Medieval \textit{obligationes} as logical games of consistency maintenance (Q2576419)

This paper argues that the internal aim of the medieval form of disputation known as \textit{obligationes} was consistency maintenance, rejecting other possibilities such as the exploration of counterfactual conditionals, the resolution of sophisms, belief revision, or thought experiments, and acknowledging that as such it could have various external aims inclosing research, concept development, pedagogy, and student assessment. The obligation game is compared to such modern logical methods as deduction trees and model construction. The paper rightly rejects the suggestion that a player could adopt a model-theory based strategy of choosing an arbitrary model (valuation of all sentences) beforehand as impractical given the richness of the language in which the game was played, and the fact that Respondent did not know what the \textit{positum} is to be until the game had begun. The paper does not sufficiently emphasise that the obligation game, and indeed its ancestor the Socratic elenchus, is a regimentation of a natural form of social interaction, the serious conversation, to which it is related rather as the modern athletic event of javelin throwing is related to ancient warfare.