In the early 1980s, Paul V. Spade advanced the thesis that obligational reasoning was counterfactual reasoning, based upon his interpretation of the obligationes of Walter Burley, Richard Kilvington, and Roger Swyneshed. Eleonore Stump in a series of contemporary papers argued against Spade’s thesis with respect to Burley and Swyneshed, provisionally admitting it for Kilvington with the caveat that Kilvington’s theory is by no means clear or non-idiosyncratic. In this paper, we revisit the connection between counterfactual reasoning and obligationes, focusing on one particular treatise, the anonymous early twelfth-century Obligationes Parisienses edited by L.M. de Rijk in the late 70s. We show that while positio in this treatise does not involve counterfactual reasoning, the species sit verum or rei veritas apparently does, and it is precisely this which distinguishes the two species in this treatise.
Purchase
Buy instant access (PDF download and unlimited online access):
Institutional Login
Log in with Open Athens, Shibboleth, or your institutional credentials
Personal login
Log in with your brill.com account
Spade, ‘Three Theories’, 1. Peter King takes up this position in P. King, ‘Mediaeval Thought-Experiments: The Metamethodology of Mediaeval Science’, in Thought Experiments in Science and Philosophy, eds. T. Horowitz and G.J. Massey (Savage, MD, 1991), 43–64.
Spade, ‘Three Theories’, 31; cf. also S. Read, ‘Obligations, Sophisms, and Insolubles’, Technical Report, Higher School of Economics, National Research University (2013), which gives a reconstruction of Kilvington’s rules.
Spade, ‘Three Theories’, note 6. King follows suit, cf. King, ‘Mediaeval Thought-Experiments’, 52. Even though Michael Woods notes that counterfactuals in English more and more often do not use the subjunctive mood (cf. Woods, Conditionals [Oxford, 1997], 6–7), the use of the subjunctive in this fashion is much more ubiquitous in Latin, even though the standard counterfactual construction, using the imperfect or pluperfect subjunctive, is “simply not found with regularity anywhere in the vicinity of treatises de obligationibus” (cf. Spade, ‘Obligationes’, 172).
R.C. Stalnaker, ‘A Defense of Conditional Excluded Middle’, in Ifs, eds. Harper, Stalnaker, and Peirce, 87–104, at 98.
C.J. Martin, ‘Obligations and Liars’, in Medieval Formal Logic, ed. M. Yrjönsuuri (Dordrecht, 2001), 63–94.
E.W. Adams, ‘Subjunctive and Indicative Conditionals’, Foundations of Language 6 (1970), 89–94, at 89.
Stump, ‘Obligations’, 320. Stump is speaking primarily of Burley at this point.
Spade, ‘Three Theories’, 11. Peter King repeats this point, cf. King, ‘Mediaeval Thought-Experiments’, 52.
N. Asher and E. McCready, ‘Were, Would, Might and a Compositional Account of Counterfactuals’, Journal of Semantics 24 (2007), 93–129.
F.B. Fitch, ‘A Logical Analysis of Some Value Concepts’, Journal of Symbolic Logic 28 (1963), 135–142. G.E. Moore, Commonplace Book 1919–1953, (London, 1962).
All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 480 | 86 | 3 |
Full Text Views | 142 | 1 | 0 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 38 | 5 | 0 |
In the early 1980s, Paul V. Spade advanced the thesis that obligational reasoning was counterfactual reasoning, based upon his interpretation of the obligationes of Walter Burley, Richard Kilvington, and Roger Swyneshed. Eleonore Stump in a series of contemporary papers argued against Spade’s thesis with respect to Burley and Swyneshed, provisionally admitting it for Kilvington with the caveat that Kilvington’s theory is by no means clear or non-idiosyncratic. In this paper, we revisit the connection between counterfactual reasoning and obligationes, focusing on one particular treatise, the anonymous early twelfth-century Obligationes Parisienses edited by L.M. de Rijk in the late 70s. We show that while positio in this treatise does not involve counterfactual reasoning, the species sit verum or rei veritas apparently does, and it is precisely this which distinguishes the two species in this treatise.
All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 480 | 86 | 3 |
Full Text Views | 142 | 1 | 0 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 38 | 5 | 0 |