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Record W4410362060 · doi:10.1515/opphil-2025-0066

Did Aristotle have a Doctrine of Existential Import?

2025· article· en· W4410362060 on OpenAlexaff
Byeong-uk Yi

Bibliographic record

VenueOpen Philosophy · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicLegal principles and applications
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsExistentialismDoctrinePhilosophyEpistemologyPsychologyTheology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract Modern logicians hold that traditional logic makes a serious error by accepting the subalternation thesis , the thesis that universal affirmatives imply matching particular affirmatives. But some traditional logicians (e.g., Al-Fārābī, Abelard, Ockham) presented doctrines of existential import of categorical propositions that include subalternation, and some modern studies of Aristotle’s logic take him to assume one of the doctrines. This article argues that such interpretations have serious problems and proposes a radically different interpretation. On the new interpretation, called the no-import interpretation , Aristotle takes both singular and general categorical propositions (including singular and particular affirmatives) not to have existential import. In proposing and defending this interpretation, the article gives a close examination of two influential interpretations of his views on existential import: (a) the affirmative–negative interpretation , which takes him to hold that affirmative categorical propositions have existential import while negative ones do not, and (b) the non-vacuity interpretation , which takes his system of logic to presuppose or require that empty terms do not figure in general categorical propositions the system deals with. The article argues that Aristotle holds theses about singular and general categorical propositions that conflict with these interpretations, and that examination of the theses leads to the no-import interpretation.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.006
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.008
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.006
Threshold uncertainty score0.037

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0060.008
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0040.034
Scholarly communication0.0050.012
Open science0.0010.004
Research integrity0.0040.007
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0040.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.050
GPT teacher head0.411
Teacher spread0.361 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations1
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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