determinate supposition

The term "determinate supposition" originates from medieval logic and refers to a specific type of reference made by a term within a proposition. It is part of a broader theory of "supposition," which analyzes how terms in a statement refer to things.1

In essence, determinate supposition describes a situation where a term refers to one or more specific, individual things, but not necessarily all of them. For example, in the statement "Some horse is running," the term "horse" has determinate supposition because it refers to a particular horse or horses that are running, rather than to the concept of "horse" in general or to every single horse that exists. This contrasts with other types of supposition, such as confused and distributive, where a term might refer to all members of a class in a distributed way. The theory of supposition was a key tool for semantic analysis in medieval logic and was applied in various fields, including theology and natural sciences.1