ABSTRACT
Aristotle’s Topics has been read as a kind of cookbook of argumentation. On a development of this reading by Jacques Brunschwig and followed by many interpreters after him, the τόποι provide recipes for doing something: for establishing or refuting a certain proposition p upon the basis of another proposition q. The recipes so conceived contain a construction procedure which tells you what the content of q is given the content of p, together with a law-like rule which establishes an inference scheme for getting from q to p. In this paper regulative or law-like rules of certain dialectical recipes are considered which behave differently. These rules function as controls for the correctness of a given utterance. They occur in connection with an exclusive interpretation of the predicables, i.e. the interpretation on which being an accident, a property, a definition, or a genus are mutually exclusive features of a predicable. The occurrence of such rules is thus coordinated with a specific semantic framework for predication, one which may have had the function of disambiguating propositions in dialectical contexts. The rules are interpreted, moreover, in their relationship to the theory of the predicables as a theory of linguistic features of dialectical propositions.
