Franz Brentano_The True and the Evident.pdf

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The True and the Evident
There is, finally, a linguistic consideration which Sigwart believes will confirm his view.
He says that we symbolize a negative judgement by adding a certain complication to the way
in which we symbolize an affirmative judgement; we add the word “not” to the copula. To
evaluate this, let us for a moment consider the emotions. Sigwart agrees with me, and with
everyone else, that pleasure and displeasure, rejoicing and sorrowing, loving and hating,
and the like, are co-ordinate with each other. Yet we have a large group of expressions
which are such that the names for feelings of disinclination are dependent upon the names
for feelings of inclination. Thus we have: “inclination” and “disinclination”; “pleasure”
and “displeasure; “fortunate” and “unfortunate”; “happy” and “unhappy”; “agreeable” and
“disagreeable”; and in German “lieb” and “unlieb”, “schön” and “unschön” and even
“ungut”. I believe that the psychologist will not find this fact difficult to explain, despite
the fact that we have here two co-ordinate species of emotive phenomena. But if this is
so, why should there be a difficulty in reconciling the corresponding fact, about the way
in which negative judgements are expressed, with the fact that there are two co-ordinate
species of intellectual phenomena?
If a thinker of Sigwart’s calibre must take refuge in this type of argument to defend an
important and unorthodox doctrine, then his case must be very poor indeed!
(2) There is no tenable basis, then, for Sigwart’s theory of the negative judgement. And
this is as it should be. One should not expect to be able to demonstrate a theory which
seems to plunge everything into the greatest possible confusion.
Sigwart now finds himself compelled to distinguish a positive judgement and an
affirmative judgement. And he goes on to say (the new terminology will be dumbfounding)
that the affirmative judgement is, strictly speaking, a negative judgement! Thus we have
his own words on page 150: “The original and primordial judgement should not be called
affirmative; it would be better to say that it is a positive judgement. The simple assertion,
that A. is B, should be called affirmative only in opposition to a negative judgement and
only insofar as it may be said to reject the possibility of a negation.” Insofar as it “rejects”?
What can this mean other than “insofar as it denies”? And so it really is true that, given
this strange new use of words, only denials are to be called affirmations! But all this—
especially if one is also going to say that the assertion, A is B, is sometimes such a denial
(compare the words cited above)—multiplies linguistic confusion beyond necessity and
beyond endurance.
Not only does the affirmative judgement turn out to be strictly negative, on Sigwart’s
account; we also find, paradoxical as it may be, that his negative judgement, when closely
examined, is a positive judgement. He does protest against the view of Hobbes and others,
according to which negative judgements are really positive judgements with negative
predicates. On his view, however, they have to be positive judgements with positive
predicates; for he says that the subject of a negative judgement is always a judgement and
that its predicate is the concept “invalid”. Thus he says (p. 160n.) that negation serves to
cancel out a supposition and to reject it as invalid (spreche ihr die Gültigkeit ab); these
words would suggest that Sigwart does suppose that there is a special function of rejecting
which is contrary to that of affirming. But no; according to him (see p. 153) there is no such
thing as a negative copula. How on earth are we to interpret his “rejection”, then? Could
it be the simple “cessation” of the positive judgement about the corresponding subjectmatter—and
thus (on Sigwart’s view) the disappearance of the feeling of compulsion which