Franz Brentano_The True and the Evident.pdf

Notes 105
“objective” or “state of affairs” (the state of affairs that something A is, or that it is not). The analogue
holds true in the case of the correspondence between valuation and value, states-of-value, valuecontents,
and the like. Brentano had not yet become completely aware of the fictitious character of
these modes of speaking.
25 Instead of speaking of a “correct inference” from false premises, one should speak of the correct
conception of the so-called “rule of inference”. To call the inference itself formally correct or formally
true is inadvisable and misleading. Compare Hillebrand, Die neuen Theorien der kategorischen
Schlüsse; compare also notes 7 and 38.
26 From this point on, the entire correspondence or “adaequatio” theory is capable of refutation.
Any such theory, including the one presented in the text, is untenable, because it is absurd, indeed
ridiculous, to hope to compare the thing with the judgement in which the thing is known. For the
thing in question would have to be known before the comparison could be made. Yet every theory
intending to trace back the concept of the “true” to the concepts of being “appropriate”, “fitting”,
“suitable”, or the like, tacitly implies that such a comparison must be made.
27 The concept of a thing is not to be confused with that of an existent. We derive the concept of
thing from any intuition of outer, or inner, perception; “thing” is the most general concept that there
is. But we speak of “the existent” or of “that which has belng” only when we assert of some thing that
it is; “existence” and “existent” are thus related to the judging attitude and to affirmation in particular.
We will not discuss the ways in which some recent philosophers have played with the words “Being”,
“Dasein”, and “Existence”, except to note that, if a theory has anything new to offer, it should not be
expressed in words which have traditionally been used in other senses.
28 The principle according to which any conceptual investigation must ultimately go back to
intuition is what finally enabled Brentano to dispose of the doctrine of irrealia.
29 Brentano here expressly states that to every thought (Denken) there corresponds, as a correlate,
that which is thought about (das Gedachte). Brentano always insisted that when we think about a
horse, we think about the horse and not about the idea of the horse; but he is saying here that there is
a correlation between the thinking-of-a-horse and the horse as something which is thought about. I
mention this because by the time he wrote the letter of 17 March, 1905, which is printed below, the
latter doctrine had become so foreign to him that he questioned whether he had ever enunciated it.
According to his later views, the “A-as-something-which-is-thought-about” is a linguistic and not a
conceptual correlate of “That which is thinking about A”.
30 The fragment breaks off with the additional phrase, “And similarly in the case of judgement,
‘There is…’” The manuscript was written certainly not after 1901, and most probably long before.
This is confirmed by the fact that the handwriting does not yet show any indication of diminishing
eyesight and, even more strongly, by the fact that the general train of thought is the same as that of
the lecture on truth.
31 The Deskriptive Psychologie which Brentano announces here exists up to now only in the form of
unpublished lectures. In 1911 Brentano prepared a new edition of Book Two of his Psychologie vom
empirischen Standpunkt and added supplementary material; see Chapter VII, “On the Impossibility
of Regarding Judgement and the Emotions as forming a single basic category” (Vol. II, p. 15 2).
32 Concerning those compound or double judgements, see Volume II of the Psychologie, p.
183, and “Miklosich über subjektlose Sätze” published in 1883 and translated as “Miklosich on
Subjectless Propositions”, in the appendix to The Origin of the Knowledge of Right and Wrong
(London 1902), Cecil Hague’s translation of Brentano’s Vom Ursprung sittlicher Erkenntnis.
33 On the concept of intensity, see Brentano’s Vom sinnlichen und noetischen Bewusstsein (Vol. III
of the Psychologie) and his Untersuchungen zur Sinnespsychologie (Leipzig 1907).
34 Brentano would now approach Windelband’s doctrine somewhat differently. Windelband had
said that the statement “There is freedom” does not ascribe to freedom the kind of being that “There
is a God” ascribes to God. He had also held that substances do not have the same type of being as do
properties or activities. But Brentano never accepted any such distinction between modes of being;