Franz Brentano_The True and the Evident.pdf

On the Concept of Truth 11
30. But there are other problems which may seem less easy to dispose of. Some of these
are due to the particular features of Aristotle’s own formulation, stemming from the fact
that his conception of judgement is not complete. When the relevant corrections are made,
these difficulties disappear. There is another type of case, however, which will not yield to
such treatment.
31. First a word about the problems that stem from Aristotle’s theory of judgement. Aristotle
states in the De Interpretatione that judgement is a combination of thoughts or concepts
that it is a synthesis He says that the synthesis consists
either in taking one thing to be combined with another, thus forming a unity, or else in
taking one thing to be separated or cut off from another. One judges truly when one takes
as combined things that really are combined, or when one takes as separated things that
really are cut off from one another. One judges falsely, on the other hand, if one judges in
a way that is contrary to the way in which the things are related.
32. But this should give us pause. Consider above all the assertion that the separate or distinct
existence of the things, which correspond to the subject and predicate in a judgement, is
a condition for the truth of the negative judgement and a condition for the falsity of the
affirmative judgement. If I say of a dog that he is a cat, then it is indeed the case that the
subject (dog) and predicate (cat) have separate existence, and that in taking the dog to be
a cat I am judging falsely. But the falsity of my judgement does not lie in the fact that a
dog and a cat exist separately; if there were no cat at all—neither united with nor separated
from the dog—my judgement would be still false.
33. We may clarify this point, if it is necessary, by considering other cases. For example,
if I judge that a certain tone “c” is a twentieth octave “a”, my judgement is certainly as
false as if I had considered it a first octave “a”; the latter tone has a separate existence
from the “c”; but the former tone is wholly imaginary. And instead of saying of a negative
judgement that it is true provided that the predicate exists separate from the subject, we
ought rather to say that the negative judgement is true provided the predicate does not exist
combined with the subject.
The definition of truth would now become: a judgement is true if it attributes to a thing
something which, in reality, is combined with it, or if it denies of a thing something which,
in reality, is not combined with it.
34. This change provides us with an essential correction, but the definition is still
unsatisfactory. Is it really the case that our affirmative judgements are always concerned
with the combination of real determinations? Clearly not: If I believe, of a certain real
thing, that that thing is a dog or a physical body, or if I believe that it is round or red, then
indeed I do combine real determinations. But consider those cases in which I do not believe
of a thing that it is a dog or that it is a physical body, but believe simply in its existence—
those cases in which I judge that a particular thing exists. There have been philosophers
who really supposed that attributing existence to a thing is a case of combining. But when
asked what they meant by this existence, they would simply answer that “an existent”
means no more than “a thing”, taken in an entirely indeterminate and general way. From