John Buridan on the Bearer of Logical Relations

Abstract

According to John Buridan, the time for which a statement is true is underdetermined by the grammatical form of the sentence -the intention of the speaker is required. As a consequence, truth-bearers are not sentence types, nor sentence tokens plus facts of the context of utterance, but statements. Statements are also the bearers of logical relations, since the latter can only be established among entities having determined truth-conditions. This role of the intention of the speaker in the determination of what is said by an utterance is not isolated in medieval semantics. Mathematics Subject Classification (2000). Primary 03A05.