Franz Brentano_The True and the Evident.pdf

Notes 111
5 The manuscript reads “true (wahren)”; the word “genuine (echten)” has been inserted in order to
avoid ambiguity.
6 What Brentano here calls particles in the widest sense of the word do not quite coincide with what
Marty calls synsemantic signs. See Marty’s Untersitchungen, pt. II, ch. 1. The distinction between
words that are autosemantic and those that are merely synsemantic has recently been repudiated on
the ground that one always “thinks something”, even in connection with so-called merely semantic
words; as is well known, some ideas, especially anticipations of meaning, are regularly aroused
through the “constructive inner form of language”. But I should like to leave such views to selfcriticism.
They stand in the way of the only road there is which frees us from the epistemologicalphenomenological
fictions of ancient and modern philosophy.
7 According to Brentano, even names are “sentence-particles” in the widest sense of the word. These
include the names which Marty called theoretical autosemantica—for example, “stone”, “animal”,
“man”, “table”. They also include what are merely names in the grammatical sense—words which
do not name anything, but which because of the structure of the sentence serve to arouse anticipatory
expectations fixing the meaning of what is said. See the references to “synkategorische Partikel” in
the index to Vol. II of the Psychologie.
8 “Signifying itself” (für sich bedeuten) and “indicating something about itself” (für sich etwas
anzeigen) are two quite different functions. Compare note 4 above.
9 In accordance with what is said in the previous note, we are here concerned with conveying
information and not with meaning.
10 “Considering the thing positively” should be replaced by “thinking of”. At the same time that he
wrote this paper, Brentano doubted whether his concept of “thinking of”, in this sense, should be retained.
11 The theory of the fictitious character of the so-called formal words (grammatical abstracta) is
here extended to the so-called reflexiva and negativa.
12 “That which is a thing” here signifies, as so often elsewhere, the highest general concept.
13 Brentano does not mean to say that the expressions “thought” (gedacht) and “willed” (gewollt)
are synonymous with “that which thinks” (Denkendes) and “that which wills” (Wollendes); the former
words taken just by themselves are completely meaningless. He means rather that the thought of a
willing or thinking being must be called up if the expressions “thought” or “willed” are to perform
their synsemantic function in the sentence.
13 Analogously, the sentence “A visible black spot is presented” says only that there is someone
seeing a black spot. Bertrand Russell offers the contrary interpretation, however, on page 227 of his
book, Mensch und Welt (Munich 1930). He does not notice that, in the sentence “An observed black
spot is present,” the word “observed” functions synsemantically. Instead of adding to the concept of
the subject-term, it modifies it (in the way in which “deceased” may modify “man”). Because of this
fact, the use of “is present” is different from its use in such a sentence as “A person is present”. In the
latter case, the expression “is present” or “there is” serves to complete the statement by expressing
the acceptance or acknowledgement of a person. But saying “There is an observed black spot” is like
saying “There is an imagined centaur”; the latter tells us only that there is someone who imagines
a centaur. In Our Knowledge of the External World, Russell moves beyond Wittgenstein and adopts
the Brentano-Marty theory of synsemantic words (beginnings of which may be found, among the
moderns, in Mill’s theory of the syncategorematic). Thus Russell cites “there is” among his examples
of what is synsemantic. He does not notice, however, that such expressions as “the observed”, “the
seen”, “the loved”, and “the believed” are not names and hence that they too are “incapable of being
the logical subject of a meaningful proposition”. They signify neither things nor properties of things.
The statement “There is an observed spot of colour” expresses in a misleading way the belief that
someone is observing a spot of colour. For further details, see Psychologie, Vol. II, p. 62, and Marty’s
Untersuchungen, etc.; note the references to “Modifizierende Bedeutung” in the index to the latter
work.