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I At the opening of De Interpretatione Aristotle defines the nature of speech in terms that are both logical and metaphysical and which, to a large extent, determine the ancient, medieval, and many of the most modern theories of language and its operation. “Spoken sounds” (literally, “the things in the voice” [tå §n tª fvnª, ea quae sunt in voce]), Aristotle explains, are signs of impressions on the soul (payÆmata, passiones), which, in turn, are the images of things (prágmata, res).1 Speech is thus tied, in two steps, to the world of things: its sounds point, as symbols, to psychic imprints that, for their part, attest to the beings with which the soul is already familiar.2 The significance of this claim, for the philosophy of language and its history, could not be more decisive. Once De Interpretatione determines the canonical form of speech as a “meaningful utterance” (lÒgow shmantikÒw, vox significativa) and, more precisely , as a “proposition” (lÒgow a 'pofantikÒw, oratio enuntiativa) bearing truth or falsity, and once it situates truth and falsity in the composition (súnfesiw, compositio) of autonomous elements,3 the conclusion is inevitable: the paradigmatic form of true speech must be that of a “statement of one thing concerning another thing” (légein ti katá tinÒw, enuntiatio, in Boethius’ translation of the Greek, alicuis de aliquo).4 Even at its end, language, according to such a conception, thus hardly leaves the things from which it arises. It reaches its final form, the predicative assertion, in reducing itself, through the terms of its logical composition, to the subject on which it bears; it fulfills its 11 Inventio Linguae The Language of Contingency 1 function in dissolving itself, according to the canon of analysis (a 'nalúsiw, literally, “loosening up”) into the “one thing” of which it states “another thing.” At its origin and its end, speech, by definition, remains the speech of what exists; the integrity and identity of language is altogether founded on the consistency and stability of the things that it bears. Aristotle’s treatise, in this way, confronts all speech with a limit beyond which it cannot easily venture: it must remain a question whether language can bear on what does not exist. De Interpretatione does not conceal this limit, nor does it retreat before the radical consequences it implies for the form of the statement and its truth. Aristotle, on the contrary, places this limit at the center of his discussion of language and the utterance, giving it a name: contingency . Contingency (tÚ §ndexÒmenon in Greek, which Boethius renders as contingens) is the term by which Aristotle refers to that of which language speaks when, at the limit of its canonical operation, it refers to what is not a thing and what, in a certain sense, is not at all. The steps that lead Aristotle to consider the problem of contingency in his reflections on language and the statement can be easily summarized. Having defined truth, in numerous passages of his logical and metaphysical works, as the correspondence between things and thought, such that the necessities of speech are also those of Being, Aristotle locates truth in the judgment and the proposition that expresses it.5 A proposition is therefore considered to be true when, in the form of affirmation or negation, it states what exists. Given the stability and irrevocability of the past and present, Aristotle writes, all statements that refer to past and present things are therefore necessarily bearers of truth and falsity: “with respect to what is and what was,” we read, “it is necessary that affirmation and negation be true or false” (§p‹ m¢n oÔn t«n ˆntvn ka‹ genom°nvn énãgkh tØn katãfasin µ tØn épÒfasin élhyÇ h µ ceudÇ h e‰nai, in his quae sunt et facta sunt necesse est adfirmationem vel negationem veram vel falsam esse).6 “In singular and future matters,” however, Aristotle adds, “the case is not the same” (§p‹ d¢ t«n kay' ¶kasta ka‹ mellÒntvn ou 'x ımo¤vw, in singularibus vero et futuris non similiter).7 Aristotle’s reasoning here is perfectly consistent with the principles that found his treatment of language; his claim follows directly from his initial derivation of the statement and its truth from the determinacy and presence of that of which it speaks. In each case the necessary truth or...

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