1994/07/01 by Wallace A. Murphree · 1 citation
Psychology · Arts and Humanities · Mathematics · #Philosophy and Theoretical Science #Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics #Syllogism #Predicate (mathematical logic) #Proposition #Statement (logic) #Term (time) #Truth value #Mathematics #Epistemology #Logical consequence #Mathematical economics #Philosophy #Computer science #Linguistics #Physics #Programming language
paper · pdf · doi:10.1305/ndjfl/1040511349
openalex publication_date 1994/07/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
While accepting that distribution is a coherent notion, I argue that it is nevertheless irrelevant to the working of the syllogism. Instead, I propose: (i) that a term's being distributed or undistributed in a proposition is its capacity to be replaced in a truth-preserving substitution with a narrower or a wider term; (ii) that which capacity the term has is determined by whether it occurs as the predicate of a negative or of an affirmative statement of the proposition; and (iii) that it is only the term's occurrence as the predicate of a negative or an affirmative statement–rather than its distribution value–that is relevant to syllogistic entailment.