Franz Brentano_The True and the Evident.pdf

INTRODUCTION (References 1 to 10)
Notes 99
1 There are modern theories of knowledge which are nothing but correspondence theories in disguise—for
example, those theories which would rely, not upon evidence, but upon “verification”,
i.e., upon a comparison between a judgement and a state of affairs (or the facts, or what is actual). A
comparison with the empirically given is itself an act of judgement, which can be either false or correct;
and one cannot make the comparison unless one already knows both the judgement and the fact.
2 In Brentano’s Würzburg lectures on ontology, given prior to 1872, we find the following passage: “One
may correctly characterize truth in the following way: Truth (or knowledge) is goodness or perfection
in judgement, just as beauty is goodness or perfection of thought or idea (Vorstellung) and virtue the
goodness or perfection of will (or desire).” This is the way in which Windelband was later to speak.
3 Wherever there is a belief in ideal and unreal objects, reasons of the sort that Brentano cites may be said
to be at work: ordinary language is a practical and not a theoretical instrument; its influence is misleading,
for it was not formed for the purposes of philosophy. But the philosopher must make use of ordinary language
as long as there is no characteristica universalis grounded upon an adequate psychological analysis.
4 The negative judgement is the source of our apparent references to non-being and to nothing. By
denying this fact, one is led to the nonsensical mysticism of Heidegger’s “Nichts-theorie”, with its
delusion that in certain moods and feelings we can “contemplate the essence of nothingness”. This is
discussed in “Über Nichts und Alles” in Wege und Abwege der Philosophie (Prague 1937), by O.Kraus.
5 This principle is not to be confused with Höfler’s thesis (a product of misunderstandings),
according to which contradictory judgements cannot be made by the same subject.
6 According to Husserl (Logische Untersuchungen, 2nd edn, Vol. I, pp. 176–177), the law of
contradiction, “when properly understood”, says that “of two contradictory propositions (judgementcontents),
one is true and one is false”. And this, according to him, is to be distinguished from saying:
“Of two contradictory judgements, one is correct and one is incorrect.” The latter is supposed to be
merely a consequence of the former strict formulation. According to Husserl, when we think of the law
of contradiction in its strict sense, we need not think of judgements as real acts at all, and in no case are
judgements the objects with which the law is concerned. This over-subtle distinction must be rejected
as nonsense, if only for the following reason: the term “correct”, when it is not used to mean the same
thing as “evident”, is not being used as a real predicate which applies to the acts of judgement which we
call correct; it functions rather as a mere denominatio extrinseca, merely expressing the thought that a
judgement contradicting the one called correct cannot possibly be one that is evident, or seen to be correct.
The principle that, of two contradictory propositions, one is true and one is false, tells us no more
than this—“when properly understood”. The principle of contradiction does not imply that in calling
a judgement “true” we are treating the judgement as being the subject of any kind of predication
(and to this extent Husserl has a vague notion of what the correct view is); still less is the
principle concerned with ideal propositions or contents of judgement. The principle of contradiction
is an apodictic denial that there can be an evident judgement which contradicts a judgement
called “true”. The fictions of our language, however, serve to conceal the results of psychognostic
analysis. The errors to which these fictions may lead are illustrated by Husserl’s doctrine that
“the” judgement that two and two are five (two and two are six, two and two are seven) is of the
same sort as “the” judgement that there are dragons. His realm of ideal objects, in other words,
is populated not only by every possible “eternal truth” but also by every possible “eternal falsehood”.
The “pure consciousness” is hardly to be envied, therefore, for the wealth of its Noëmata.
7 [According to Brentano’s theory of judgement, every judgement has an object which the judgement
either affirms or denies (accepts or rejects); two judgements have the same object if the object that
the one affirms or denies is the same as the object that the other affirms or denies; they have the same
quality if they both affirm the object, or if they both deny the object.—R.M.C.] We must distinguish