Franz Brentano_The True and the Evident.pdf

Contents of Judgement, Propositions, Objectives, States of Affairs 65
linguistic factors which may mislead us here. And also this: that whenever we do seem
to be concerned with a non-thing, we will find—if we are attentive enough—that there
is in fact some thing with which our thought is also concerned. Our analyses must take
these facts into account, and there are many closely connected considerations which must
be explicated and clarified, if our thread is to lead us out of this labyrinth. Here too, as
before, it is good to remind ourselves of Leibniz’s pertinent observation: whenever we put
anything into abstract terms, we should be prepared to translate it back into concrete terms,
in order to be sure that we have not altered the sense.
VII
To Oskar Kraus
8 November, 1914
… As for our philosophical question, I am most grateful to you for letting me know the
way in which Marty himself attempted to answer my objection. It is regrettable that he
never told me of this reply, for otherwise I might have been able to persuade him that
it is untenable. I note with satisfaction that he and I agree on one point: that if the term
“something” has no unambiguous meaning in the expression “to think of something”, then
the term “thought” itself cannot be univocal. The fact that the term is univocal cannot be
denied; Marty now believes he can preserve this fact by holding that the “something”, as
that which is thought, is simply the correlate of the thinking. But it would be easy to show
him that this is a mistake. The “something” is the object of our thoughts—in the one case,
horse; in another, that which is coloured; in another, the soul; and so on. But the term
“horse” does not signify “contemplated horse”, or “horse which is thought about”, the
term “coloured” does not signify “coloured thing which is thought about”, and the term
“soul” does not signify “soul which is thought about”. For otherwise one who affirmed or
accepted a horse would be affirming or accepting, not a horse, but a “contemplated horse”;
or, more precisely, he would be accepting or affirming a person thinking about a horse; and
this is certainly false. To see the matter even more clearly, you might want to consider the
following. If the “something” in the expression “to think about something” really meant
only “something thought about”, then the “something” in “to reject or deny something”
would mean no more nor less than “something rejected or denied”. But nothing could be
more obvious than the fact that, if a man rejects or denies a thing, he does not reject or
deny it as something rejected or denied; on the contrary, he knows it is something which he
himself does reject or deny. If a man denies God, for example, he does not deny a denied
God, for this would be to deny that anyone denies God. So the uniform concept which
relates to “something” in the expression “to think about something” is not the concept of
“something thought about”; rather, it is a concept which is common to God and horse and
that which is coloured, and so on and so forth.
With this I have said everything I need to say in order to show that Marty’s answer
is untenable. It doesn’t matter at all what word we use to refer to the concept which is
common to the things that are thought about. Whether we speak of “thing” or “entity”, the
essential point is that the highest universal to which we can attain by means of the supreme