Venn and Existential Import: Development of the Modern Doctrine of Categorical Propositions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article discusses John Venn's contribution to the development of the modern doctrine of categorical propositions, which departs from the traditional doctrine by rejecting the subalternation thesis, and holds that universal propositions do not have existential import while particular propositions do. Venn was one of the earliest proponents of the modern doctrine, and made significant contributions to its development by examining the existential import of categorical propositions to argue for the superiority of the modern doctrine over the traditional doctrine. While discussing his significance in the development and establishment of the modern doctrine, the article also argues that his defense of the doctrine has serious problems because some, if not all, of the universal affirmatives have existential import. And it argues that the problems are due ultimately to fundamental assumptions about categorical propositions the doctrine inherits from the traditional doctrine.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot 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.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.041 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
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".