Semantics

“ That is to say, if, in any sentence in which a thing is mentioned, you substitute a class for the thing, you no longer have a sentence that has any meaning: the sentence is no longer either true or false, but a meaningless collection of words. Appearances to the contrary can be dispelled by a moment’s reflection. For example, in the sentence, “Adam is fond of apples,” you may substitute mankind, and say, “Mankind is fond of apples.” ”

“ Every general name, if used as a concrete term, has, or may have, a corresponding abstract term. Sometimes the concrete term is modified to form the abstract, as 'greedy—greediness'; sometimes a word is adapted from another language, as 'man—humanity'; sometimes a composite term is used, as 'mercury—the nature of mercury,' etc. The same concrete may have several abstract correlatives, as 'man—manhood, humanity, human nature' ”

“ It was natural enough that the originators of conceptual logic, seeing that judgments can be expressed by propositions, and conceptions by terms, should fall into the error of supposing that, as propositions consist of terms, so judgments consist of conceptions, and that there is a triple mental order—conception, judgment, reasoning—parallel to the triple linguistic order—term, proposition, discourse. ”

“ Synonyms:
While the cause of any event, act, or fact, as commonly understood, [303] is the power that makes it to be, the reason of or for it is the explanation given by the human mind; but reason is, in popular language, often used as equivalent to cause, especially in the sense of final cause. In the statement of any reasoning, the argument may be an entire syllogism, or the premises considered together apart from the conclusion, or in logical strictness the middle term only by which the particular conclusion is connected with the general statement. ”

“ How do we decide what the sense of a proposition is, or what we mean by a sentence which is spoken, written, or printed? We try to present to ourselves the significance of the different words that we have learned to use, and then endeavor to find sense in the proposition. ”

“ A proposition is called verbal or analytic when the predicate is a part, or the whole, of the meaning of the subject; and the subject being species, a genus or difference is part, and a definition is the whole, of its meaning or connotation. Hence such a proposition has also been called explicative. Again, a proposition is called real or synthetic when the predicate is no part of the meaning of the subject; and, the subject being species, a proprium or accident is no part of its meaning or connotation. ”

“ For we must, if we are to be consistent, describe what appears to be most substantive as no more than a collection of such supposed adjectives: and thus, in the end, the concept turns out to be the only substantive or subject, and no one concept either more or less an adjective than any other. ”

“ But this word, strange as the fact may appear, is still more completely spoiled for the purpose which it seemed expressly made for, than the word Thing. Being is, by custom, exactly synonymous with substance; except that it is free from a slight taint of a second ambiguity; being implied impartially to matter and to mind, while substance, though originally and in strictness applicable to both, is apt to suggest in preference the idea of matter. Attributes are never called Beings; nor are feelings. ”

“ The accident that one of the words was used and not the other on a particular occasion or in a particular social circle, will be sufficient to produce so strong an association between the word and some specialty of circumstances, that mankind abandon the use of it in any other case, and the specialty becomes part of its signification. The tide of custom first drifts the word on the shore of a particular meaning, then retires and leaves it there. ”

“ Now, if you will put the matter to proof, you will find, I believe, in every case that there has attached itself to the different forms of a word a modification of meaning more or less sensible, that each has won for itself an independent sphere of meaning, in which it, and it only, moves. ”

“ Again, when we use a common noun, such as man, in a universal sense, as signifying all possible men, we are fully aware of this intention on our part, and distinguish it carefully from our intention when we mean a certain group of men, or a solitary individual before us. In the chapter on Conception we shall see how important this difference of intention is. It casts its influence over the whole of the sentence, both before and after the spot in which the word man is used. ”

“ As our thoughts or reflections are conducted by language, great caution is required that the terms we employ should possess a fixed and determinate meaning; and this is more especially important, when we employ words which are not the representatives of the objects of our perceptions, but of a complex nature, or, as they have been denominated, general terms; such as those which are used to designate the faculties and operations of the mind, and such as convey our moral attributes. ”

“ But the abstract term, 'humanity,' denotes the very collection of attributes, which was before connoted by the concrete terms, 'man' and 'human.' In this case, therefore, extension and intension coincide, and the term is non-connotative. ”

“ Every common noun, verb, adjective, adverb, and preposition is the name of a concept; for example, horse, beauty, to steal, running, over, early, yellow, grape, ocean, etc. To understand these concepts there must be somewhere a progress from the individual to the abstract, an induction from particulars to a general concept. ”

“ But as we have no words by which to recall those former sensations, except the very word which we seek to define, or some other which, being exactly synonymous with it, requires definition as much, words can not unfold the signification of this class of names; and we are obliged to make a direct appeal to the personal experience of the individual whom we address. ”

“ The application of so improper a term as Necessity to the doctrine of cause and effect in the matter of human character, seems to me one of the most signal instances in philosophy of the abuse of terms, and its practical consequences one of the most striking examples of the power of language over our associations. ”

“ For, if more men than one give expression to some one object in thought, apparently there are as many words corresponding to that object as there are thinkers; since the word corresponding to it exists in the thoughts of each separately. ”

“ In the case of grammar and logic, the sign and the thing signified are always heterogenous and strangers to each other: with genius, on the contrary, the expression gushes forth spontaneously from the idea, the language and the thought are one and the same ”

“ This realised particularity of the notion is the Judgment.
The ordinary classification of notions, as clear, distinct and adequate, is no part of the notion; it belongs to psychology. Notions, in fact, are here synonymous with mental representations; a clear notion is an abstract simple representation: a distinct notion is one where, in addition to the simplicity, there is one 'mark' or character emphasised as a sign for subjective cognition. ”

“ The judgment or proposition, which is the characteristic form in which the result of reflection finds its expression, consists, in its most rudimentary shape, of the embodiment of this distinction in the separation of predicate from subject, and the subsequent affirmation of the first about the second. The work of thought or knowledge in making our world more intelligible to us essentially consists in the progressive analysis of a content or what, considered in abstraction from the this to which it belongs. ”

“ In this last case, again, we may either compose our definition of as many connotative names as there are attributes, each attribute being connoted by one, as, Man is a corporeal, organized, animated, rational being, shaped so and so; or we employ names which connote several of the attributes at once, as, Man is a rational animal, shaped so and so. ”

“ From what has already been said of Substance, what is to be said of Attribute is easily deducible. For if we know not, and can not know, any thing of bodies but the sensations which they excite in us or in others, those sensations must be all that we can, at bottom, mean by their attributes; and the distinction which we verbally make between the properties of things and the sensations we receive from them, must originate in the convenience of discourse rather than in the nature of what is signified by the terms. ”

“ For the proposition, that the course of nature is uniform, possesses rather the brevity suitable to popular, than the precision requisite in philosophical, language: its terms require to be explained, and a stricter than their ordinary signification given to them, before the truth of the assertion can be admitted. ”

“ The useful ways in which people ordinarily talk or seem to talk about meanings boil down to two: the having of meanings, which is significance, and sameness of meaning, or synonymy. What is called giving the meaning of an utterance is simply the uttering of a synonym, couched, ordinarily, in clearer language than the original. ”

“ But in conveying the fruits of his study and reflection to others, he must condescend to weigh words, compare terms, and preclude all possibility of errour in those he instructs, by using a simplicity of definition, a perspicuity of expression, and, where the barrenness of language denies the immediate term, a neatness of periphrase which not only invites but creates conception. ”

“ Our preference, however, for the objects of sense, for the pen, and the sun, as typical instances of objects of ideas, arises from the fact that in case of just these objects, it is especially easy, by observing, from without, the acts of the person who has these ideas, to form confident and, for common-sense purposes, relatively exact notions of the selection to which the internal meaning of the ideas has bound the maker of any given judgment about objects. ”

“ But as wise men have found it for the express purpose of being able to convey to us some notion of Him who is the first, the unspeakable Being,—a notion, namely, which may represent Him to us through the medium of other objects,—they endeavour either by synthesis, which is the combining of various qualities, or by analysis, which is the separation and setting aside of some qualities, or finally by analogy;—in these ways, I say, they endeavour to set before us that which it is impossible to express in words. ”

“ All propositions the truth of which is implied in the name, all those which we are made aware of by merely hearing the name, are included in the definition, if complete, and may be evolved from it without the aid of any other premises ”

“ Words are the custodiers of every product of mind less impressive than themselves. All extensions of human knowledge, all new generalizations, are fixed and spread, even unintentionally, by the use of words. ”

“ And 'is,' considered as a substantive verb, as in the example, 'This man is,' contains in itself the application of the copula of judgment to the most elementary of all abstractions—'thing' or 'something.' Yet if a being has the power of thinking 'thing' or 'something,' it has the power of transcending space and time by dividing or decomposing the phenomenally one. ”

“ All propositions intelligible to us, whether or not they primarily concern things only known to us by description, are composed wholly of constituents with which we are acquainted, for a constituent with which we are not acquainted is unintelligible to us. A judgment, we found, is not composed of mental constituents called "ideas," but consists of an occurrence whose constituents are a mind [10] and certain objects, particulars or universals. (One at least must be a universal.) ”

“ In endeavouring to apprehend the significance of these roots, we must divest their ideas of the definite forms of conception which we are accustomed to attach to them: each represents its own meaning in nakedness, in an indeterminate condition from which it is equally ready to take on the semblance of verb or of noun. ”

“ Whether a word is used as a concrete or abstract term is in most instances plain from the word itself, the use of most words being pretty regular one way or the other; but sometimes we must judge by the context. ”

“ The following is one of the modes in which these abstract terms, Nature and Essence, are used as instruments of this fallacy. Some particular properties of a thing are selected, more or less arbitrarily, to be termed its nature or essence ”

“ The concept, or subject of thought, is the important element or fact and the term denoting it is merely a convenient symbol of expression. It must be remembered that a term does not necessarily consists of but a single word, for often many words are employed to denote the concept, sometimes even an entire clause or phrase being found necessary for the current term. ”

“ All these truths, however much they may differ, have this in common that in them both the grammatical subject and the grammatical object stand for something which exists. Immensely the commonest type of truth, then, is one which asserts a relation between two existing things. ”

“ It continually happens that of two words, whose dictionary meanings are either the same or very slightly different, one will be the proper word to use in one set of circumstances, another in another, without its being possible to show how the custom of so employing them originally grew up. ”