Distribution of terms in A, E, I, O propositions

"All lawyers are graduates" tells you something about every single lawyer, but it tells you nothing about every graduate — there could be a million graduates who never touched law. Yet "No lawyers are judges" (were it true) would tell you something about every lawyer and every judge at once. Why does one sentence commit you to a whole class and the other only to part of it? That question is what distribution of terms answers, and it is the single most tested rule in this paper.

In two minutes

A term is distributed in a proposition if the proposition makes a claim about every single member of the class that term denotes; in the four traditional forms, the subject is distributed in universal propositions (A, E) and undistributed in particular ones (I, O), while the predicate is distributed in negative propositions (E, O) and undistributed in affirmative ones (A, I).

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