falsity,
Amsterdam, North-Holland.
Schabel,
Christopher. (2001).
"Gregory of Rimini." The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Winter
2001 Edition.
from
http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2001/entries/gregory-rimini/
Simons,
Peter (1988).
"Aristotle's concept of state of affairs", in: Antike Rechts- und
Sozialphilosophie. O.
Gigon, M. W. Fischer. Frankfurt a. M., Peter Lang: 97-112