Abstract
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.
Citation
Wallace A. Murphree. "The Irrelevance of Distribution for the Syllogism." Notre Dame J. Formal Logic 35 (3) 433 - 449, /Summer 1994. https://doi.org/10.1305/ndjfl/1040511349
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