5. DIFFICULTIES
13
or potency of a thing. (It could also be read as a species of the category
of Quality, but that saddles Buridan with the inconsistent triad.) Thus
whiteness is what it is in virtue of a power.
An example may help to make this suggestion clear and even palatable.
Humans are rational animals; each human is rational through the presence
of rationality. Now rationality is a characteristic exemplified by individ-
ual acts of thought: only individual cases of thinking combine or disjoin
or analyze or synthesize concepts in the right way, only certain trains of
deliberation are indeed rational. Yet to say that humans are rational is
not to ascribe to us a property which we all exhibit all the time in every
instance of thinking; humans are certainly not always rational. But fail-
ures of rationality, whether rare or regular, do not make us less human,
any more than the newborn infant’s inability to prove theorems of modal
syllogistic, or the senile person’s similar inability, make them non-human
or less human. We are what we are, namely human, by having rationality,
but it is more accurate to say that we are what we are by having the power
to act rationally, whether it is exercised in any particular instance or not.
Thus the general idea that something is what it is in virtue of a power is
natural to Aristotelian philosophy; it is rarely articulated, but lies beneath
the surface in wait for extreme cases, like separable accidents, to bring it
out.
What kind of relation is there between (a) whiteness’s power to make
things white through inherence, and (b) the whiteness itself? In QM 7.04
fol. 44ra Buridan says that the appellative term ‘creative’ connotes a dispo-
sition, namely the power to bring things into being ex nihilo, yet he also says
that the connoted disposition is not “extrinsic” (non alienae dispositionis),
and so doesn’t signify some thing, some res, distinct from God.
21
It seems
21
Buridan also mentions “extraneous” and “extrinsic” connotation in QM 4.01 fol. 13ra
and SDD 3.1.3; in SDD 4.1.4 he asserts that nominative substantial terms, including
‘whiteness,’ have no appellation precisely because they do not connote any extrinsic
disposition (13.4–8): “Prima est de terminis supponentibus et non appellantibus, qui
illi sunt termini recti de praedicamento Substantiae. Et hoc est quia non connotant
alienam dispositionem cum substantia quam significant et pro qua supponunt, et ita
etiam est de multis terminis abstractis de praedicamento Qualitatis, ut albedo, calidi-
tas, humiditas.” He also says that ‘rational’ in the combination ‘rational animal’ does
not connote any accident since it doesn’t appellate a distinct disposition, but is instead
a constitutive differentia here: “Sed tu quaeres an dicendo animal rationale currit sit
ibi aliqua appellatio a parte subiecti. Et ego dico quod non, supposito quod animal sit
uere terminus de praedicamento Substantiae et rationale sit uere differentia specifica
animalis nullum accidens connotans. Sed solum ibi est contractio suppositionis sine
appellatione dispositionis alienae” (SDD 4.1.4 80.21–25).
c Peter King, unpublished
14
BETWEEN LOGIC AND PSYCHOLOGY
as though a new wrinkle has to be added to the picture sketched above:
terms may be absolute or they may be appellative, but some appellative
terms have extrinsic connotation and others what we may call ‘intrinsic’
connotation.
This distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic connotation allows us
to resolve the problem of whiteness. The term ‘whiteness’ is appellative,
since it connotes some other disposition adjoining whiteness in virtue of
which whiteness is formally whiteness, namely it connotes the power to
make things white through inherence, but it has intrinsic connotation, since
what it connotes is not really distinct (aliena) from whiteness itself. Thus
Buridan denies (2): the disposition connoted by ‘whiteness’ is not really
other than the whiteness itself.
22
He is no longer saddled with inconsistency.
The price paid for this solution, though, is high. Appellative terms with
intrinsic connotation do not fall under the Remainder Principle, since they
do not connote anything for which they do not supposit. Hence appellative
terms with intrinsic connotation correspond to simple concepts. But if the
view that some appellative terms correspond to simple concepts is correct,
which seems forced on us by Buridan’s claims that (a) whiteness is a simple
concept (SDD 4.1.4 and 4.2.4), and (b) something other than whiteness
makes it formally whiteness, which thereby makes ‘whiteness’ appellative,
then the elegant formal semantics made possible by the Coordination Thesis
is incorrect.
A more careful examination of appellation only makes matters worse. As
noted, Buridan holds that a term like ‘white’ supposits for the subject that
is white, connotes whiteness, and appellates the whiteness qua adjoining
the subject (see SDD 3.1.3 12.18–20). The kinds of ‘adjoining’ are the Aris-
totelian categories, he maintains; corresponding to each mode of predication
is a different manner of adjoining:
23
22
De Rijk [1993] 48 n. 23 claims that the text of QM 7.03, according to two manuscripts,
inserts a ‘non’ in the troublesome phrase cited earlier; Buridan would therefore be
denying that whiteness connotes some “other” disposition. If so, the way to read his
denial, I think, is in line with the reconstruction I have given here.
23
QC q.3 18.96–104: “Sed sumuntur ex diuersis intentionibus, secundum quas termini
sunt diuersimode connotatiui uel etiam non connotatiui. Ex quibus diuersis connota-
tionibus proueniunt diuersi modi praedicandi terminorum de primis substantiis; et ita
directe et immediate distinguuntur penes diuersos modos praedicandi de primis sub-
stantiis. Si enim praedicentur in quid siue essentialiter de ipsis, tunc tales termini sunt
de praedicamento Substantiae; si uero praedicantur denominatiue in quale, tunc sunt
de praedicamento Qualitatis; et si in quantum, sunt de praedicamento Quantitatis. . . ”
There are many illustrative comments to this effect, e. g. QM 4.06 fol. 17va and Soph. 4
Remark 3.
c Peter King, unpublished