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.Finally, the unsaturated nature of a concept explainsits non-occurrent, or quasi-dispositional status that is, its status as a capacitythat could, but need not, be exercised in an appropriate context, or, that mightin fact never be exercised at all.8.4 Personal Supposition and ReferenceReference in conceptual realism is a pragmatic notion that applies only whenreferential concepts are exercised in speech or mental acts.Reference in termin-ist logic is also a pragmatic notion, but applies to the way categorematic termsare said to supposit for the things they signify when used in a speech or mentalact.Both systems distinguish reference to concepts from reference to things,but only conceptual realism is explicit in distinguishing reference to concepts interms of predicate quantifiers.Reference to concepts in terminist logic, which iscalled simple supposition, does not explicitly involve predicate quantifiers, butthis might be a matter only of surface grammar.40 In any case, our concernhere will be with reference to things, which in terminist logic is called personalsupposition.Personal supposition in terminist logic is not the same as reference to thingsin conceptual realism, because (as we explain in the following section) cate-gorematic terms can have personal supposition either as subjects or predicatesof categorical propositions, whereas referential concepts in conceptual realismcan never function as predicable concepts, nor can predicable concepts functionas referential concepts.Nevertheless, except for the so-called merely confusedpersonal supposition of predicates containing an intensional verb or modal oper-ator (as discussed in §7 below), the personal supposition of terms in categoricalpropositions does coincide with a combined notion of activated and deactivatedreference in conceptual realism, where the deactivated reference is involved inthe truth conditions determined by a predicable concept.Both systems, more-over, give a uniform account of general and singular reference to things.As already noted in the previous chapter, referential concepts in conceptualrealism, like predicable concepts, are unsaturated cognitive structures; but thestructures are not the same.Rather, like the way that quantifier phrases have astructure that is complementary to predicate expressions, or the way that nounphrases are complementary to verb phrases, referential concepts and predicableconcepts are cognitive structures that are complementary to one another.This40There is also another type of supposition, material supposition, in which a term standsfor itself or other spoken or written signs.We will not deal with this type of supposition here. 8.4.PERSONAL SUPPOSITION AND REFERENCE 179complementarity is such that when they are exercised together in a speech ormental act each saturates the other; and just as the predicable concept is whatinforms that act with a predicable nature, so too the referential concept iswhat informs the act with a referential nature.An affirmative assertion thatis analyzable in terms of a noun phrase and a verb phrase (regardless of thecomplexity of either) is semantically analyzable, for example, in terms of anovert joint application of a referential concept with a predicable concept; andthe assertion itself, as a speech act, is the result of the mutual saturation of theircomplementary structures in that act.It is just this sort of mutual saturationof complementary cognitive structures that constitutes the nexus of predicationin conceptualism.It is also what accounts for the unity of a speech or mentalact, i.e.of an assertion or judgment, a problem that Ockham, who anticipatedF.H.Bradley s infinite regress argument, was unable to resolve.41 Ockham, forexample, assumed that a judgment that every man is an animal was literallymade up of a universal quantifier, the concept man, the mental copula is, andthe concept animal.42 But then what unifies these mental terms into a singleunified mental act? A fifth mental term that tied these items together wouldneed a sixth to tie it with the others, which in turn would need a seventh, andso on ad infinitum.That is not how a judgment or assertion is understood inconceptual realism, where concepts, as unsaturated cognitive structures, are notobjects, and therefore cannot be actual constituents of a mental act (event).43Referential concepts, as we have explained, are what the quantifier phrasesof our logistic system stand for when the latter are affixed to the symboliccounterparts of names, where both proper and common names are understoodto have such counterparts, just as they do in Mental, the language of thoughtof terminist logic.A proper name is distinguished in the system from commonnames by a meaning postulate to the effect that at most one thing can bereferred to by that name, and that the name refers to the same thing in everypossible world in which it refers to anything at all.But names, whether properor common are different from predicate expressions, as Geach has pointed out,because they can be used in simple acts of naming outside the context ofa sentence.44 Naming is not the same as referring, it should be emphasized,because the latter is an act that does not occur outside the (implicit if notexplicit) context of a sentence used in a speech act, i.e., independently of anassociated act of predicating.41See Spade [1996], chapter 4, §3.42Ibid., p.123.Spade points out that not all terminists agreed with Ockham, and Buridanas well, on this view of judgments or mental propositions as complexes of syncategorematicand categorematic mental terms.Gregory of Rimini and Peter of Ailly, in particular, criticizedthe view, and argued instead that judgments, or mental propositions, unlike the assertions ofspoken language, were structureless mental acts that occur, as it were, all at once.Thisview is similar to the notion of a judgment or assertion in conceptual realism, and might wellbe reconstructed in terms of the latter [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]