Chapter III: Part 3

5. I hope that these general lectures, which, as I am quite aware, have anticipated the treatment of many difficult questions which they have not attempted to solve, have been successful in putting the problem of Logic before us with some degree of vividness. If this problem were thoroughly impressed upon our minds, I should say that we had already gained something definite from this course of study. The points which I desire to emphasise are two.

(1) I hope that we have learned to realise the world of our knowledge as a living growth, sustained by the energy of our intelligence; and to understand that we do not start with a ready-made world in common, but can only enter upon the inheritance of science and civilisation as the result of courage, labour, and reasonable perseverance; and further, that we retain this inheritance just as long as our endurance and capacity hold out, and no longer.

And (2) I have attempted to make clear that this living growth, our knowledge, is like the vegetable or animal world in being composed of infinite minor systems, each and all of which are at bottom the same function with corresponding parts or elements, modified by adaption to the environment. So that the task of analysing the form of judgment bears a certain resemblance to that of analysing the forms of plants. Just as from the single cell of the undifferentiated Alga, to {60} the most highly organised flower or tree, we have the same formation, with its characteristic functions and operations, so from the undifferentiated judgment, which in linguistic form resembles an ejaculation or interjection, to the reasonable systems of exact or philosophical science, we find the same systematic function with corresponding elements.

But the world of knowledge has a unity which the world of organic individuals cannot claim; and this whole system of functions is itself, for our intelligence, approximately a single function or system, corresponding in structure to each of its individual parts, as though the plant world or animal world were itself in turn a plant or animal. We cannot hope to exhaust the shapes taken by the pervading fundamental function of intelligence. We shall only attempt to understand the analogies and differences between some few of its leading types.

{61}

LECTURE IV TYPES OF JUDGMENT AND THE GENERAL CONDITIONS
INVOLVED IN ASSERTION

_Correspondence between types of Judgment and nature of objects as Knowledge_

1. The question of correspondence between the types of Judgment and the orders of Knowledge was really anticipated in discussing the relation between the content and the form of knowledge. We saw that the content or matter and nature known determines on the whole the form or method of knowledge by which it can be known.

I give a few cases of this correspondence, not professing to complete the list. We should accustom ourselves to think of these forms as constituting a progression in the sense that each of them betrays a reference to an ideal of knowledge which in itself it is unable to fulfil, and therefore inevitably suggests some further or divergent form. And the defect by which the forms contradict the ideal, is felt by us as a defect in their grasp of reality, in their presentation of real connections.

_“Impersonal” Judgment_

_a_. We think of the judgment as predicating an ideal content of a subject indicated in present perception. But there are judgments which scarcely have an immediate subject at all, such as “How hot!” “Bad!” “It hurts!” In the judgments thus represented the true subject is some {62} undefined aspect of the given complex presentation. Of course the words which we use are not an absolutely safe guide to the judgment--they may be merely an abbreviation. But there are typical judgments of this kind in which we merely mean to connect some namable content with that which can only be defined as the focus of attention at the moment. Such judgments might be called predications of mere quality. The only link by which they bind their parts into a whole is a feeling referred to our momentary surroundings. A _mere_ quality, if not defined or analysed, or a feeling of pleasure or pain, is the sort of object which can be expressed in such a judgment.

_Perceptive Judgment_

_b_. Then we have the very wide sphere of perceptive judgment, which we may most conveniently confine to judgments which have in the subject elements analogous to “This,” “Here,” “Now.” Such particles as these indicate an effort to distinguish elements within the complex presented. They have no content beyond the reference to presentation, and, in “here” and “now,” an implication that the present is taken in a particular kind of _continuum_. Otherwise they mean nothing more or other than is meant by pointing with the finger. We may or may not help out a “subject” of this kind by definite ideas attached to it as conditions of the judgment. If we do, we are already on the road to a new form of knowledge, incompatible with the judgment of perception. For so long as we keep a demonstrative, spatial or temporal, reference in the thought, the subject of judgment is not cut loose from our personal focus of presentation. And as the existence of such a focus is undeniable, we are secure against criticism so far as the {63} content of the subject is concerned. But if we begin to specify it, we do so at our peril.

Such judgments as these have been called “Analytic judgments of sense.” [1] The term is not generally accepted in this meaning, but is conveniently illustrative of the nature of these judgments. It is intended to imply that they are a breaking up and reconstruction of what, in our usual loose way of talking, is said to be given in sense-perception. They remain on the whole within the complex of “that which” is presented.

[1] Mr. F.H. Bradley, _Principles of Logic_, p. 48.

From the point of view which we have taken, such judgments are not confined to what we think it worth while to _say_, but are the essence of every orderly and objective perception of the world around us. In a waking human consciousness nothing is unaffirmed.

We have no other term than perception to express the process which is employed in scientific observation and experiment. But it is plain that so soon as the judgment that refers to “This” is modified through the inevitable demand for qualification by exact ideas--“_This_ hurts me,” “_What_ hurts you?” “This old sprain, at the pace we are walking”--a conflict of elements has arisen within the judgment. And as commonplace perception passes into scientific observation, the qualifying ideas, on which truth and relevancy depend, dwarf the importance of the “this,” and ultimately oust it altogether. That is a simple case in which the ideal of knowledge and the nature of reality operate within the judgment to split asunder its primitive form. The subject as expressed by a pure demonstrative refuses to {64} take account either of truth, _i.e._ consistency with knowledge as a whole, or of relevancy, _i.e._ consistency with the relation involved in the particular predication that may be in question. Our commonplace perception halts between these two extremes. It deals with the world of individual objects and persons, which, being already systematised according to our current observations and interests, has, so long as we keep to its order, a sufficient degree of truth and relevancy for the needs of daily life. Thus if I say, “This book will do as a desk to write upon,” the truth of the qualification “book” (_i.e._ the reality of the subject) is assumed on the ground of the facility of recognising a well-known “thing,” while the relevancy of the qualification “book” is not questioned, because we accept an individual thing as an object of habitual interest _qua_ individual, and do not demand that whenever it is named those properties alone should be indicated which are relevant to the purpose for which it is named. The “thing” is a current coin of popular thought, and makes common perception workable without straining after a special relevancy in the subject of every predication. Such special relevancy leads ultimately to the ideal of _definition_, in which subject and predicate are adequate to each other and necessarily connected. A definitory judgment drops the demonstrative and relies on qualifying ideas alone. It is therefore an abstract universal Judgment, while the Judgment of Perception, so long as it retains the demonstrative, is a Singular Judgment.

_Proper names in Judgment_

_c_. But a very curious example of a divergence or half-way house in Knowledge is that form of the singular Judgment in which the subject is a proper name. A proper name is {65} designative and not definitory. It may be described as a generalised demonstrative pronoun--a demonstrative pronoun which has the same particular reference in the mouth of every one who uses, it, and beyond the given present of time.

So the reference of a proper name is a good example of what we called a universal or an identity. That which is referred to by such a name is a person or thing whose existence is extended in time and its parts bound together by some continuous quality--an _individual_ person or thing and the whole of this individuality is referred to in whatever is affirmed about it. Thus the reference of such a name is universal, not as including more than one individual, but as including in the identity of the individual numberless differences--the acts, events, and relations that make up its history and situation.

What kinds of things are called by Proper Names, and why? This question is akin to the doctrine of Connotation and Denotation, which will be discussed in the next lecture. It is a very good problem to think over beforehand, noting especially the limiting cases, in which either some _people_ give proper names to things to which other people do not give them, or some _things_ are given proper names while other things of the same general kind are not. These judgments, which are both Singular and Universal, may perhaps be called for distinction’s sake “Individual” Judgments.

_Abstract Judgment_

_d_. The demonstrative perception may also be replaced by a more or less complete analysis or definition.

Within this province Definition of a concrete whole is one extreme, _e.g_. “Human Society is a system of wills”; {66} that of an abstract whole the other extreme, “12 = 7 + 5.” There are all degrees, between these two, in the amount of modification which the parts undergo by belonging to the whole. There are also all sorts of incomplete definitions, expressing merely the effects of single conditions out of those which go to make up a whole. These form the abstract universal judgments of the exact sciences, such as, “If water is heated to 212° Fahr. under one atmosphere it boils.” In all these cases some idea, “abstract” as being cut loose from the focus of present perception, whether abstract or concrete in its content, replaces the demonstrative of the judgment which is a perception. These are the judgments which in the ordinary logical classification rank as universal.

_The general definition of Judgment_

2. It was quite right of us to consider some types of judgment before trying to define it generally. It is hopeless to understand a definition unless the object to be defined is tolerably familiar. We have said a great deal about knowledge and about judgment as the organ or medium of knowledge. Now we want to study particular judgments in their parts and working, and observe how they perform their function of constructing reality.

Now, for our purpose, we may take the clearest cases of judgment, viz. the meanings of propositions.

The distinctive character of Judgment as contrasted with every other act of mind is that it claims to be true, _i.e._ pre-supposes the distinction between truth and falsity.

First, we have to consider what is implied in claiming truth.

Secondly, by what means truth is claimed in Judgment.

{67} Thirdly, the nature of the ideas for which alone truth can be claimed.

_What is implied in claiming truth_

(i.) Claiming truth implies the distinction between truth and falsity. I do not say, “between truth and falsehood,” because falsehood includes a lie, and a lie is not _prima facie_, an error or falsity of knowledge. It is, as may be said of a question, altogether addressed to another person, and has no existence as a distinct species within knowledge. Thus a lie is called by Plato “falsehood in words”; the term “falsehood in the mind” he reserves for ignorance or error, which he treats as the worst of the two, which from an intellectual point of view it plainly is.

No distinction between truth and falsity can exist unless, in the act or state which claims truth, there is a reference to something outside psychical occurrence in the course of ideas. Falsity or error are relations that imply existences which, having reality of one kind, claim in addition to this another kind of reality which they have not. In fact, all things that are called false, are called so because they claim a place or property which they do not possess. They must exist, in order to be false. It is in the non-fulfilment, by their existence, of some claim or pretension which it suggests, that falsity consists. And so it is in the fulfilment of such a claim that truth has a meaning. A false coin exists as a piece of metal; it is false because it pretends to a place in the monetary system which its properties or history [1] contradict.

[1] For it is, I suppose, technically false, even if over value, if not coined by those who have the exclusive legal right to coin.

As the claim to be true is made by every judgment in its {68} form, there can be no judgment without some recognition of a difference between psychical occurrences and the system of reality. That is to say, there is no judgment unless the judging mind is more or less aware that it is possible to have an idea which is not in accordance with reality.

Thus, _if_ an animal has no real world distinct from his train of mental images, if, that is, and just because, these are his world directly, and without discord, he cannot judge. The question is, _e.g._ when he seems disappointed, whether the pleasant image [1] simply disappears and a less pleasant image takes its place, or whether the erroneous image was distinguished as an element in “a mere idea,” which could be retained and compared with the systematised perceptions which force it out, _as_ an idea with reality.

[1] It will be observed that we are not treating the mental images as being taken for such by the primitive mind. It is just in as far as they are _not_ yet _taken for such_ that they _are merely such_. Mr. James says that the first sensation is for the child the universe (_Psychology_ II. 7). But it is a universe in which all is equally mere fact, and there is no distinction of truth and falsehood, or reality and unreality. That can only come when an existent is found to be a fraud.

We must all of us have seen a dog show signs of pleasure when he notices preparations for a walk, and then express the extreme of unhappiness when the walk is not taken at all, or he is left at home. People interpret these phenomena very carelessly. They say “he thought that he was going to be taken out.” If he did “_think that_, etc,” then he made a judgment. This would imply that he distinguishes between the images suggested to his mind, and the reality of their content as the future event of going out, and knew that he might have the one without the other following. But of {69} course it is quite possible that the dog has no distinct expectation of something different from his present images, but merely derives pleasure from them, which he expresses, and suffers and expresses pain when they are replaced by something else. It is here, no doubt, in the conflict of suggestion and perception, that judgment originates.

On the other hand, animals, especially domestic animals, do seem to use the imperative, which perhaps implies that they know what they want, and have it definitely contrasted with their present ideas as something to be realised.

However this may be, the claim of truth marks the minimum of Judgment. There can be no judgment until we distinguish psychical fact from the reference to Reality. A mere mental fact as such is not true or false. In other words, there is no judgment unless there is something that, formally speaking, is capable of being denied. When your dog sees you go to the front door, he may have an image of hunting a rabbit suggested to his mind, but so far there is nothing that can be denied. If he has the image, of course he has. There is nothing that can be denied until the meaning of this image is treated as a further fact beyond the image itself, in a system independent of the momentary consciousness in his mind. _Then_ it is possible to say, “No, the fact does not correspond to your idea,” _i.e._ what we are ultimately obliged to think as a system is inconsistent with the idea as you affirmed it of the same system.

_By what means the claim to truth is made_

(ii.) The first thing then in Judgment is that we must have a world of reality distinguished from the course of our ideas. Thereupon the claim to truth is actually made by attaching the meaning of an idea to some point in the real {70} world. This can only be done where an identity is recognised between reality and our meaning.

Thus (keeping to the Judgment of Perception) I say, “This table is made of oak.” This table is given in perception already qualified by numberless judgments; it is a point in the continuous system or tissue which we take as reality. Among its qualities it has a certain grain and colour in the wood. I know the colour and grain of oak-wood, and if they are the same as those of the table, then the meaning or content “made of oak” coalesces with this point in reality, and instead of merely saying, “This table is made of wood that has such and such a grain and colour,” I am able to say “This table is made of oak-wood.”

This example shows the true distinction between the Logical Subject and Predicate. The fact is, that the ultimate subject in Judgment is always Reality. Of course the logical subject may be quite different from the grammatical subject. Some kinds of words cannot in strict grammar be made subjects of a sentence, though they can represent a logical subject quite well: _e.g._ “_Now_ is the time.” “_Here_ is the right place_.” Adverbs, I suppose, cannot be grammatical subjects. But in these sentences they stand for the logical subjects, certain points in the perceptive series.

The true logical subject then is always reality, however much disguised by qualifications or conditions. The logical predicate is always the meaning of an idea; and the claim to be true consists in the affirmation of the meaning as belonging to the tissue of reality at the point indicated by the subject. The connection is always made by identity of {71} content at the point where the idea joins the reality, so that _the judgment always appears as a revelation of something which is in reality_. It simply develops, accents, or gives accuracy to a recognised quality of the real. This is easily seen in cases of simple quality--_e.g._ “This colour is sky-blue.” The colour is given, and the judgment merely identifies it with sky-blue, and so reveals another element belonging to its identity, the element of being seen in the sky on a clear day.

The analysis is not quite so easy when there is a concrete subject like a person; for how can there be an identity between a person and a fact? “A.B. passed me in the street this afternoon.” Between what elements is the identity in this case? It is between him, as an individual whom I know by sight in other places, and him as he appeared this afternoon in particular surroundings. His identity already extends through a great many different particulars of time and place, and this judgment merely recognises one more particular as included in the same continuous history. “He in this context belongs to him in a former context.” In this simple case the operative identity is probably that of my friend’s personal appearance; but the judgment is not merely about that but about his whole personality, of which his personal appearance is merely taken as a sign.

Any assertion which is incredible because the identical quality is wanting will illustrate the required structure. There is a story commented on by Thackeray in one of his occasional papers, which implied that the Duke of Wellington took home note-paper from a club to which he did not {72} belong. (Thackeray gives the true explanation of the fact on which the suggestion was founded.) The identity concerned in this case would be that of character. Can we find an identity between the character involved in a piece of meanness like that suggested and the character of the Duke of Wellington? No; and _prima facie_ therefore the judgment is false. The identity which should bind it together breaks it in two. But yet, again: supposing the external evidence to be strong enough, we may have to accept a fact which conflicts with a man’s character as we conceive it. That is so: in such a case one kind of identity appears to contradict the other. I may think that I saw a man with my own eyes, doing something which wholly contradicts his character as I judge it. Then there is a conflict between identity in personal appearance and identity in character, and we have to criticise the two estimates of identity--_i.e._ to refer them both to our general system of knowledge, and to accept the connection which can be best adapted to that system.

We have got, then, as the active elements in Judgment a Subject in Reality, the meaning of an idea, and an identity between them.

Is this enough? Have we the peculiar act of affirmation wherever we have these conditions?

This is not the question by what elements of language the judgment is rendered. We shall speak of that in the next lecture. The question is now, simply, “Is a significant idea, referred to reality, always an assertion?”

The first answer seems to be that such an idea is always _in_ an assertion, but need not constitute the whole of an {73} assertion. If we think of a subject in judgment which is represented by a relative sentence, it seems clear that any idea which can stand a predicate can also form a part of a subject. “The exhibition which it is proposed to hold at Chicago in 1893”--has in effect just the same elements of meaning, and just the same reference to a point in our world of reality as if the sentence ran, “It is proposed to hold an exhibition at Chicago in 1893.” In common parlance we should say, that in the former case we entertain an idea--or conceive or represent it--while in the latter case we affirm it.

But if we go on to say that the former kind of sentence as truly represents the nature of thought as the latter, then it seems that we are mistaken. Even language does not admit such a clause to the rank of an independent sentence.

If we insist on considering it in its isolation, we probably eke it out in thought by an unarticulated affirmation such as that which constitutes an impersonal judgment; in other words, we affirm it to belong to reality under some condition which remains unspecified. Thus the linguistic form of the relative clause, as also the separate existence of the spoken or written word, produces an illusion which has governed the greater part of logical theory so far as concerns the separation between concept and judgment, _i.e._ between entertaining ideas and affirming them in reality. In our waking life, all thought is judgment, every idea is referred to reality, and in being so referred, is ultimately affirmed of reality. The separation of elements in the texture of Judgment into Subjects and Predicates which, as separated, are conceived as _possible_ Subjects and Predicates, is therefore {74} theoretical and ideal, an analysis of a living tissue, not an enumeration of loose bricks out of which something is about to be built up.

_The kind of ideas which can claim truth_

(iii.) “Idea” has two principal meanings.

(_a_) A psychical presentation and

(_b_) An identical reference.

This distinction is the same as that between our course of ideas and our world of knowledge. We must try now to define it more accurately.

(_a_) An idea as a psychical presentation is strictly a particular. Every moment of consciousness is full of a given complex of presentation which passes away and can never be repeated without some difference. For this purpose a representation is just the same as a presentation; is, in fact, a presentation. Its detail at any given moment is filled in by the influence of the moment, and it can never occur again with precisely the same elements of detail as before. If we use the term “idea” in this sense, as a momentary particular mental state, it is nonsense to speak of having the same idea twice, or of referring it to a reality other than our mental life. The idea in this sense is a psychical image. We cannot illustrate this usage by any recognisable part of our mental furniture, for every such part which can be described and indicated by a general name, is something more than a psychical image. We can only say that that which at any moment we have in consciousness, when our waking perception encounters reality, is such an idea, and so too is the image supplied by memory, when considered simply as a datum, a fact, in our mental history.

(_b_) To get at the other sense of “idea” we should think {75} of the meaning of a word; a very simple case is that of a proper name. What is the meaning of “St. Paul’s Cathedral in London”? No two people who have seen it have carried away precisely the same image of it in their minds, nor does memory, when it represents the Cathedral to each of them, supply the same image in every detail and association twice over to the same person, nor do we for a moment think that such an image _is_ the Cathedral. [1] Yet we neither doubt that the name _means_ something, and that the same to all those who employ it, nor that it means the same to each of them at one time that it did at every other time. The psychical images which formed the first vision of it are dead and gone for ever, and so, after every occasion on which it has been remembered, are those in which that memory was evoked. The essence of the idea does not lie in the peculiarities of any one of their varying presentations, but in the identical reference that runs through them all, and to which they all serve as material, and the content of this reference _is_ the object of our thought.

[1] When we are actually looking at the Cathedral, we say, “_That is_ the Cathedral.” Does not this mean that we take our momentary image, to which we point, to be the reality of the Cathedral? Not precisely so. It is the “that,” not our definite predication about it, which makes us so confident. The “that” is identified by our judgment, but goes beyond it.

In order to distinguish and employ this reference it is necessary that there should be a symbol for it, and so long as it brings us to the object which is the centre of the entire system, this symbol may vary within considerable limits.

The commonest and most secure means of reference is {76} the word or name. [1] So confident are we in the “conventional” or artificially adapted character of this mark or sign of reference, that we are inclined to treat it as absolutely unvarying on every occasion of utterance. But of course it is not unvarying. It differs in sound every time it is spoken, and in context and appearance every time we see it in a written shape. Our reliance upon it as identical throughout depends on the fact that it has a recognisable character to which its variations are irrelevant, and which practically crushes out these variations from our attention. Unless we are on the look-out for mispronunciations or misprints, they do not interfere at all with our attention to the main reference of words. We know that it is almost impossible to detect misprints so long as one reads a book with attention to its meaning. This then is a fair parallel to the distinction which we are considering between two kinds of ideas. If the momentary sound or look of a word is analogous to idea as psychical presentation, “the word” as a permanent possession of our knowledge is analogous to the idea as a reference to an object in our systematic world, and is the normal instrument of such a reference.

[1] “A name is a sound which has significance according to convention,” _i.e._ according to rational agreement.--_Ar. de Interp_. 16a 19.

But either with the word or without it there may be a symbol of another kind. Any psychical image that falls within certain limits may appear as the momentary vehicle of the constant reference to an object. Just as in recognising the reference of a word we omit to notice the accent and loudness with which it is pronounced, or the quality of the paper on which it is printed, just so in recognising the {77} reference of a psychical image our attention fails to note its momentary context, colouring, and detail. If it includes something that definitely belongs to a systematic object in our world of objects, that is enough, unless counteracted by cross references, to effect the suggestion we require, and that, and nothing else, arrests our attention for the moment. When I think of St. Paul’s Cathedral, it may be the west front, or the dome seen from the outside, or the gallery seen from the inside, that happens to occur to my mind; and further, that which does occur to me occurs in a particular form or colouring, dictated by the condition of my memory and attention at the moment. But these peculiarities are dwarfed by the meaning, and unless I consider them for psychological purposes, I do not know that they are there. It is the typical element only, the element which points to the common reference in which my interest centres, that forms the content of the idea in this sense, taken not as a transient feature of the mental complex, but as definitely suggesting a constant object in our constructed world. And it suggests this object because it, the typical element, is a common point that links together the various cases and the various presentations in which the object is given to us. In this sense it is a universal or an identity.

How can this conception of a logical idea be applied to a perfectly simple presentation? It would be impossible so to apply it, but there does not seem to be such a thing as a simple presentation in the sense of a presentation that has no connection as a universal with anything else. In the image of a particular blue colour, we cannot indeed separate out what makes it blue from what makes it the particular {78} shade of blue that it is. But nevertheless its blueness makes it a symbol to us of blue in general, and when so thought of, crushes out of sight all the visible peculiarities that attend every spatial surface. We understand perfectly well that the colour is blue, and that in saying this we have gone beyond the limits of the momentary image, and have referred something in it as a universal quality to our world of objects. An idea, in this sense, is both less and more than a psychical image. It contains less, but stands for more. It includes only what is central and characteristic in the detail of each mental presentation, and therefore omits much. But it is not taken as a mental presentation at all, but as a content belonging to a systematic world of objects independent of my thought, and therefore stands for something which is not mere psychical image.

If therefore we are asked to display it as an image, as something fixed in a permanent outline, however pale or meagre, we cannot do so. It is not an abstract image, but a concrete habit or tendency. It can only be displayed in the judgment, that is, in a concrete case of reference to reality. Apart from this, it is a mere abstraction of analysis, a tendency to operate in a certain way upon certain psychical presentations. Psychically speaking, it is when realised in judgment a process more or less systematic, extending through time, and dealing with momentary presentations as its material. In other words, we may describe it as a selective rule, shown by its workings but not consciously before the mind--for if it were, it would no longer be an idea, but an idea of an idea.

Every judgment, whether made with language or without, {79} is an instance of such an idea, which may be called a symbolic idea as distinct from a psychical image; “symbolic” because the mental units or images involved are not as such taken as the whole of the object for which they stand, but are in a secondary sense, as the word in a primary sense, symbols or vehicles only.

Such ideas can have truth claimed for them, because they have a reference beyond their mental existence. They point to an object in a system of permanent objects, and that to which they point may or may not suit the relation which they claim for it. Therefore the judgment can only be made by help of symbolic ideas. Mere mental facts, occurrences in my mental history, taken as such, cannot enter into judgment. When we judge about them, as in the last sentence, they are not themselves subject or predicate, but are referred to, like any other facts, by help of a selective process dealing with our current mental images of them. We shall not be far wrong then, if in every judgment, under whatever disguises it may assume, we look for elements analogous to those which are manifest in the simple perceptive judgment, “This is green,” or “That is a horse.” The relation between these and more elaborate forms of affirmation, such as the abstract judgment of science, has partly been indicated in the earlier portion of this lecture. The general definition of judgment has therefore been sufficiently suggested on p. 72. Judgment is the reference of a significant idea to a subject in reality, by means of an identity of content between them.

{80}

LECTURE V THE PROPOSITION AND THE NAME

_Judgment translated into language._

1. Judgment expressed in words is a Proposition. _Must_ Judgment be expressed in words? We have assumed that this need not be so. Mill [1] says of Inference that “it is an operation which usually takes place by means of words, and in complicated cases can take place in no other way.” The same is true of Judgment.

[1] _Logic_ vol. I. c. i., init.

We may say in general that words are not needed, when thinking about objects by help of pictorial images will do the work demanded of the mind, _i.e._ when perfectly individualised connections in space and time are in question. Mr. Stout [1] gives chess-playing as an example. With the board before him, even an ordinary player does not need words to describe to himself the move which he is about to make.

[1] In _Mind_, no. 62.

Words are needed when we have to attend to the general plan of any system, as in thinking about organisms with reference to their type, or about political relations--about anything, that is, which is not of such a nature that the members of the idea can be symbolised in pictorial form. It would be difficult, for example, to comprehend the respiration of plants under a symbolic picture-idea drawn {81} from the respiration of the higher animals. The relations which constitute a common element between the two processes do not include the movements, feelings, and visible changes in the circulatory fluid from which our image of animal respiration is chiefly drawn; and we could hardly frame a pictorial idea that would duly insist on the chemical and organic conditions on which the common element of the process depends. In a case of this kind the word is the symbol which enables us to hold together in a coherent system, though not in a single image, the relations which make up the content of our thought.

“Words” may be of many different kinds--spoken, written, indicated by deaf and dumb signs; all of these are derived from the word as it is in speech, although writing and printing become practically independent of sound, and we read, like the deaf and dumb alphabet, directly by the eye. Then there may be any kind of conventional signals either for letters, words, or sentences, and any kind of cipher or _memoria technica_ either for private or for general use--in these the “conventional” nature of language reaches its climax, and the relation to a natural growth of speech has disappeared. And finally there are all forms of picture-writing, which need not, so far as its intrinsic nature goes, have any connection with speech at all, and which seems to form a direct transition between picture-thinking and thinking through the written sign.

All these must be considered under the head of language, as a fixed system or signs for meanings, before we can ultimately pronounce that we think without words.

Every Judgment, however, can be expressed in words, {82} though not every Judgment need be so expressed or can readily be so.

_Proposition and sentence._

2. A Judgment expressed in words is a Proposition, which is one kind of sentence. A command question or wish is a sentence but not a proposition. A detached relative clause [1] is not even a complete sentence. The meaning of the imperative and the question seems to include some act of _will_; the meaning of a proposition is always given out simply for fact or truth. We need not consider any sentence that has no meaning at all.

[1] See above, Lect. IV.

_Difference between Proposition and Judgment_

3. Almost all English logicians speak of the Proposition and not of the Judgment. [1] This does not matter, so long as we are agreed about what they mean. They must mean the proposition _as understood_, and this is what we call the judgment.

[1] So Mill, Venn, Jevons, Bain (see his note, p. 80).

In order to make this distinction clear, let us consider the proposition as it reaches us from without, that is to say, either as spoken or as written. The words, the parts of such a proposition, as we hear or read them, are separate and successive either in time alone, or in time and space. Further, the mere sounds or signs can be mastered apart from the meaning. You can repeat them or copy them without understanding them in the least, as _e.g._ in the case of a proposition in an unknown language. So far, the proposition has not become a judgment, and I do not suppose that any logician would admit that it deserved the name even of a proposition. But if not, then we must not confuse the attributes which it has before it becomes a proposition with those which it has after.

{83} Further, in understanding a proposition, or in construing a sentence into a proposition (if the sentence only becomes a proposition when understood), there are many degrees. I read upon a postcard, “A meeting will be held on Saturday next by the Women’s Liberal Association, to discuss the taxation of ground-rents.” The meaning of such a sentence takes time to grasp, and if the words are read aloud to us, must of necessity be apprehended by degrees. We understand very quickly that a meeting is to be held next Saturday. This understanding is already a judgment. It is something quite different from merely repeating the words which we read. It consists in realising them as meanings, and bringing these meanings together into a connected idea, and affirming this idea to belong to our real world. The meanings are not separate, outside one another, as the words are when we first hear or read them. They enter into each other, modify each other, and become parts of an ideal whole. This gradual apprehension of a sentence recalls to one the boyish amusement of melting down bits of lead in a ladle. At first the pieces all lie about, rigid and out of contact; but as they begin to be fused a fluid system is formed in which they give up their rigidity and independence, and enter into the closest possible contact, so that their movements and position determine each other. But still some parts, like words not yet grasped, remain hard and separate, and it is only when the melting is complete that this isolation is destroyed, and there are no longer detached fragments, but a fluid body such that all its parts are in the closest connection with one another.

Thus then in understanding a sentence we have a judgment {84} from the first. The rest of the process of understanding consists in completing the content of this judgment by fusing with it the meanings of the words not yet apprehended; and in the completeness with which this is effected there will always be great differences of degree between different minds, and also between the same mind at different times. Some of us attach a complete and distinct meaning to the words “Women’s Liberal Association”; some of us do not know, or have forgotten, exactly what it is, and what are its aims and history. All of us have some conception of the purpose described as “taxation of ground rents,” but the phrase conveys a perfectly definite scheme hardly to one in a thousand readers. Nevertheless, in so far as we have some symbolic idea which refers to this place or context in the world of objects, the content of this idea enters into and modifies the total meaning which in apprehending the sentence before us we affirm of reality. The heard or written proposition (or sentence, if it is not a proposition till understood) serves as an instrument by which we build up in our intellectual world a sort of plan or scheme of connected meanings, and also, not subsequently but concurrently with this work of building, affirm the whole content thus being put together to be true of reality. Then we have what I call a Judgment. It is not that the words are necessarily forgotten; they, or at least the principal significant terms, are probably still in the mind as guides and symbols; but yet a constructive work has been done; a complex experience has been called up and analysed, and its parts fitted together in a certain definite order by the operation of universal ideas or meanings, each of which is a system playing {85} into other systems; and the whole thus realised has been added as an extension to the significance of the continuous judgment which forms our waking consciousness. The inconvenience of the term “proposition” is that it tends to confuse the heard or written sentence in its separate words with the proposition as apprehended and intellectually affirmed. And these two things have quite different characteristics.

_Parts of Speech_

4. Thus we must be very careful how we apply the conception of “parts of speech.” The grammatical analysis which classifies words as substantives, adjectives, adverbs, verbs, and the like, is not to be taken as telling us what words are by themselves, but just the opposite, viz. what they do when employed in a significant sentence. They are studied separately for convenience in attending to them, as we may study the wheels and pistons of an engine; but the work which gives them their names can only be done when they are together. This truth is often expressed by saying that “the sentence is the unit of language,” _i.e._ a word taken by itself cannot have a complete meaning--unless it is a verb, or used with verbal force, for a verb is an unanalysed sentence. If any one uses a substantive or adverb by itself, we think that he has not finished his sentence, and no meaning is conveyed to our minds. We ask him, “Well, what about it?” The same is true, as we saw, of a relative clause. If we read in a newspaper such a clause as this, “The epidemic of influenza, which has appeared in England for three successive seasons,” followed by a full stop, we should infer, without hesitation, that some words had dropped out by accident. Of course such a {86} combination of words would make us think something, but the meaning which we might ascribe to it would be conjectural; we should necessarily complete the thought for ourselves by some affirmation--some relation to reality--while recognising that no such relation was given in the clause as we read it. Nothing less than a sentence, or, omitting the wish and the command, nothing less than a proposition, conveys a meaning in which the mind can acquiesce as not requiring to be supplemented conjecturally. There are traces in language that indicate the sentence to have been historically prior to the word. I question whether the word could be certainly distinguished within the sentence in early languages that have not been reduced to writing. The tendency of reflective analysis, as in grammar and dictionaries, is to give it a more and more, artificial isolation. The Greeks did not separate their words in writing, and they wrote down the change in a terminal consonant produced by the initial letter of the next word, just as if it was within a compound word. Nor had they really any current term co-extensive with our “word.” Where we should say “the word ‘horse’” they most commonly use the neuter article “the” followed by the word in question as if in quotation-marks (”the ‘horse’“). In defining noun and verb, Aristotle has no simple class name like ”word“ to employ as a common element of the definition, but uses the curious description ”a portion of discourse, of which no part has a meaning by itself.“

Of course, single words often stand as signs for propositions. It is interesting to note the pregnant meaning of a single word in the mouth of a child. Thus “stool” was {87} used to mean “(1) Where is my stool? (2) My stool is broken; (3) Lift me on to the stool; (4) Here is a stool.” [1] There is in this an interesting conflict of form and meaning, owing to the child of European race having at command only “parts of speech.” In a less analytical language he might have at command a sound corresponding to a sentence rather than to a “noun substantive.”

[1] Preyer, quoted in _Höffding, Psych_., 176.

The verb of inflected languages, [1] such as Greek or Latin, in which the “nominative case” need not be supplied even by a pronoun, is the type for us of a sentence not yet broken up.

[1] In German and English, though the verb is inflected, custom forbids it to stand without the pronoun.

The bearing of this truth on Logic is to make us treat it in two parts and not in three. We do not treat of Name, Proposition, Syllogism, or of Concept, Judgment, Inference, but only of the two latter parts. The name or concept has no reality in living language or living thought, except when referred to its place in a proposition or judgment. We ought not to think of propositions as built up by putting words or names together, but of words or names as distinguished though not separable elements in propositions. Aristotle takes the simple and straightforward view. “A term is the element into which a proposition is broken up, such as subject and predicate.” [1] Of course different languages separate the parts of the proposition very differently, {88} and uneducated people hardly separate them at all. Formal Logic breaks down the grammatical meaning of “name,” so far as to treat as a “logical name” any complex words that can stand as Subject or Predicate in a Proposition (_e.g._ a relative clause).

[1] _Anal. prior_., 24b, 16. The opposite view seems to be expressed in the beginning of the περὶ Ἑρμενείας [= peri Hermeneias, _de Interpretatione_], that the separate word corresponds to the separate idea. I have attempted to explain this as an illusion, p. 73, above.

_Denotation and Connotation_

5. The doctrine of the meaning of names has suffered from their relation to propositions not being borne in mind. Mill’s discussion [1] is very sensible, but, as always, very careless of strict system. More especially it seems a pity to state the question as if it concerned a division of names into Connotative and Non-connotative; because in this way we from the first let go of the idea that the meaning of a name has necessarily two aspects, [2] and we almost bind ourselves to make out that there are some non-connotative names. It is better to consider this latter subject on its merits. Mill says that an ordinary significant name such as “man” “signifies the subjects directly, the attributes indirectly; it _denotes_ the subjects, and implies or involves or indicates, or, as we shall say henceforth, _connotes_, the attributes.” In short, the denotation of a name consists of the things _to which_ it _ap_plies, the connotation consists of the properties which it _im_plies. The denotation is made up of individuals and the connotation of attributes. Denotation is also called Extension, especially if we are speaking of Concepts rather than of names. Connotation is then called Intension. In the German writers it is more usual to say that the Extension or Area (_Umfang_) consists not of the individuals, but of the species that are contained in {89} the meaning of a general name. They oppose it to Content (_Inhalt_) corresponding to our “Connotation.” Thus the “Area” of “rose” would not be the individual roses in the world, but rather all the species of rose in the world (_Rosa Canina, Rosa Rubiginosa_, etc.). This raises a difficulty as to the denotation of a specific name, but perhaps represents the actual process of thought, in the case of a generic name, better than that which Mill adopts. The difference is not important.

[1] _Logic_, Bk. I. c. ii. § 5. Cf. Venn, 174 and 183, and Bain, 48.

[2] See Bradley, p. 155.

Well, then, according to Mill, when we say, “The Marshal Niel is a yellow rose,” we refer directly to a group of real or possible objects, and we mean that all these individual objects are yellow roses. The attributes are only mentioned by the way, or implied. So Dr. Venn says that the denotation is real, and the connotation is notional.

But there is another side to this question. The objects may be _what you mean_ but the attributes seem to be _the meaning_, for how can you (especially on Mill’s theory of the proposition) refer to any objects except through these attributes, unless indeed you can point to them with your finger? And so again it seems, especially if we consider Mill’s account of predication, as if the Connotation were the primary meaning and the Denotation the secondary meaning. The Connotation determines the Denotation; and if we “define” the meaning of the name it is the Connotation that we state. And so Mill tells us two or three pages further on, that whenever the names given to objects have properly any meaning, the meaning resides not in what they denote, but in what they connote. In short, {90} the denotation of a general name is simply the meaning of its plural, or of its singular, in that sense in which it implies a plural, while the connotation is the meaning _per se_, not considered in its instances.