Lecture V the Proposition and the Name

Judgment translated into language.

1. Judgment expressed in words is a Proposition. Must Judgment be expressed in words? We have assumed that this need not be so. Mill says of Inference that “it is an operation which usually takes place by means of words, and in complicated cases can take place in no other way.” The same is true of Judgment.

Logic vol. I. c. i., init.

We may say in general that words are not needed, when thinking about objects by help of pictorial images will do the work demanded of the mind, i.e. when perfectly individualised connections in space and time are in question. Mr. Stout gives chess-playing as an example. With the board before him, even an ordinary player does not need words to describe to himself the move which he is about to make.

In Mind, no. 62.

Words are needed when we have to attend to the general plan of any system, as in thinking about organisms with reference to their type, or about political relations--about anything, that is, which is not of such a nature that the members of the idea can be symbolised in pictorial form. It would be difficult, for example, to comprehend the respiration of plants under a symbolic picture-idea drawn {81} from the respiration of the higher animals. The relations which constitute a common element between the two processes do not include the movements, feelings, and visible changes in the circulatory fluid from which our image of animal respiration is chiefly drawn; and we could hardly frame a pictorial idea that would duly insist on the chemical and organic conditions on which the common element of the process depends. In a case of this kind the word is the symbol which enables us to hold together in a coherent system, though not in a single image, the relations which make up the content of our thought.

“Words” may be of many different kinds--spoken, written, indicated by deaf and dumb signs; all of these are derived from the word as it is in speech, although writing and printing become practically independent of sound, and we read, like the deaf and dumb alphabet, directly by the eye. Then there may be any kind of conventional signals either for letters, words, or sentences, and any kind of cipher or memoria technica either for private or for general use--in these the “conventional” nature of language reaches its climax, and the relation to a natural growth of speech has disappeared. And finally there are all forms of picture-writing, which need not, so far as its intrinsic nature goes, have any connection with speech at all, and which seems to form a direct transition between picture-thinking and thinking through the written sign.

All these must be considered under the head of language, as a fixed system or signs for meanings, before we can ultimately pronounce that we think without words.

Every Judgment, however, can be expressed in words, {82} though not every Judgment need be so expressed or can readily be so.

Proposition and sentence.

2. A Judgment expressed in words is a Proposition, which is one kind of sentence. A command question or wish is a sentence but not a proposition. A detached relative clause is not even a complete sentence. The meaning of the imperative and the question seems to include some act of will; the meaning of a proposition is always given out simply for fact or truth. We need not consider any sentence that has no meaning at all.

See above, Lect. IV.

Difference between Proposition and Judgment

3. Almost all English logicians speak of the Proposition and not of the Judgment. This does not matter, so long as we are agreed about what they mean. They must mean the proposition as understood, and this is what we call the judgment.

So Mill, Venn, Jevons, Bain (see his note, p. 80).

In order to make this distinction clear, let us consider the proposition as it reaches us from without, that is to say, either as spoken or as written. The words, the parts of such a proposition, as we hear or read them, are separate and successive either in time alone, or in time and space. Further, the mere sounds or signs can be mastered apart from the meaning. You can repeat them or copy them without understanding them in the least, as e.g. in the case of a proposition in an unknown language. So far, the proposition has not become a judgment, and I do not suppose that any logician would admit that it deserved the name even of a proposition. But if not, then we must not confuse the attributes which it has before it becomes a proposition with those which it has after.

{83} Further, in understanding a proposition, or in construing a sentence into a proposition (if the sentence only becomes a proposition when understood), there are many degrees. I read upon a postcard, “A meeting will be held on Saturday next by the Women’s Liberal Association, to discuss the taxation of ground-rents.” The meaning of such a sentence takes time to grasp, and if the words are read aloud to us, must of necessity be apprehended by degrees. We understand very quickly that a meeting is to be held next Saturday. This understanding is already a judgment. It is something quite different from merely repeating the words which we read. It consists in realising them as meanings, and bringing these meanings together into a connected idea, and affirming this idea to belong to our real world. The meanings are not separate, outside one another, as the words are when we first hear or read them. They enter into each other, modify each other, and become parts of an ideal whole. This gradual apprehension of a sentence recalls to one the boyish amusement of melting down bits of lead in a ladle. At first the pieces all lie about, rigid and out of contact; but as they begin to be fused a fluid system is formed in which they give up their rigidity and independence, and enter into the closest possible contact, so that their movements and position determine each other. But still some parts, like words not yet grasped, remain hard and separate, and it is only when the melting is complete that this isolation is destroyed, and there are no longer detached fragments, but a fluid body such that all its parts are in the closest connection with one another.

Thus then in understanding a sentence we have a judgment {84} from the first. The rest of the process of understanding consists in completing the content of this judgment by fusing with it the meanings of the words not yet apprehended; and in the completeness with which this is effected there will always be great differences of degree between different minds, and also between the same mind at different times. Some of us attach a complete and distinct meaning to the words “Women’s Liberal Association”; some of us do not know, or have forgotten, exactly what it is, and what are its aims and history. All of us have some conception of the purpose described as “taxation of ground rents,” but the phrase conveys a perfectly definite scheme hardly to one in a thousand readers. Nevertheless, in so far as we have some symbolic idea which refers to this place or context in the world of objects, the content of this idea enters into and modifies the total meaning which in apprehending the sentence before us we affirm of reality. The heard or written proposition (or sentence, if it is not a proposition till understood) serves as an instrument by which we build up in our intellectual world a sort of plan or scheme of connected meanings, and also, not subsequently but concurrently with this work of building, affirm the whole content thus being put together to be true of reality. Then we have what I call a Judgment. It is not that the words are necessarily forgotten; they, or at least the principal significant terms, are probably still in the mind as guides and symbols; but yet a constructive work has been done; a complex experience has been called up and analysed, and its parts fitted together in a certain definite order by the operation of universal ideas or meanings, each of which is a system playing {85} into other systems; and the whole thus realised has been added as an extension to the significance of the continuous judgment which forms our waking consciousness. The inconvenience of the term “proposition” is that it tends to confuse the heard or written sentence in its separate words with the proposition as apprehended and intellectually affirmed. And these two things have quite different characteristics.

Parts of Speech

4. Thus we must be very careful how we apply the conception of “parts of speech.” The grammatical analysis which classifies words as substantives, adjectives, adverbs, verbs, and the like, is not to be taken as telling us what words are by themselves, but just the opposite, viz. what they do when employed in a significant sentence. They are studied separately for convenience in attending to them, as we may study the wheels and pistons of an engine; but the work which gives them their names can only be done when they are together. This truth is often expressed by saying that “the sentence is the unit of language,” i.e. a word taken by itself cannot have a complete meaning--unless it is a verb, or used with verbal force, for a verb is an unanalysed sentence. If any one uses a substantive or adverb by itself, we think that he has not finished his sentence, and no meaning is conveyed to our minds. We ask him, “Well, what about it?” The same is true, as we saw, of a relative clause. If we read in a newspaper such a clause as this, “The epidemic of influenza, which has appeared in England for three successive seasons,” followed by a full stop, we should infer, without hesitation, that some words had dropped out by accident. Of course such a {86} combination of words would make us think something, but the meaning which we might ascribe to it would be conjectural; we should necessarily complete the thought for ourselves by some affirmation--some relation to reality--while recognising that no such relation was given in the clause as we read it. Nothing less than a sentence, or, omitting the wish and the command, nothing less than a proposition, conveys a meaning in which the mind can acquiesce as not requiring to be supplemented conjecturally. There are traces in language that indicate the sentence to have been historically prior to the word. I question whether the word could be certainly distinguished within the sentence in early languages that have not been reduced to writing. The tendency of reflective analysis, as in grammar and dictionaries, is to give it a more and more, artificial isolation. The Greeks did not separate their words in writing, and they wrote down the change in a terminal consonant produced by the initial letter of the next word, just as if it was within a compound word. Nor had they really any current term co-extensive with our “word.” Where we should say “the word ‘horse’” they most commonly use the neuter article “the” followed by the word in question as if in quotation-marks (”the ‘horse’“). In defining noun and verb, Aristotle has no simple class name like ”word“ to employ as a common element of the definition, but uses the curious description ”a portion of discourse, of which no part has a meaning by itself.“

Of course, single words often stand as signs for propositions. It is interesting to note the pregnant meaning of a single word in the mouth of a child. Thus “stool” was {87} used to mean “(1) Where is my stool? (2) My stool is broken; (3) Lift me on to the stool; (4) Here is a stool.” There is in this an interesting conflict of form and meaning, owing to the child of European race having at command only “parts of speech.” In a less analytical language he might have at command a sound corresponding to a sentence rather than to a “noun substantive.”

Preyer, quoted in Höffding, Psych., 176.

The verb of inflected languages, such as Greek or Latin, in which the “nominative case” need not be supplied even by a pronoun, is the type for us of a sentence not yet broken up.

In German and English, though the verb is inflected, custom forbids it to stand without the pronoun.

The bearing of this truth on Logic is to make us treat it in two parts and not in three. We do not treat of Name, Proposition, Syllogism, or of Concept, Judgment, Inference, but only of the two latter parts. The name or concept has no reality in living language or living thought, except when referred to its place in a proposition or judgment. We ought not to think of propositions as built up by putting words or names together, but of words or names as distinguished though not separable elements in propositions. Aristotle takes the simple and straightforward view. “A term is the element into which a proposition is broken up, such as subject and predicate.” Of course different languages separate the parts of the proposition very differently, {88} and uneducated people hardly separate them at all. Formal Logic breaks down the grammatical meaning of “name,” so far as to treat as a “logical name” any complex words that can stand as Subject or Predicate in a Proposition (e.g. a relative clause).

Anal. prior., 24b, 16. The opposite view seems to be expressed in the beginning of the περὶ Ἑρμενείας [= peri Hermeneias, de Interpretatione], that the separate word corresponds to the separate idea. I have attempted to explain this as an illusion, p. 73, above.

Denotation and Connotation

5. The doctrine of the meaning of names has suffered from their relation to propositions not being borne in mind. Mill’s discussion is very sensible, but, as always, very careless of strict system. More especially it seems a pity to state the question as if it concerned a division of names into Connotative and Non-connotative; because in this way we from the first let go of the idea that the meaning of a name has necessarily two aspects, and we almost bind ourselves to make out that there are some non-connotative names. It is better to consider this latter subject on its merits. Mill says that an ordinary significant name such as “man” “signifies the subjects directly, the attributes indirectly; it denotes the subjects, and implies or involves or indicates, or, as we shall say henceforth, connotes, the attributes.” In short, the denotation of a name consists of the things to which it applies, the connotation consists of the properties which it implies. The denotation is made up of individuals and the connotation of attributes. Denotation is also called Extension, especially if we are speaking of Concepts rather than of names. Connotation is then called Intension. In the German writers it is more usual to say that the Extension or Area (Umfang) consists not of the individuals, but of the species that are contained in {89} the meaning of a general name. They oppose it to Content (Inhalt) corresponding to our “Connotation.” Thus the “Area” of “rose” would not be the individual roses in the world, but rather all the species of rose in the world (Rosa Canina, Rosa Rubiginosa, etc.). This raises a difficulty as to the denotation of a specific name, but perhaps represents the actual process of thought, in the case of a generic name, better than that which Mill adopts. The difference is not important.

Logic, Bk. I. c. ii. § 5. Cf. Venn, 174 and 183, and Bain, 48.

See Bradley, p. 155.

Well, then, according to Mill, when we say, “The Marshal Niel is a yellow rose,” we refer directly to a group of real or possible objects, and we mean that all these individual objects are yellow roses. The attributes are only mentioned by the way, or implied. So Dr. Venn says that the denotation is real, and the connotation is notional.

But there is another side to this question. The objects may be what you mean but the attributes seem to be the meaning, for how can you (especially on Mill’s theory of the proposition) refer to any objects except through these attributes, unless indeed you can point to them with your finger? And so again it seems, especially if we consider Mill’s account of predication, as if the Connotation were the primary meaning and the Denotation the secondary meaning. The Connotation determines the Denotation; and if we “define” the meaning of the name it is the Connotation that we state. And so Mill tells us two or three pages further on, that whenever the names given to objects have properly any meaning, the meaning resides not in what they denote, but in what they connote. In short, {90} the denotation of a general name is simply the meaning of its plural, or of its singular, in that sense in which it implies a plural, while the connotation is the meaning per se, not considered in its instances.

It is clear then that every name has these two kinds of meaning--first, a content, and then instances, whether possible or actual, of the content; and the two are obviously inseparable, although they are distinguishable. Ultimately, indeed, the denotation itself is an attribute, and so part of the connotation. It is one of the attributes of man to be a unit in the plurality men, i.e. to be “a man.” It may be said that some names have no plural. If so, these would be non-denotative rather than non-connotative, but in fact this is not true. The content of a significant name can always, unless hindered by a special convention (see below on proper names), be prima facie regarded, in respect of its actual embodiment, as a unit against other possible units. Granting that there may be an object, which according to our knowledge can only be real as an isolated case, the very consideration of it as such a case is enough to distinguish its existence, whether real or possible, from its content. Thus, as a real or possible existence, the object is ipso facto considered in the light of a particular, and as capable of entering into a plurality. But its nature or content, the meaning of its name, cannot enter into a plurality. Two meanings, two connotations, are alternative and irreconcilable. Denotation and connotation are thus simply the particular, or particulars, which embody or are thought of as embodying a content, and the single or universal content itself.

{91} Have Proper Names Connotation?

6. Therefore I think that Mill is wrong, when he goes on, “The only names of objects which connote nothing are Proper Names, and these have, strictly speaking, no signification.” If the name has no signification, for what reason, or by what means, is it attached to a person or a place? You may say that it is only a conventional mark. But a mark which has power to select from all objects in the world, and bring to our minds, a particular absent object, is surely a significant mark. Granted that it is conventional, yet by what mechanism, and for what purpose, does the convention operate?

Cf. Venn, 183 ff, and Bradley, 156.

Mill’s point, however, is quite clear. To be told the name of a person or object does not inform us of his or its attributes. Directly, it only warns us by what sign the same person or object will be recognisable in language again. If a name is changed, the new name tells us nothing different from the old, whereas if an object that was called vegetable is now called animal, our conception of it is radically transformed. A name expresses the continued identity of an object, and this implies only a historical continuity of attributes and relations, and no constant attribute whatever.

We cannot make it a distinctive mark of proper names that they recur in different and quite disconnected meanings, because the words which are used as general names have this same property. Nor can we say that a proper name is not used in the same sense of more than one object. Family names and national names make this plainly untrue. Through these, and names typically employed, there is a clear gradation from proper to general names.

The case of marriage may be urged. But a lady’s change of name does not by itself indicate marriage. It is a mere fact, which may have various explanations. The change of title (from “Miss” to “Mrs.”) is more significant, but it is not a change of name.

{92} Thus a proper name is a contradiction in terms. A name should have a meaning. But a meaning cannot be proper--that is, particular. The name-word is therefore like a demonstrative pronoun, if this were attached, by a special convention, to one identifiable object only. It acquires meaning, but its meaning is an ever-growing contradiction with its usage. The meaning is necessarily general, the usage is ex hypothesi particular.

So, from the complementary point of view, is a general name. A name, it may be urged, is meant to designate a particular thing or things. And this a name with a true “meaning” cannot do.

This convention of usage, which prevents a proper name from becoming general, i.e. from being cut loose and used simply for its meaning, is always on the point of breaking down. Christian names usually indicate sex; family names, though now with little certainty, descent and relationship. There are germs of a general meaning within the several usages of names; while a Solon, a Croesus, a Christian, a Mahometan, have become purely general names cut loose from all unique reference. Still in a proper name, as such, we have no right to build on any general meaning. Recognition is its only purpose; and the law permits, it has been said, that a man should have one name for Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and another for Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. The essence of a name is a reference to unique identity; it employs meaning only to establish identity.

See note on last page.

What kinds of things have proper names given, then? Always things individually known to the people who give {93} the name, and interesting to them for some reason beyond generic or specific qualities. Pet animals have names, when other animals of the same kind have not. The peasants throughout England use names, it is said, for all the fields, although strangers are not usually acquainted with them.

A Proper Name, then, has a connotation, but not a fixed general connotation. It is attached to a unique individual, and connotes whatever may be involved in his identity, or is instrumental in bringing it before the mind.

When we think of history, the importance of proper names becomes very great. This is the characteristic logical difference between history and science. “England” and “France” are proper names, names of individual existences in contact with our world of perception, not scientific abstractions. Even the words, “1892 A.D.,” are partly of the nature of a proper name. They say nothing merely general or abstract about this year; they assign the year a name by counting forwards from a unique point in the series of years, itself designated by the name of a historical personage. Everything that is simply distinguished by its place in the series of events in space and time is in some degree a proper name. Thus we could not identify the French Revolution by mere scientific definition. It is known by its proper name, as a unique event, in a particular place and time. When thus identified it may have all kinds of general ideas attached to it. It would be hard to show that “Our earth,” “Our solar system” are not proper names, in virtue of their uniqueness.

{94} Inverse ratio of Connotation and Denotation

7. It has sometimes been said that Connotation is in inverse ratio to Denotation. Mill explains the fact upon which any such idea rests. If we arrange things in classes, such that the one class includes the other--e.g. Species “Buttercup,” Genus “Ranunculus,” Order “Ranunculaceae,”--of course the genus will contain many species besides the one mentioned, and the order many genera besides the one mentioned. The object of the arrangement is that they should do so, and thus bring out the graduated natural affinities which prevail in the world. Thus the denotation of the genus-name is larger than that of the species, and the denotation of the order-name is larger than that of the genus-name.

See Venn, p. 174, for reference to Hamilton. Venn points out the fallacy.

Logic, Bk. I. ch. vii. § 5.

Or “than the species,” if we take the denotation as made up of species.

But further, in such an arrangement the genus can contain only the attributes which are common to all the species, and the order can contain only the attributes which are common to all the genera; so the genus-name implies fewer attributes (less connotation) than any one species-name under it, and the order-name implies fewer attributes (less connotation) than any one genus-name under it.

That is the fact which suggests the conception of Denotation and Connotation as varying inversely.

But in any case it would not be right to speak thus mathematically of an inverse ratio, because there is no meaning in a numerical comparison of attributes and {95} individuals, and the addition of one attribute will exclude sometimes more and sometimes fewer individuals.

See Jevons, p. 40.

And there are more important objections to the whole idea of a corresponding gradation in these two kinds of meaning. The idea of abstraction thus implied is altogether wrong. The meaning of a genus-name does not omit the properties in which the species differ. If it did, it would omit nearly all properties. What happens is that the genus-idea represents the general plan on which the species are built, but provides for each of the parts that constitute the whole, varying in the specific cases within certain limits. Thus in the Ranunculaceae some species have no petals. But we do not omit the character “petals” from the genus-idea. We state the general plan so far as this element is concerned as “Petals five or more; rarely none.” This is read by a botanist to mean that in some groups the petals tend to be aborted, and sometimes are actually missing. In a symbolic representation of the genus-idea such a property may stand as A, and its various specific forms as A1, A2, A3, etc. There is nothing to prevent these specific phases approaching and sometimes reaching zero. No doubt if the classification is pursued in the direction of “universals” containing fewer and fewer properties, it is possible to arrive at concepts which appear to have a larger denotation and a smaller connotation than those “below” them. “Ranunculaceae,” “Dicotyledons,” “Plants,” “Organisms.”

But this is only because we choose to form our system by that process of abstraction which consists in leaving out properties. E.g. comparing Frenchmen with men in general, {96} we assume that “Frenchman” indicates (a) all the qualities of humanity as such, and (b) the qualities of French humanity in addition to these. But is this so in fact? Humanity, considered as a wider, and therefore as a deeper, idea, may have more content, as well as more area, than Frenchmanity. We do not really, in thinking of humanity, omit from our schematic thought all references to qualities of Greek, Jew, English, and German, and their bearing and interaction upon one another. It is only that we have been drilled to assume a certain neatness in the pyramidal arrangement by which we vainly try to reduce the meaning of a great idea to something that has no system and no inter-relation of parts, but approaches as near as possible in fixity to the character of a definite image, though far removed from such a character in the impossibility of bringing it before the mind.

So we can only say, “the greater the denotation the less the connotation,” and “vice versâ”, in as far as we arrange ideas by progressive abstraction in the sense of progressive omission. But it is not the only way of regarding them. Things may develop new inter-relations as their number increases. Has the community, as Mr. Bradley asks, less meaning than the individual person? But we must not consider the community, would be the answer; we must simply consider the relation of an idea of one individual to any idea that applies to many individuals. This is simply to rule out those relations that arise within progressively larger wholes. We can do so, if we think the exclusion necessary in the interests of logical purity, but it is only by doing so that we can maintain the traditional view of connotation and denotation. It is worth while to think out the {97} matter for ourselves in relation to such familiar ideas as those of man and animal. It is plain that the idea of “animal” cannot omit all reference to intelligence, but must in some way allow for the different phases of this property which run throughout the animal kingdom, and only find a climax in man. And it is plain also, that even if intelligence were wholly omitted, this would not leave behind, as in a simple stratification, properties in which the whole animal kingdom was the same. Man’s animality is modified throughout in a way corresponding to his rationality, so that no general idea could be framed including him and other animals, simply by collecting properties which are the same and omitting those which are different. The idea of “man” really becomes richer when considered in the light of a comparison with the rest of the animal world. Our great systems of natural classification, representing affinities graduated by descent, are what give the view which we have criticised a certain objective importance. But they do not establish it as an exclusive logical doctrine.

If we insist on throwing the whole of this comparison, in explicit shape, into the complete idea of man, then the progress to the idea “animal” can add nothing; even so, however, it loses nothing, but simply becomes the same set of relations, looked at, so to speak, from the other end.

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