Franz Brentano_The True and the Evident.pdf

Critique of Sigwart’s Theory of the Existential and the Negative Judgement 33
had previously existed along with a joining of concepts? This could not possibly be; for if
the feeling of compulsion disappears, then, on Sigwart’s view, there remains only a joining
of ideas without any affirmation or negation. Consider how often it happens that something
previously certain becomes uncertain—without our thereby rejecting or denying it. What
is it, then, to reject or deny? Could we say that just as, for Sigwart, affirmation is a feeling
of being compelled to posit, denial or negation is a feeling of being compelled to cancel
out? In this case we should have to say that, whenever we make a negative judgement, we
have found ourselves frustrated in a previous attempt to make the corresponding positive
judgement. But one who simply finds that there is no ground for the positive judgement has
a similar state of mind. Whenever we find that there is no ground whatever for believing a
given thing, do we ipso facto attempt to believe it? Certainly this is false on Sigwart’s own
definition of judgement; such an attempt would always end in failure. And so we have not
yet been able to get the negative judgement clearly before us. If there is no negative copula,
then rejection or denial would have to be a matter of attributing the predicate “false” to
something, or, in Sigwart’s terms, a matter of inserting this predicate into a judgement
having the judgement in question as its subject. But this “false” cannot be said simply to
mean the same as “not true”. For we can say of countless things that they are “not true”,
where it would hardly be appropriate to say of them that they are “false”. If judgements
are the only things that can be said to be true, then “not true” applies to everything that is
not a judgement; but “false” does not at all apply to everything that is not a judgement. 54
Thus “false” must be conceived as a positive predicate. Hence, given Sigwart’s point of
view, which is inherently wrong, just as we must say that negation or denial is something
other than mere failure to be convinced, we must say that every negative judgement is a
positive judgement with a positive predicate. And thus we have a paradox which is even
more striking than the first one we encountered.
But there is a third paradox, which serves to make the confusion complete. If we consider
the way in which Sigwart conceives the nature of judgement in general, we can easily see
that his simple positive judgement involves, again, a negative judgement. According to him,
every judgement involves, not only a certain connection of ideas, but also a consciousness
of the necessity of our putting them together and of the impossibility of the opposite
(see in particular p. 102) and, indeed, it involves the consciousness of such a necessity
and impossibility for every thinking being (pp. 102, 107)—which, incidentally, is just as
much mistaken as is Sigwart’s whole concept of the nature of judgement. Because of this
characteristic, then, Sigwart says that every judgement without exception is apodictic; there
is no valid distinction, according to him (see pp. 229 ff.), between assertoric and apodictic
judgements. I would ask, therefore: Do we not have here that which obviously involves
a negative judgement? Otherwise what sense could we give to Sigwart’s “consciousness
of the impossibility of the opposite”? And there is still more! I have already shown in my
Psychologie (p. 233) that every universal judgement is negative; for to be convinced of
universality is no more nor less than to be convinced that there is no exception. Without
this latter negation, no accumulation of positive assertions, however extensive, would
be sufficient to constitute a belief in universality. Hence when Sigwart says that every
judgement involves the awareness that such-and-such a way of thinking must be universal,
we have additional confirmation for our contention that, according to Sigwart’s theory of
judgement, even the simplest positive judgement has to involve a negative judgement. 55