Philosophical Review

Aristotle's Theory of Descriptions Author(s): C. J. F. Williams Reviewed work(s): Source: The Philosophical Review, Vol. 94, No. 1 (Jan., 1985), pp. 63-80 Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of Philosophical Review Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2184715 . Accessed: 15/10/2012 11:11
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Review,XCIV, No. 1 (January 1985) ThePhilosophical

ARISTOTLE'S

THEORY

OF DESCRIPTIONS

C. J. F. Williams
I

Aristotle

has a doctrine, or series of doctrines, of accidental

predication, accidental being, accidental unity and accidental sameness, which scholars have recently illuminated by reference to problems in the philosophy of logic. (See references below to papers by Gareth Matthews, Nicholas White and Alan Code.) But they have not so far found a single key to the understanding of these doctrines. The key can, I believe, be found by comparing Aristotle's doctrines with Russell's Theory of Descriptions. Russell's theory is couched in the formal mode of speech: it is concerned with distinguishing amongst expressions which rank grammatically as subjects of sentences those which alone are true logical subjects. Aristotle's theory is couched for the most part in the material mode: he speaks of accidental unities or beings as though they were a subclass of entities, in a way which has allowed Gareth Matthews recently to talk of this doctrine as a doctrine of "kooky objects."' The doctrine of accidental or per accidenspredication, appearing as it does in Aristotle's logical works, has a more linguistic ring, and perhaps it is this which has prevented it from being used to illumito nate his use of the term "accidental (katasymbekikos)" headline his of sameness, unity and being. When more metaphysical doctrines one examines the doctrine of per accidenspredication, however, one is forcibly struck by the similarity between the way in which Aristotle describes this phenomenon and the way in which Russell analyzes propositions containing definite descriptions. Aristotle's "kooky objects" are near relations of Russell's "logical fictions." And the use to which Russell puts his theory in solving problems of intentionality turns out to be strongly reminiscent of the use to
'Gareth B. Matthews, "Accidental Unities," in Language and Logos, edited by M. Schofield and M. Nussbaum (Cambridge University Press, 1982) pp. 223-240. One may compare the way in which the phenomena of referential opacity are spoken of in terms of "intentional objects."
63

C. J. F. WILLIAMS

which Aristotle puts his doctrine of accidental sameness in solving problems like that of the Hooded Man. The two Arthurs, Smullyan and Prior, spell out more clearly even than Russell the power of the Theory of Descriptions to get rid of apparent exceptions to Leibniz's Law, the Law of the Substitutivity of Identicals.2 This Law, according to them, requires that truth value remain unaffected only when codesignative name is substituted for codesignative name; when what is substituted, or what is substituted for, is a definite description, there is no presumption that the substitution can be made salva veritate.Similarly Aristotle restricts the doctrine that the same things belong to the same things to those which are indistinguishable and one in being or substance (ousia). Aristotle's doctrine of substance, once again, makes sense as a doctrine of logical subjects, that is, Russellian names. In the terminology of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, substance is a "formal concept." "Octavian is the same as Augustus" would be taken by Aristotle as asserting identity in being or substance, as would "A square is the same as an equilateral rectangle." But "The hooded man is my father" would asin substratum-and sert a merely accidental identity-sameness would not provide a license for substituting "the hooded man" for "my father" without change of truth value in any context. As in Russell's theory, so in Aristotle's, the obstacle to substitution is explicable in terms of the logic of definite descriptions. The argument of this paper may be said to presuppose a methodology which some interpreters of Aristotle will find controversial. It is the view that time and again in philosophies of the past we find doctrines which, literally interpreted, seem to make claims about the nature of reality-what are still, I fear, often called "ontological" claims, but which in fact represent theses about the structure of our language. Clarity is to be obtained by reinterpreting these "ontological" doctrines as logical doctrines. This view dates back at least to the heyday of Logical Positivism. It is too much to ask that we should attempt a general defense of this methodology
2Arthur F. Smullyan, "Modality and Description," TheJournal of Symbolic Logic, 1948, reprinted in L. Linsky (ed.), Reference and Modality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971); and Arthur N. Prior, "Is the Concept of Referential Opacity Really Necessary?" Acta PhilosophicaFennica 16 (1963).

64

ARISTOTLE'S THEORY OF DESCRIPTIONS

each time it is adopted,3 particularly since the best defense is the success of the individual reinterpretations it suggests. Those who reject it will have to determine whether the analogies between Aristotle and Russell to which I draw attention are susceptible of an alternative explanation. It is not, of course, my view that Aristotle saw his own work in this light, nor that he would have seen "translation into the formal mode of speech" as an improvement, or even as legitimate, if the idea had been explained to him. I am bound, however, to hold that he ought to have done so. II The full significance of Russell's Theory of Descriptions is rarely understood. Indeed it is questionable whether it was completely understood by Russell himself. He allows symbols representing expressions like "The President of Harvard" to occupy positions in formulae otherwise occupied by proper names. Where Xx represents "'x is a chemist'" and a the proper name "'Jones'," Russell uses +(a) to represent the result of predicating being a chemist of Jones. But he also allows his symbol for definite descriptions to occupy the place of a name in such predications: with ( i x)(+lx) representing "The President of Harvard" and Xx "x is a chemist," Russell's representation of "The President of Harvard is a chemist" would be +(( _Jx)(+1x)).It is difficult to resist the impression that, for Russell, in such a proposition, being a chemist is predicated of the President of Harvard. Russell's symbolism here does him a disservice. Properly understood, 4(( i x)(+rx)) is nothing but an abbreviation. Nothing is lost but economy in the use of paper if we rewrite every expression of the form (4(( J x)('lx)) as (3x)(y)((x = y = 4by)& Xx). And in this expression it no more looks as though + is being predicated of something than it does in the simpler expression (3x)(+x). Prior (op. cit., p. 198) suggested an alternative notation for abbreviating (3x)(y)((x = y = 4by)& Xx): instead of 4(( J.x)(+jx)) we use i x+1x+x.
3I have criticized the "ontological-logical" dichotomy in Chapter VII ("Ontology Called in Question") of my book What is Existence? (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981).

65

C. J. F. WILLIAMS

Here i x+ix-x has the same appearance as (3x)(- x), the appearance of a functor requiring a predicative expression for its completion. + is here argument to i x+.x-x as function, whereas in X)(+rx))it looks as though ( J x)(+ix) were argument to +(-) as i(( x function. In Fregean terms, i x4Jx - x, like (3x)(-x), stands for a concept of second level: just as " exists" in "An even prime number exists" is a second-level predicate, so "The President of Harvard" is a second-level predicate in "The President of Harvard is a chemist." The expression " is a chemist," though capable of functioning as a first-level predicate in other propositions, for example, "Jones is a chemist" is no more functioning as a predicate here than it is in "Someone is a chemist."4 is a For Russell, as interpreted by Prior and Geach, " chemist" in "The President of Harvard is a chemist" is not predicated of anything at all. Aristotle is more guarded: "Well, if we must legislate, let speaking in the latter way be predicating, and in the former way either not predicating at all, or else not predicating simpliciterbut predicating incidentally."5 Elsewhere, instead of saying "predicating simpliciter,"Aristotle says "predicating per se"; and the phrase translated "predicating incidentally" might well have been translated "predicating per accidens." By "the latter way" he indicated predications like "Jones is a chemist," by "the former way" quasi-predications like "The President of Harvard is a chemist"-or that is what I hope to establish. Aristotle's examples of predicating simpliciter or per se, in the immediately preceding passage, are "The log is large" and "The man is walking"; his examples of per accidens predication are "The white thing is walking" and "That large thing is a log." Let us concentrate for a moment on per accidenspredication. Carping critics of Russell's theory often object that his analysis of "The table is
4The earliest application of Frege's doctrine of second-level predicates to Russell's Theory of Descriptions known to me is Geach's footnote on page 51 of his translation of "On Concept and Object" in Geach and Black, Translationsfrom the Philosophical Writings of GottlobFrege, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1952). I have attempted to spell this idea out more fully on pages 36-38 of my What is Truth? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). 5PosteriorAnalytics, translated by Jonathan Barnes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), I, 22, 83a 14-17. 66

ARISTOTLE'S THEORY OF DESCRIPTIONS

sticky" would require as a necessary condition of its truth that there be no more than one table in the Universe. On any likely occasion of its utterance, however, the context would make clear which table was meant by the person who said "The table is sticky." Similarly we may suppose that the person who utters "The white thing is walking" is pointing at a photograph (or a red-figure vase) and means "The white thing represented in that picture is walking." Russell's view is that such a proposition is of the form (3x)(y)((x = y = '1y)& 4x), or equivalently, (3x)((y)(x = y = '1y)& Xx); and this latter is itself of the form (3x)(Xx&xx). The fact that the open sentence which is the first conjunct of the conjunctive open sentence in this formula has to be uniquely, if at all, satisfiable, is not what interests us at the moment. Aristotle's description of per accidenspredication shows that it is not what interests him. What is his theoretical description of per accidenspredication? It is more illuminating than his typically off-hand examples: when I say that the white thing is a log, then I say that that which is incidentallywhite is a log, and not that the white thing is the underlying subjectfor the log; for it is not the case that, being white orjust what is some white,it came to be a log, so thatit is not (a log) except incidentally. But when I say that the log is white(I do) not (say)that somethingelse is white, and that that is incidentallya log, as when I say that the musical thing is white (for then I say that the man, who is incidentallymusical,is white);but the log is the underlyingsubjectwhichdidcome to be (white) withoutbeing somethingother thanjustwhatis a log or a particular log. (Ibid.,83-4_ 14.) Jonathan Barnes, in his note on this distinction between per se and peraccidenspredications (which, following ancient commentators, he calls "natural" and "unnatural" predications, respectively), regards the phrase "things which, being something else, are so and so" as the key phrase in descriptions of the latter.6 What is meant by "being something else" in this phrase? Barnes interprets it in this way: to say that Y is predicated unnaturally of X is to say that "Xis Y"means "For some Z distinct from X, Z is Y and it happens that Z is X." At first sight

60p. cit., page 116. Barnes's main treatment of this distinction is to be found hereabouts, on pages 115-118. He lists a number of passages, from the PosteriorAnalytics and from elsewhere, where this phrase occurs. 67

C. J. F. WILLIAMS

this is paradoxical. How could X be said to be Y in virtue of something else, Z, being Y? Aristotle's example, of the musical thing's being white, sheds light on this. The musical is white only because the man, who is incidentally musical, is white. Aristotle's use of the material mode of speech is what confuses us here. It is not that the musical thing is different from the man: on the contrary the musical thing has to be the same as the man. Rather, being musical is something different from being a man. The difference is a difference, not between two things, but between two ways of picking out one and the same thing. Of course, for it to be true that the musical thing is white, there does not have to be a man who is musical and is also white. The musical thing could be a goddess-even a Muse-as long as there was something ("else") which was white as well as being musical. Clearly an existential quantification is in the offing. Barnes interprets 83a4-6 as saying that "The white thing is a log" means "That which is incidentally white is a log," or, generally, in unnatural predication "X is Y"means "For some Z distinct from X, Z is Y and it happens that Z is X." It is nothing new to see a proposition containing a relative clause like "that which is incidentally white" regarded as equivalent to an existentially quantified proposition. If "The President of Harvard is a chemist" is of the form (3x)(Xx & Xx), so is "That which is incidentally white is a log". Existentially quantified propositions, however, are true in virtue of the truth of singular propositions (forgetting for the moment problems about nameless objects). If "Someone presides over Harvard and he is a chemist" is true, it is because "Jones presides over Harvard and Jones is a chemist" is true. Propositions of the form (3x)(xx & Xx) are true because propositions of the form xa & 4a are true. If we have a true proposition, "The xer is a Per," which links the terms X and +, it is because of the truth of a proposition containing a third term a which tells us that a both x's and +'s. X and + are linked because "something else," namely a, is there to link them. The "something else" has to be a true logical subject. Russell distinguishes logical subjects (logically proper names) from merely grammatical subjects (as often as not, definite descriptions). Aristotle distinguishes the log, and presumably the man, which are "underlying subjects," ("underlying subject" is Barnes's translation of "hypokeimenon," which I translate "substratum") from the white and 68

ARISTOTLE'S THEORY OF DESCRIPTIONS

is the musical, which are not. Aristotle's "hypokeimenon" not consciously a logical or grammatical label like Russell's "subject,"but the one word is the lineal ancestor of the other. It is no accident that Aristotle talks about substrata and predication in the same paragraph: our terminology of "subject" and "predicate" is due to him. The "unnaturalness" of saying that the musical is white may be expressed in metaphysical terms by saying that a quality like whiteness can inhere only in a substance like man, not in another quality like musicality; but it is arguable that these metaphysical distinctions are only logical distinctions writ large.7 The claim that accidents cannot inhere in other accidents says in the material mode what is said in the formal mode by the claim that predicates cannot attach directly to other predicates but only to names. III As for names, we cannot ignore any longer the fact that Aristotle is prepared to countenance common names, like "man" and "log," in subject position, whereas Russell is hard put even to admit proper names like "Jones" to this rank. Russell's puritanism about proper names is no doubt excessive; but if Aristotle is so permissive as to regard men and logs, so designated, as underlying subjects, his views must surely be a thousand miles, as they are two thousand years, away from the doctrine of logically proper names. This conclusion is unavoidable so long as we treat Russell and Frege as the founders of the only two schools of thought about names which have currency in modern philosophy of logic. But for over twenty years a third view has been available, a view which rejects the coincidence of the common name/proper name distinction with the predicate/subject or concept/object distinction. Already in 1962 P. T. Geach argued for the recognition of common nouns, such as "man" or "log," as genuine logical subjects. This was in the first edition of Referenceand Generality.In the third edition, published in 1980, Geach affirmed this view of common names even more forcibly, and drew attention to earlier philosophers who took this position:
7Aristotle can on occasion explicitly treat as a thesis about words a thesis which he elsewhere expresses as a thesis about things. See my remarks on homonymy in Aristotle's'De Generationeet Corruptione'(Clarendon Aristotle Series, 1982), p. 113.
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C. J. F. WILLIAMS

I thus came to accept the view of Legniewski and other Polishlogicians that there is no distinctsyntactical categoryof proper names. Whethera name is a proper name depends on the kind of thing it is a namefor,and thisis a matterof its sense, not of its syntactical category;in syntaxthere
is only the category of names.8

The link between propositions where the subject is a proper name and those where the subject is a common name is to be found in propositions where the subject is a list of proper names. In "Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are all evangelists," being an evangelist is predicated of four men in the same way as being a poet is predicated of Larkin in "Larkin is a poet." In the former, however, the word "all"is needed to show that the predicate is being said to be true of all, rather than of some or most, of those whose names appear on the list. In the latter this is unnecessary, although Geach is prepared to allow the equivalent forms "Every Larkin is a poet," "Most Larkin is a poet" and "Some Larkin is a poet," which all have the same sense as "Larkin is a poet." Lists, which enumerate the subjects of propositions, are not far removed from common names, which indicate subjects of propositions in an open-ended way. The two propositions "Each of: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, wrote in Greek" and "Each evangelist wrote in Greek" say the same thing about the same people; and the list, the common name and a proper name, say "Luke," all perform the same referential function in ways which, from the syntactical point of view, are indistinguishable. Geach is, of course, well aware that his view of names is much the same as that set forth by Aristotle in De Interpretatione. The so-called "Aristotelian" view to which he, as much as Frege or Russell, is opposed, is that phrases like "Every man," "Some man" or "No man," taken as a whole, constitute subjects of propositions. Geach points out that this debased "Aristotelian logic" was not even generally accepted among the scholastic philosophers of the Middle Ages: And to the applicatives"some","every","only",and the like, Aquinas assignsthe role of showing the way the predicategoes with the subject,
ordinempraedicati ad subjectum.Like Frege, Aquinas will have no truck

8P. T. Geach, Reference and Generality,Third Edition, (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1980), p. 15.

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with the idea that an applicativegoes along with a general term to form a quasi subject,to which a predicate is then attached.9 For Geach, as for Russell, there are no logically complex names. The phrase "man who is musical" is not a syntactically coherent string of expressions. When it is attached to "every" it requires "if" and when it is attached to "some" it requires "and" to explicate its significance: "Every man who is musical appreciates silence" is unpacked into "Every man, if he is musical, appreciates silence," whereas "Some man who is musical appreciates silence" comes out as "Some man is musical and he appreciates silence." The case of "The man who is musical" is merely an instance of this general rule. Understood as containing a definite description, "The man who is musical appreciates silence" is equivalent to "Just one man is musical and that man appreciates silence." Since "man who is musical," here as elsewhere, is not a syntactical unit, "The man who is musical" is a fortiori a mere fragment of a sentence, a fragment possessed of no unitary function. It is like "Plato was bald" in the sentence "The man who taught Plato was bald." Aristotle's view that such phrases signify only an "accidental unity" can be seen as a projection on to the world of a looseness of connection which belongs properly to combinations of words. Aristotle's theory of kooky objects, if not a perfect anticipation of Russell's theory of logical fictions, bears considerable resemblance to Geach's view that complex names are a "logical mirage" ibidd.,p. 145). Aristotle, after all, held a pretty low view of "accidental being": "the accidental seems to have some affinity to not-being" (Metaphysics E.2. 1026b21).

IV
Russell's Theory of Descriptions had, among its other aims, that of solving certain puzzles to do with identity. George IV, who wondered whether Scott was the author of Waverley, was not plagued by curiosity over whether Scott was Scott. The law of the substitutivity of identicals holds, for Russell, where proper names are substituted for proper names. It does not hold where definite de-

9Ibid., p. 201. 71

C. J. F. WILLIAMS

scriptions, at least those which have secondary occurrence, are substituted for each other or for proper names. Recent studies of Aristotle's views about accidental unities have suggested that similar problems motivated his theory.'0 One such problem is discussed in De SophisticisElenchis, Chapter 24. It is the famous puzzle about the Hooded Man. The constituents of the puzzle are as follows: I do not know who the hooded man is; Coriscus is known by me to be Coriscus; Coriscus is the same as the hooded man; but ex hypothesi,the hooded man is not known by me to be Coriscus. Aristotle's solution of this puzzle is as follows (179a36-bl): For in all these cases it is clearly not necessarythat what is true of the accidentis true also of the thing; for it is only to those things which are indistinguishableand one in substance that all the same things are thought to belong. In terms of the Hooded Man puzzle, Coriscus is "the thing" and the hooded man "the accident." Coriscus may be the same as the hooded man, but this is only accidental identity, the third and weakest of the three kinds of numerical identity listed in Topics, 103a23-31. "Hooded Coriscus," like "musical Coriscus" or "the musical white," is only an accidental unity or an accidental being; it is this which Matthews, expounding Aristotle's views in this passage, has called "a kooky object." These ways of expressing the distinction are, however, liable to confuse people who find it difficult to move from the material to the formal mode of speech. Aristotle's use of the word "true" should have shown us the way. "What is true of the accident is not necessarily true of the thing." A true proposition is obtained by attaching "is not known by me to be Coriscus" to "The hooded man" but not by attaching it to "Coriscus." The difference is a consequence of the difference between a definite description like "the hooded man" and a name like "Coriscus." Aristotle is interested in the phenomenon Quine picked out by the phrase "referentially opaque context"; but his explanation of it has more in common with that of Prior, who locates the trouI0See Alan Code, "Aristotle's Response to Quine's Objections to Modal Logic," Journal of Philosophical Logic, 5 (1976), pp. 159-186. Gareth B. Matthews, op. cit.; Nicholas P. White, "Aristotle on Sameness and Oneness," The PhilosophicalReview, 80 (1971), pp. 177-197. 72

ARISTOTLE'S THEORY OF DESCRIPTIONS

ble, not in the alleged context, but in the tendency to lump together (as "singular terms") the expressions which seem to be inserted in the context. (Cf. Prior, op. cit., p. 199). Expressing himself in the material mode, he explains matters by distinguishing the beings to which these different sorts of expression are said to refer. V Another puzzle, or family of puzzles, is sketched by Aristotle in various places (Topics, I, 11, 104b25-28; MetaphysicsE, 2, 1026b1820; K, 8, 1064b23-30). Code and Matthews set it out in roughly the I following way: " (1) The musical person has become the literate person (2) The musical person is the same as the literate person (3) The literate person has become the musical person. The second of these propositions follows from the first with the help of the logical truth that what something has become it now is. The identity proposition thus obtained enables (3) to be derived from (1) by a double application of Leibniz's Law. The result, however, is intolerable, since, if (1) and (3) are both true, as Ross remarks,'2 "he must have been grammatical (= literate) before he was musical as well as musical before he was grammatical." Again, the puzzle can be resolved if we follow Russell's Theory of Descriptions. Leibniz's Law can only safely be applied if the terms of the identity proposition are proper names. The Law can be regarded as affirming the validity of the schema x = y D (+x y), but a
1lIt is not entirely clear that the exegesis of all or any of the Aristotelian passages just cited requires or permits precisely this exposition of the puzzle. I discuss the correct interpretation of these passages at some length in an article "Some Comments on Aristotle MetaphysicsE 2, 3" 10, no.2 Illinois Classical Studies (1985). However, the problem undoubtedly turns on the legitimacy of substituting "the literate person" or "someone literate" for "the musical person" or "someone musical"; and Aristotle clearly locates the fallacy in the fact that these expressions designate merely accidental beings, and that the identity in question is merely per accidens identity. 12W. D. Ross, Aristotle'sMetaphysics,(Oxford: At the Clarendon Press,

1924, vol. I), p. 359. 73

C. J. F. WILLIAMS

proposition like (2) is not a substitution instance of x = y; rather it is a substitution instance of (3x)(y)((x = y = + y) & (z)(x = z = Fez)).If (1) and (2) are interpreted in accordance with the Theory of Descriptions it is no longer obvious that (1) entails (2). "The musical person has become the literate person" must be understood as equivalent to "Just one person was musical and that person has become the literate person," and "The musical person is the same as the literate person" as "Just one person is musical and that person is the same as the literate person"; but the fact that just one person was musical does not entail that just one person is now musical. Indeed, as Code and Matthews observe, the pattern of inference which takes us from (1) to (2) would take us from "The illiterate person has become the literate person" to "The illiterate person is the same as the literate person," and the absurdity of this forces us to analyze "The illiterate person has become the literate person" as "Just one person was illiterate and that person has become the literate person." Definite descriptions can be explicitly or implicitly tensed: "the President of the United States" can mean "the person who was then President of the United States." Names, as Aristotle was aware, are untensed (aneu chronou-De Interpretatione, 2, 16a20). The logically valid schema "If x has become F, x is (now) F," like Leibniz's Law, requires names, not descriptions, as substitutions for x. "What something has become, it now is" can justify deriving "Spain is a democracy" from "Spain has become a democracy," but not "The worst European dictatorship is a democracy" from "The worst European dictatorship has become a democracy." The view that Aristotle deals with this puzzle in a Russellian manner, as I have done, is one which Code examines, only to reject (op. cit., pp. 167, sqq.). His reasons for rejecting it, however, are unconvincing. Two of these reasons depend on his considering an analysis of propositions like (1) which involves quantification, not only over persons, but also over times. This means that the analysans no longer contains the word "becomes," and is thus incompatible with a view Code ascribes to Aristotle, namely, that becoming has to be retained as a two-term relation. The analysis considered in this way also has the effect of analyzing becoming, or change, in terms of time, or times, and this, Code believes, goes against the analysis of time in terms of change, which Aristotle 74

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gives in Physics IV, 11. But whatever force these arguments may have considered in themselves, they do not tell against the Russellian analysis just given of (1) as "Just one person was musical and that person has become the literate person." The analysans here retains the word "becomes" and makes no mention of times. More relevant to the case I have been arguing is Code's view of Aristotle's

remarks in PhysicsI, 2,

185b25-186a3

about the relation between

verb-phrases with the copula and finite verbs. Aristotle here talks of some of his predecessors who wished to avoid the verb "be" in its copulative sense, and changed "The man is white" to "The man whitizes"'3 and "The man is a walker" to "The man walks." Their motivation was fear of making the one many, presumably by seeming to identify "white" and "a walker," which are different, with one and the same thing, namely "the man." Aristotle accuses them of failing to see that one thing can be many, that is, different, things, if we are talking about things which are many or different in definition (logoii),and this is glossed by saying that being white (to einai) is different from being musical (mousikii). This is a stanleukoii dard contrast in Aristotle. The two sorts of sameness (oneness) or difference (manyness) are variously labelled in different places: sameness in definition (logos) or being (einai, ousia) is contrasted 14 with sameness in subject or substratum (hypokeimenon). The like Russell, who thinkers Aristotle is criticizing may have been thought it was "a disgrace to the human race" that it used the same word "is" to express, amongst other things, both predication and identity;15 and they may have wished to scrap the copulative or predicative use of "be" altogether, to avoid the possibility of equiv13The Greek has the perfect indicative passive of the verb "whiten," which is a single word in the Greek, and does not involve any part of the Greek equivalent of the verb "be." To translate this, as Code does, as "has been whitened" is to obscure the point Aristotle is making. 14Cf. the remarks in my note on De Generatione et Corruptione, I, 3, 319a29, sqq., op. cit., pp. 96, sq., in which I list a number of passages where Aristotle makes this distinction. I tried in my note to illuminate Aristotle's distinction by assimilating it to Frege's distinction between Sinn and Bedeutung; but I now believe that an understanding of the possibility of informative identity propositions, which Frege tried to achieve by this distinction, is better secured by Russell's Theory of Descriptions, which is also closer to Aristotle's account. 15Bertrand Russell, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1919), p. 172. 75

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location. Aristotle, on the other hand, is always ready to allow a word to be used in a plurality of senses: one of his favorite philosophical techniques is to distinguish such senses. So here Aristotle is prepared to allow that "white" and "musical" are different (or many) in one sense, namely in definition or being, while remaining the same (or one) in another sense, namely in substratum. This latter sameness or unity, expressible by the proposition "The white (person) is the same as the musical (person)," consists in the fact of whiteness and musicality inhering in a common subject, that is, having a common substratum. Russell's analysis of identity propositions containing definite descriptions, as having the logical form (3x)(xx & Ox),brings out the very feature that Aristotle was emphasising. Having explained in this way how one thing can be many things without self-contradiction, he has no need to follow Lycophron and the others in extirpating the verb "be" from sentences expressing accidental unity, being or sameness. But so far from ruling out a Russellian analysis in which one or both of the terms of an identity statement dissolve into first- and second-level predicates, this is precisely the direction in which Aristotle is pointing. Code is not justified in seeing here an argument against interpreting Aristotle's solution of his problem in terms of the Theory of Descriptions. Code has his own interpretation of Aristotle's solution of the problem raised in Metaphysics E.2. It involves the notion of the coincidence of spatio-temporal continuants.16 A spatio-temporal continuant is made up of "space-time slices" of individuals collected together under principles associated with what Code calls "an individual concept." Thus "Gerald Ford" names a "space-time worm'' which consists of every space-time slice corresponding to Ford at a particular moment during his existence, while "the President of the United States" names a "space-time worm" composed of slices of George Washington from 1789 to 1797, of John Adams from 1797 to 1801, and so on. The proposition "Gerald Ford was the President of the United States" asserts the coincidence of these two worms, that is, the fact that they were composed of the same slices, during the period 1974-76. This coincidence is, on this view, what Aristotle means by sameness per accidens (kata symbebikos).
'61n this he follows Nicholas White, op. cit.

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Code's theory has, however, been sufficiently refuted by Matthews (op. cit., p. 237). He points out that Aristotle's doctrine is designed to solve a certain range of puzzles. This includes the puzzle of how to avoid the entailment of (3) by (1) and (2), but it also includes the Hooded Man puzzle of De SophisticisElenchis. As Matthews makes clear, the doctrine of space-time slices and the coincidence of spatio-temporal continuants is powerless to help with puzzles which have the same structure as that of the Hooded Man. "The Hooded Man" no doubt picks out only a small sub-stretch of the space-time slices which compose Coriscus: Coriscus does not always wear his hood. But "suppose Coriscus is, from birth, the favorite son of Electra. Then the favorite son of Electra could lack the attribute of being known by Socrates to be Coriscus even though Coriscus has it and is accidentally the same person as he" (Matthews, ibid.). Code's solution depended on expressions like "the literate man" and "the musical man" picking out different, though coincident, collections of space-time slices. Matthews's "the favorite son of Electra" picks out exactly the same space-time slices as does "Coriscus," but still the argument is fallacious. VI Code's interpretation of Aristotle's notion of per accidensidentity makes it relevant only to puzzles which arise out of the temporal concept of becoming. Aristotle is also interested, -however, in puzzles which arise out of epistemic concepts. Code's attractive paper draws illuminating connections between the temporal concepts which gave trouble to Aristotle and the modal concepts which give trouble to Quine. But Quine is concerned also with epistemic concepts, and psychological concepts generally. Referential opacity is for Quine a blemish which attaches equally to modal and to psychological contexts. The analogies between modality and tense are well known, and it is no surprise that the obstacles that arise for the Substitutivity of Identicals in modal contexts should be paralleled in contexts involving tense, which are needed to express the ideas of change or becoming. Russell's method of overcoming these obstacles was to distinguish primary from secondary occurrence of definite descriptions, and the same method is used by Smullyan and Prior to distinguish true from false interpretations of proposi77

C.J. F. WILLIAMS tions like "The number of the planets is necessarily greater than seven." This sort of distinction, now recognized as a distinction of scope, was made by medieval logicians using the terminology of sensus divisus and sensus composites.They realized the generality of the device, applying it, not only to modal propositions like "What is known is necessarily true," but to propositions covertly involving tense, like "The blind see" and "The lame walk."'7 These have to be understood sensu diviso, as exemplifying the schema "Some persons were F and those persons now G,"just as "The literate person has become musical" has to be understood as meaning "Just one person was literate and that person has become musical." In each case the analysis of the proposition unearths a truth function, and the truth or falsity of the proposition depends on determining which has wider scope, this truth function or the modal, tense or epistemic operator which also plays a role in the construction of the proposition. Scope distinctions provide a solution which has far greater generality than Code's solution in terms of space-time slices and spatio-temporal continuants. Following Russell, Smullyan and Prior, I have no doubt that these solutions in terms of scope distinctions are the correct ones. What this paper, however, is chiefly designed to establish is that this solution was also Aristotle's. Code makes capital out of the use of "coincidental" to translate the Aristotle's kata symbebikos," original of "per accidens."The verb is of "symbainein," which "symbebikos" a participle, can undoubtedly mean "coincide"; so Code's notion of "space-time worms" coinciding for certain stretches of their occupancy of "space-time" gives his interpretation of the Aristotelian solution of the problems of bein coming a certain plausibility. However, "symbainein" Aristotle has its own technical sense: it is used fairly frequently for the relation in which predicates stand to their subjects, and it is used to express the relation which two predicates have to each other when both are truly predicable of the same subject. This is the same relation as is also described by Aristotle as "sameness in substratum (i.e., subject-hypokeimenon)." It is that which exists between X and Pwhen hold, when, that is, there is at least one thing of which both X and P (3x)(Xx & Ax) is true. This explains why Aristotle is chary about
'7See my comments in "Aristotle and Corruptibility: Discussion of Aristotle De Caelo I, xii," Religious Studies, 1 (1966), p. 98, n.4. 78

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calling the relation between "musical" and "white" in "The white thing is musical" a case of predication, but insists, if "predication" is to be used at all in this connection, in characterizing it as "per accidens(i.e., coincidental) predication." Coincidence is there, but it is logical coincidence, the relation obtaining between two predicates both of which hold of a given subject, not spatio-temporal coincidence, as when different space-time worms are partially composed of the same space-time slices. What is coincidental in this sense is in no way contrasted with what is essential in the sense of "necessary." It is a mistake, as Matthews has pointed out (op. cit., pp. 228, sqq.), to take Aristotle's accidental identity to be simply what is asserted by contingent identity statements. He no doubt believed it to be a necessary truth that the road from Athens to Thebes is the same as the road from Thebes to Athens and John's teaching Mary the same as Mary's learning from John, but these are both contrasted with sameness in definition or being, and so are, presumably, cases of accidental identity (Physics,III, 3, 202bl 1-22). The fallacious inference from Peter's knowing that the sum of thirty and six is greater than thirty to Peter's knowing that the square of six is greater than thirty cannot be stopped by calling "30 + 6 - 62" an accidental identity, if by that is meant its expressing a contingent truth. But for Aristotle "greater than thirty" can be predicated only accidentally of "the sum of six and thirty" or of "the square of six," because it holds of each of them only in so far as it and they all hold of some further thing, namely, 36. Being greater than thirty no doubt follows from the definition of being 36, but this does not prevent its being reor garded by Aristotle as a "symbebikos" "accident." He has indeed a special sub-class of accident called the "perse accident (kath'hauto symbebikos)" MetaphysicsB, 995b20, for example), which consists (see of these accidents whose inherence in a substance is a consequence of its definition. VII Russell's theory, particularly when expressed with the help of symbols, seems far removed from any ideas that Aristotle could have had. How could someone in the Fourth Century B.C. have conceived the thought that "The son of Electra is a coward" means 79

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"Something is such that both anything is identical with it if and only if born of Electra, and it is a coward," let alone that it is a proposition of the form (3x)((y)(x = y = tjy) & 4x)? But, as I have already pointed out, propositions which are of this form are also of the less specific form (3x)(xx & Xx). They assert that there is something which x's (i.e., which alone +'s) and which also +'s. The fine detail of the Russellian analysis is what takes care of the implication of uniqueness in the use of a definite description; but the gross outline is concerned only with the fact that a per accidenspredication is true if and only if the property indicated by the grammatical predicate belongs to something to which the property indicated by the grammatical "subject" also belongs. "Subject" and "predicate" are united in a common substratum (hypokeimenon). This, rather than the fine detail of Russell's analysis, is what is chiefly significant as refuting the old subject-predicate analysis of these propositions. And this analysis is already explicit and clearly expressed in Aristotle's account of the matter, even if he lacked the apparatus of a repeated variable bound by a single quantifier. His description of the bold outline of the logical form of propositions like "The white thing is musical" is every bit as accurate as that of Russell. So I hope enough has been said to persuade the reader that the ideas which gave rise to Russell's Theory of Descriptions, were also at work in producing Aristotle's doctrine of accidental predication, accidental sameness, etc. It would be silly to pretend that the ideas were fully developed by Aristotle, or that these are the only source of his pervasive use of the phrase translated "per accidens." Many threads are entwined in this web of doctrine and the task of disentangling them is long and laborious. This particular thread, however, is worth following, and the risk of anachronism is less than the danger of mistaking for futile scholasticism distinctions and classifications which provide useful tools for the solution of problems that are still alive.'8 Universityof Bristol

181 am grateful to Peter Alexander for comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

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