Franz Brentano_The True and the Evident.pdf

106 Notes
he held instead that the word “is” has a single meaning in the statements “There is a God”, “There is
a substance”, “There is a property or quality”. But at the time he wrote the criticism of Windelband he
did believe that such words as “deprivation”, “possibility”, “truth”, and “freedom” are categorematic,
and hence that one could think about a deprivation, and accept or reject it, just as one may think about
a physical thing, or about a man, or God. But later investigations (see the appendix of Vol. II of the
Psychologie) indicated that the words in question have only a syncategorematic use. The lecture
on truth, at the beginning of the present book, implies that the statement “There is a deprivation,
or absence, of gold” affirms an “irreal” object of thought—that it affirms the “absence of gold” or
the “non-existence of gold”. But according to Brentano’s later view, the statement rejects or denies
something; “There is an absence of gold” is only another way of saying “There is no gold”. And
what is denied or rejected is always some thing, whether it be gold or water or whatever. Brentano
would also add this: if we are to express ourselves strictly, we should not speak of the meaning of
the expressions “is” and “is not”; we should speak rather of the synsemantic uses of such words.
And these uses may be very different: in the sentence “There is a God” the word “is” is used to
express an affirmation, but in “There is an absence or deprivation” and “There is an impossibility”
it is used to express a denial or rejection, which in such cases happens to have the linguistic form of
an affirmation. Brentano’s criticisms of his own earlier doctrine are set forth very clearly in a letter
which I have included in my introduction to the Psychologie (Vol. I, pp. xliv–liv).
35 Brentano is here calling attention to the fact that when the word “is” is used syncategorematically
as a copula, in order to express an affirmation, it has nothing to do with that sense of “being” which
is synonymous with “object” or “thing” and which does function as a genuine name. It would be well
if this equivocation in the term being could henceforth be avoided.
36 A simple thetic judgement, according to Brentano, is adequately expressed in the forms “There
is an A” or “There is not an A”, or even in the forms “There is an AB” or “There is not an AB”. A
compound predicative judgement (a “double-judgement”) would be put as “A is B” or “A is not B”.
The traditional logic misconceives the nature of the latter judgements; it takes them to be single
judgements (as Brentano had done at first) and not as consisting of two judgements. Thus it takes “A
is B” and “There is AB” to be different verbal expressions of the same judgement; just as Brentano
had taught, in 1874, that “Some man is sick” has the same meaning as the existential statement
“There is a sick man”. But if there are “double-judgements”, then the proper way to express them is
in the form “A is B”—“Some man is sick”. In the latter judgement a man is accepted or affirmed and
it is said of him that he is sick. But “There is a sick man”, on the contrary, is the proper expression
for a simple thetic judgement, in which the object of a synthesis of ideas—“sick man”—is simply
acknowledged.
37 According to Windelband, the statement “The rose is a flower” may be thought of as being like
the statement “All roses are flowers” and consequently he believed it to mean the same as “There
is no rose which is not a flower” or “There is no rose which is a non-flower”. Brentano says, on
the contrary, that “The rose is a flower”, as well as “All roses are flowers”, expresses a twofold
judgement: one judgement which accepts or acknowledges a rose, and a second judgement which
rejects or denies roses which are non-flowers. In other words, one must take account of the fact that
statements beginning with “all” may have two different senses. Sometimes they may express what is
merely a negative judgement. For example, the judgement expressed by “All triangles are such that
the sum of their angles is 180 degrees” is a purely negative apodictic judgement which does not assert
that there is such a thing as a triangle; the judgement is true, and yet there cannot be anything that is
actually made up of three absolutely straight lines. But when one says “All men are mortal” and “All
roses are flowers”, one is expressing the judgements (1) that there are men and that there are flowers
and (2) that there are no men who are not mortal and that there are no roses which are not flowers. It
was in 1883, so far as I know, that Brentano first published this interpretation of “all” statements.
38 Windelband had written: Brentano “proposes in a very mysterious way that the traditional
theory of inference may be revolutionized on the basis of a theory of the nature of judgement, but he