Lecture Vi Parts of the Judgment, and Its Unity

Parts of the Judgment

1. The result of taking the Judgment as one with the Proposition has been to assume that its parts were the same as those of the Proposition; and moreover the same as those of the Proposition in a very artificial form, viz. as analysed into three separable elements, “Subject,” “Predicate,” “Copula,” commonly represented in the examples of the text-books by Substantive, Adjective or Substantive, and the Verb “is.”

This assumption involves (see Lecture V.) a confusion between the Proposition as thoroughly understood, and the Proposition as a series of partially significant sounds or signs. For obvious reasons, this confusion is very readily made.

For the operation of Formal Logic it is almost necessary to have these parts, because it is requisite to transpose the terms (as in Conversion) without changing their meaning, and to get rid of tenses, which do not belong to Scientific Judgment, and are very troublesome in Formal Inference.

If the “predicate” is a Substantive, this presents no difficulty; and if it is an Adjective, it can be done by a little straining of grammar, or the insertion of “thing” or “things.” With a verb it is more clumsy.

Thus in Formal Logic we prefer the shape of sentence “Gold is lustrous” to “Gold glitters,” and “The bridge is {99} cracked” to “There is a crack in the bridge.” And practically all propositions can be thrown into this shape, which is convenient for comparing them. The educational value of elementary formal logic consists chiefly, I am convinced, in the exercise of paraphrasing poetical or rhetorical assertions into this typical shape, with the least possible sacrifice of meaning. The commonest mistakes in the work of beginners, within my experience as a teacher, consist in failures to interpret rightly the sentence given for analysis.

But this type is not really ultimate. The judgment can be conveyed without a grammatical subject, and without the verb “is”--indeed without any grammatical verb at all. On the whole this agrees with Mill’s view in the chapter “Of Propositions.” He points out (§ 1) that we really need nothing but the Subject and Predicate, and that the copula is a mere sign of their connection as Subject and Predicate. He does not, however, discuss the case in which the grammatical Subject is absent.

Mill’s Logic, Bk. I. ch. iv.

Copula

2. In analysing the Judgment as an act of thought we may begin by dismissing the separate Copula. It has no separate existence in thought corresponding to its separate place in the typical proposition of Formal Logic. It has come to be considered separately, because the abstract verb “is” is used in our languages as a sign of the complete enunciation. But there is not in the Judgment any separate significant idea--any third idea--coming in between the Subject and Predicate of Judgment. We should try to think of the Copula not as a link, separable and always {100} intrinsically the same, connecting two distinct things. We should think of it rather as the grip with which the parts of a single complex whole cohere with one another, differing according to the nature of the whole and the inter-dependence of its parts. Benno Erdmann has strikingly expressed this point of view by saying, that in the Judgment, “The dead ride fast,” the Subject is “the dead,” the Predicate “fast riding,” and the Copula “the fast riding of the dead.” In other words, the Copula is simply the Judgment considered exclusively as a cohesion between parts of a complex idea, the individual connection between which can only be indicated by supplying the idea of those parts themselves.

In a comic Logic, with pictures, meant to stimulate dull minds at a University, I have seen the Copula represented as the coupling-link between two railway carriages. This is an excellent type of the way in which we should not think of it.

Logik, p. 189.

Are Subject and Predicate necessary?

3. The explicit Predicate is more necessary than the explicit Subject.

We have spoken of Judgments expressed by one word, “Fire!” “Thieves!” etc., and also of impersonal Propositions, “It is raining,” “It is thawing.” These two classes of Judgments show hardly any explicit Subject at all. But we could not assert anything without a Predicate--that would be to assert without asserting anything in particular.

As these Judgments have, roughly speaking, a Predicate and no Subject, I do not think it convenient to call them, with Dr. Venn, existential judgments. It is true that they refer to reality, but their peculiarity is in not referring to a distinct subject. And when used for definite and complex assertions they become very artificial, e.g. “There is a {101} British Constitution by which our liberties are guaranteed.” Instead of organising the content of the Judgment, such a form of assertion simply tosses the whole of it into the Predicate in a single mass.

The question is only one of words; but it appears to me more convenient to reserve the term Existential judgments for those highly artificial assertions which actually employ the Predicate “exist” or “existence,” e.g. “Matter exists.” These are at the opposite end of the scale from those last-mentioned, and are the nearest approach to Judgment with Subject and no Predicate. That is to say, their Predicate is the generalised abstract form of predication without any special content--the kind and degree of existence asserted being understood from the context.

Expressed in Greek by the word corresponding to “is,” used with an accent, which does not belong to it in its ordinary use. He is good = ἄγαθός ἐστι [= agathos esti]; He exists = ἔστι [= esti Tr.].

Except, however, in the case of these peculiarly abstract and reflective assertions, it must be laid down that a predicated content is necessary to judgment, while an explicit subject of predication is unnecessary.

Two Ideas of Things

4. If it is possible, in some cases, to throw the whole content of judgment into the predicate, this rather disposes us to criticise the notion that there must be two distinct matters, objects, ideas, or contents, in every judgment. The notion in question has two forms.

It is thought that the Judgment consists in putting two ideas together, or, {102} That the Judgment consists in comparing two or more things.

For this conception, see Hamilton’s Lectures on Logic, i. 227, and for a criticism on it. Mill’s Logic, Bk. I. ch. v., init, Dr. Venn seems to incline to Hamilton’s view, but I do not feel sure that he intends to discuss the question in the form in which it is referred to in the text. See his Empirical Logic, pp. 210 and 211.

See Jevons, pp. 61-2; and Mill, Bk. I. ch. iii., init.; and ch. iv., init.

Two Ideas

(a) The notion of “two ideas” has two principal difficulties.

Notion of mental transition pure and simple

(i.) In its simplest shape the notion of “two ideas” involves the great blunder which I explained in Lecture IV. It suggests that the parts of Judgment are separate and successive psychical states, and that the Judgment consists in a change from the one to the other. Herbert Spencer, as I understand him, considers every relation to be apprehended as a mental change or passage from one idea to another. This view would degrade logical connection into mere psychical transition. I do not say that there is no psychical transition in Judgment. I do say that psychical transition is not enough to make a Judgment. The parts of Judgment, as we saw in the last lecture, do not succeed one another separately like the parts of a sentence. The relation between Subject and Predicate is not a relation between mental states, but is itself the content of a single though continuous mental state. Mill has rightly touched on this point. “When I say that fire causes heat, do I mean that my idea of fire causes my idea of heat?” and so on. The fact is that “Fire-causing-heat” is itself the single content or meaning represented in my symbolic idea; it is not a succession of psychical states in my mind, or a passage from the idea of fire to the idea of causing heat.

Logic, Bk. I. ch. V. § I.

{103} Absence of assertion

(ii.) But further, understanding now that the Judgment is composed of a single ideal content, and is not a transition from one mental state to another, there is still a difficulty in the conception that its component elements are nothing but ideas. If the Subject in Judgment is no more than an ideal content, how, by what means, does the Judgment claim to be true of Reality? “The Subject cannot belong to the content or fall within it, for in that case it would be the idea attributed to itself.” If the Subject were only a part of an ideal content it would not claim to be true of Reality, and where it appears to be only an ideal content there is much dispute in what sense the Judgment does claim to be true of Reality. “Violations of a law of nature are impossible.” “The three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles.” “All trespassers will be prosecuted.” In these Judgments we should find it hard to make out that the Subjects are real things corresponding to our ideas. And yet, if they are not, how can the Judgment attach itself to Reality? This is the difficult question of the distinction between the categorical and the hypothetical Judgment, and we shall have to return to it. In the meantime, we must adhere to our judgment of perception as the true underlying type. The Subject is here not an idea, but is the given reality, this or that, and the Judgment is not a conjunction of two ideas, but is present reality qualified by an idea. We say, “It is very hot,” meaning that heat, the general quality embodied for us in an ideal content, is true of--forms one tissue with--the surroundings which here and now press upon our attention. Or again, “This is red,” {104} i.e. the content of the idea red is what my attention selects and emphasises within the mass of detail presented to it in its own unique focus which the pronoun “this” simply points out as though with the finger. We shall find such a structure underlying all the more artificial forms of Judgment.

Bradley’s Principles of Logic, p. 14.

Two Things

(b) Thus it would seem that Jevons and Mill are much nearer the real point when they say that the proposition has to do with two Things, or with a Thing and a group of Things. But we must notice in passing that Mill, after fighting hard against calling them Ideas, takes our breath away by saying that they are states of consciousness. There is, of course, a difficulty, which I will not try to deal with now, in the fact that however much we refer to things, we have nothing to work with intellectually but our ideas of them, and in some types of Judgment the reference to real things is difficult to trace. Mill further emphasises this by showing, that what we assert in ordinary general Judgment is co-existence of attributes. “Now when we say, Man is mortal, we mean that wherever these various mental and physical phenomena (the attributes of man) are all found, then we have assurance that the other physical and mental phenomenon called death, will not fail to take place.” That is, no doubt, a very indirect way of referring to the real things which we call men. Moreover, he treats all conclusions in geometry and mechanics as hypothetical. All this we shall have to return to, in order to reconcile it with our doctrine; which is apparently coincident with {105} Mill’s view in the place first alluded to, that the subject in Judgment is always reality.

Logic, Bk. I. ch. V. § 5. Ibid., § 4.

Ibid., Bk. II. ch. vi. §§ 3, 4.

But our point at present is only the duality ascribed to the Judgment by saying that it essentially deals with two things or groups of things. Jevons even says that every Judgment is a comparison of two things--though these “things” are really, it would seem, groups of things. We thus have it impressed upon our minds that there is one “thing” corresponding to the Subject-word (or clause) of the Propositional sentence, and another “thing” corresponding to the Predicate-word (or clause), and that these are somehow separate, like two railway carriages, till we bring them together by the coupling-link of the copula. This is a very inconvenient way of looking at the matter. It is not true that all Judgment is comparison, in the proper and usual sense of the word. It is not true that Judgment involves two things; two or more things may be mentioned in a Judgment, but they cannot correspond respectively to the Subject and Predicate. It is a real Comparison if you say, “A.B. is taller than C.D.,” but C.D. is here not a term in the Judgment. The one person, A.B., is qualified by the ideal content “taller than C.D.,” and the idea of A.B. so qualified is referred to, or discriminated within, perceptive reality. Comparison is a rather complex process, and consists in a cross-reference by which each of two objects is judged according to a standard furnished by the other; but this complex process is not necessary to all Judgment, and cannot be expressed with complete convenience in a single Judgment. And in {106} any case the two objects that enter into the comparison do not correspond to two essential parts of Judgment.

Elementary Lessons in Logic, p. 61. Ibid. p. 62.

It is far more simple and true to say that Judgment is always the analysis and synthesis of elements in some one thing or ideal content. “Gold is yellow” has not within it, as Jevons says it has, any direct comparison of gold with other yellow substances. It simply drags to light the property “yellow” as distinct within the complex of attributes belonging to gold, while at the same time insisting that this property--this meaning of an idea--belongs to, is of one piece with, perceived reality in so far as gold is given in such reality. The Judgment exhibits the content in its parts. It breaks it up, and pronounces it to be all of one tissue, by one and the same indivisible act. We should practically have a much fairer chance of seeing clearly what Judgment is if we began by considering it as not two things or two terms — but as one thing or one term drawn out into elements by discriminating selection. Even if the paradox that every “Thing” is a Judgment neglects some necessary distinctions, I am convinced that we shall understand Judgment much more clearly if we do our best to approach it from this point of view. Whenever we look or listen, and notice features and qualities in the perceptions that arrest the eye and ear, we are rapidly and continuously judging. “The fire is crackling,” “The daylight is waning,” “That bookshelf is not full,” “The window-curtain is twisted.” In none of these cases is there any separation other than an intellectual distinction between the predicated content and the perceived reality. The Judgment is simply a distinct {107} insistence on a quality within a certain focus of reality as belonging to that reality. This is the fundamental nature of Judgment.

Loc. cit.

Therefore, to draw our conclusion as to the Unity of the Judgment, it is not a transition from one mental state to another; the relation of which it consists is not between ideas in it, but is the content of the idea which forms it. Judgment is not primarily comparison between two things; it is a thing or content displayed as possessing some definite relation or quality within its identity. Every Judgment is the content of one idea, but you may of course distinguish relations between ideal elements within this idea. “Fire causes heat” is a single content or idea, the nature of fire, expanded into one of its properties.

Distinction between Subject and Predicate

5. But then, if the whole Judgment is a single content, what is the difference between Subject and Predicate, and is it necessary to distinguish Subject from Predicate at all? If some Judgments can be made without explicit Subjects, cannot all be made in that way?

This suggestion is very useful as carrying on the simplest type of Judgment throughout the whole theory of Judgment. By a little torture of expression any Judgment can be thrown into a form in which undefined Reality is the general subject, and the whole mass of the Judgment is the Predicate. “William Pitt was a great statesman” = “There was a great statesman named William Pitt”; “The three angles of every triangle are equal to two right angles” = “There are figures known as triangles with their three angles equal to two right angles”; “All citizens are members of a moral order” = “There is a moral order, including the {108} relations of citizenship”; “All trespassers will be prosecuted” = “Here are conditions which ensure the prosecution of possible trespassers.” Or you might always put a subject, “Reality is such that”--“Reality is characterised by.”

Thus we see that, as we have said before, in every Judgment the ultimate subject is Reality, the world in contact with us as we have already qualified it by previous Judgment. It is a less mistake to reject the Subject and Predicate in the Judgment altogether, than to think that they are separate things or ideas, and that in judging you pass or change from one to the other. Always bear in mind that it is possible to mass the whole Judgment as a single Predicate directly or indirectly true of Reality.

Having said this much, to make the Unity of the Judgment unmistakable, we may now safely distinguish between the Subject and Predicate in the Judgment. And we shall find the safest clue to be that the explicit Subject, when there is one, marks the place at which, or the conditions under which, Reality accepts the Predicate. The natural Subject is concrete, and the Predicate abstract; the Subject real, and the Predicate ideal, but pronounced to be real. The reason of this is that every Judgment is the connection of parts in a whole, and to be a whole is the characteristic of reality. In other words, the natural course of thought is to define further what is already in great part defined, and our real world is that which we have so far defined. The isolated judgments of the text-books make it very hard to grasp this, because you seem to begin anywhere for no connected reason at all. But if we reflect on actual thought, {109} we find that, as Mr. Stout very cleverly says, we are always developing a “subject” which is in our minds (in the ordinary sense of a “subject of conversation”), and this subject is some region or province of the world of reality.

Now the explicit Subject in Judgment or the grammatical Subject in Proposition does not always set out the full nature of this, but merely some mark or point in it which we wish to insist upon. So that we may find in Judgment almost anything serving as explicit Subject. Thus, as Aristotle said quite plainly and sensibly, it is natural to say “The horse is white,” but we may have occasion to say “This white is a horse”; it depends on the way in which the Subject comes into our minds. Usually the Subject will be what Dr. Venn calls the heavier term, i.e. the term with more connotation. When there is no difference of concreteness between parts and whole, the Judgment becomes reversible as in the equation 7 + 5 = 12. There is no distinction here between Subject and Predicate. The real underlying unity or Subject is the numerical system.

See Prof. Bain, p. 56, upon the Universe, and Universe of Discourse, i.e. the general subject which you have in your mind.

Therefore by recognising Subject and Predicate we represent the organisation of knowledge, and the connection of inherence or consequence within the content of our knowledge. If we do not recognise this distinction we throw the whole of Judgment into an undifferentiated mass of fact, running all assertion into the same mould, “It is the case that,” etc. One difficulty still remains. If the relation between Subject and Predicate is within an idea, and not between ideas--that is, if the whole explicit content, Subject and {110} Predicate together, can be regarded as predicated of reality,--why is the act of predication expressed by a verb, i.e. a sign of activity within this content? Why is a verb often if not always the form of predication which connotes Subject and Predicate? Not because it is a time-word. On the contrary, we want to get rid of the tense in Logic. The time of a Judgment ought to be determined only by the special connection between Subject and Predicate, not by tense, because tense is always subjective, merely relative to the time of speaking, and is accidental to the content of Judgment. Action seems nearer to what we want; the verb expresses both action and predicate. But the idea of action again does not make a predication, and the verb “is” does not really indicate action. Perhaps it is the demonstrative element in a finite verb that makes it the vehicle of predication, i.e. in a finite verb you have a meaning referred by a demonstrative element to something else. Originally the meaning was always an action; “is” of course meant “breathes.” But now the verb has lost vitality by wear and tear, and only refers something to something else. The puzzle is that the Judgment is not referred to us who make it, but is expressed as if it was accomplished by something outside us. That puzzle points to the essential feature which we insisted on, viz. its objectivity; in predication we refer what is mentally our act to a subject that represents the real world, not to ourselves at all. When I say “Gladstone comes to London this week,” the verb which expresses Gladstone’s action also expresses that my real world in his person accepts the qualification “coming to London this week.” Because of this objectivity of thought, I attribute to {111} the real world and not to myself the connection which is presented to my mind, and so it takes its place as an act of the real world. But I might throw the whole content into the Predicate by saying, “The ideal content ‘Gladstone coming to London this week’ is a predication true of Reality.” Thus though the distinction between Subject and Predicate best exhibits the living structure of knowledge, we must beware of the notion that two ideas or two things are needed for Judgment.

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