Future Contingents and the Iterated Exchange: Walter Chatton on Truth, Scope, and actus exercitus / significatus

In his Reportatio super Sententias (ca. 1321–1323), Walter Chatton proposes a solution to the problem of future contingents based on propositional analysis. Future-tense statements must be disambiguated with the help of a scope distinction between temporal and truth operators, such that a statement...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Vivarium
Main Author: Bornholdt, Jon (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Brill 2022
In: Vivarium
Further subjects:B Future contingents
B Thomas Wylton
B scope
B actus exercitus, actus significatus
B Walter Chatton
B Speech Act Theory
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Summary:In his Reportatio super Sententias (ca. 1321–1323), Walter Chatton proposes a solution to the problem of future contingents based on propositional analysis. Future-tense statements must be disambiguated with the help of a scope distinction between temporal and truth operators, such that a statement like “Socrates will sit” comes out either as (1) “it is true now that Socrates will sit,” or (2) “it will be true that Socrates sits.” On the first analysis, Socrates’s action is necessitated, whereas on the second it remains contingent. In his later Quodlibet (ca. 1330), Chatton maintains his original analysis but augments it with an ingenious use of the traditional distinction between actus exercitus and actus significatus. His use of the distinction enables him both to give some speech-act-theoretical content to the scope analysis, which had been open to the charge of mere formalism, and to defend it cogently against an apparently strong counterargument.
ISSN:1568-5349
Contains:Enthalten in: Vivarium
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1163/15685349-06004003