PART II 



JUDGMENTS AND PROPOSITIONS. 



CHAPTER I. 

 NATURE OF THE JUDGMENT AND PROPOSITION. 



78. NATURE OF THE MENTAL PROCESS OF JUDGMENT: 

 STRUCTURE OF THE PROPOSITION. Just as the mental act of 

 Simple Apprehension or Conception produces the concept or idea, 

 verbally expressed by the Term, so does the mental act of 

 Judgment result in a product which is also called a Judgment, 

 and whose verbal expression is called a Proposition. A Logical 

 Proposition is, therefore, a Judgment expressed in language. It is 

 a significant utterance which announces something about some 

 thing : Propositio est oratio enunciativa aTrotyavvis, aTrotyavTi/cos, 

 Aristotle calls it. &quot;All intelligible or rational discourse, he 

 writes, signifies something, but not all discourse announces 

 something. A name or term signifies something but does not 

 announce anything : so, too, the imperative mood of a verb, a 

 command, a wish, an entreaty, these are significant words or 

 phrases, but they make no statements : therefore they are not 

 logical propositions. Every statement or proposition must take 

 the form either of an affirmation or of a denial. In every pro 

 position there must be a verb. Take, for example, the notion of 

 man : unless you assert (or deny) something of him, that he 

 is or he was or he will be something, you have no state 

 ment, no proposition.&quot; Such is Aristotle s brief analysis. The 

 logical proposition must contain two terms, the &quot;something&quot; 

 [Subject] about which the statement is made, and the &quot;some 

 thing &quot; [Predicate ] that is stated about it ; and the verb to be 

 which serves as logical {Copula or] connexion between the terms. 



Sometimes subject, copula, and predicate are expressed by 



1 Perihermeneias, chaps, iv., v. 



