Book Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1903 edition. Excerpt: ...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, tion and sentence. Judgment. though not every Judgment need be so expressed or can readily be so. Proposi-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 clause1 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. Difference 3-Almost all English logicians speak of the Proposition and Proposi1-not Judgment.2 This does not matter, so long as we tion and are agreed about what they mean. They must mean the proposition as understood, and this is what we call the judgment. 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...