subject, predicate and copula.[1] At this stage we are as much
concerned with speech-forms as the thought-forms of which they
are conventional symbols, with Plato’s analysis, for instance,
into a noun and a verb, whose connotation of time is as yet a
difficulty. The universal of this stage is the universal of fact,
what is recognized as predicable of a plurality of subjects. The
dialectical doctrine of judgment as the declaration of one member
of a disjunction by contradiction, which is later so important, is
struggling with one of its initial difficulties,[2] viz. the contingency
of particular events future, the solution of which remains imperfect.[3]
The doctrine of the Categories is still on the same level of thought,[4] though its grammatico-logical analysis is the more advanced one which had probably been developed by the Academy before Aristotle came to think of his friends there as “them” rather than “us.” It is The Categories. what in one direction gave the now familiar classification of parts of speech, in the other that of thought-categories underlying them. If we abstract from any actual combination of subject and predicate and proceed to determine the types of predicate asserted in simple propositions of fact, we have on the one hand a subject which is never object, a “first substance” or concrete thing, of which may be predicated in the first place “second substance” expressing that it is a member of a concrete class, and in the second place quantity, quality, correlation, action and the like. The list follows the forms of the Greek language so closely that a category emerges appropriated to the use of the perfect tense of the middle voice to express the relation of the subject to a garb that it dons. In all this the individual is the sole self-subsistent reality. Truth and error are about the individual and attach or detach predicates correctly and incorrectly. There is no committal to the metaphysics in the light of which the logical inquiry is at last to find its complete justification. The point of view is to be modified profoundly by what follows—by the doctrine of the class-concept behind the class, of the form or idea as the constitutive formula of a substance, or, again, by the requirement that an essential attribute must be grounded in the nature or essence of the substance of which it is predicated, and that such attributes alone are admissible predicates from the point of view of the strict ideal of science. But we are still on the ground of common opinion, and these doctrines are not yet laid down as fundamental to the development.
Dialectic then, though it may prove to be the ultimate method of establishing principles in philosophy,[5] starts from probable and conceded premises,[6] and deals with them only in the light of common principles such as may be reasonably appealed to or easily established against challenge. The Topics. To the expert, in any study which involves contingent matter, i.e. an irreducible element of indetermination, e.g. to the physician, there is a specific form of this, but the reflection that this is so is something of an afterthought. We start with what is prima facie given, to return upon it from the ground of principles clarified by the sifting process of dialectic[7] and certified by νοῦς. The Topics deal with dialectic and constitute an anatomy of argumentation, or, according to what seems to be Aristotle’s own metaphor, a survey of the tactical vantage-points (τόποι) for the conflict of wits in which the prize is primarily victory, though it is a barren victory unless it is also knowledge. It is in this treatise that what have been called “the conceptual categories”[8] emerge, viz. the predicables, or heads of predication as it is analysed in relation to the provisional theory of definition that dialectic allows and requires. A predicate either is expressive of the essence or part of the essence of the subject, viz. that original group of mutually underivable attributes of which the absence of any one destroys its right to the class-name, or it is not. Either it is convertible with the subject or it is not. Here then judgment, though still viewed as combinatory, has the types which belong to coherent systems of implication discriminated from those that predicate coincidence or accident, i.e. any happening not even derivatively essential from the point of view of the grouping in which the subject has found a place. In the theory of dialectic any predicate may be suggested for a subject, and if not affirmed of it, must be denied of it, if not denied must be affirmed. The development of a theory of the ground on which subjects claim their predicates and disown alien predicates could not be long postponed. In practical dialectic the unlimited possibility was reduced to manageable proportions in virtue of the groundwork of received opinion upon which the operation proceeded. It is in the Topics, further, that we clearly have a first treatment of syllogism as formal implication, with the suggestion that advance must be made to a view of its use for material implication from true and necessary principles. It is in the Topics,[9] again, that we have hints at the devices of an inductive process, which, as dialectical, throw the burden of producing contradictory instances upon the other party to the discussion. In virtue of the common-stock of opinion among the interlocutors and their potentially controlling audience, this process was more valuable than appears on the face of things. Obviously tentative, and with limits and ultimate interpretation to be determined elsewhere, it failed to bear fruit till the Renaissance, and then by the irony of fate to the discrediting of Aristotle. In any case, however, definition, syllogism, induction all invited further determination, especially if they were to take their place in a doctrine of truth or knowledge. The problem of analytic, i.e. of the resolution of the various forms of inference into their equivalents in that grouping of terms or premises which was most obviously cogent, was a legacy of the Topics. The debate-game had sought for diversion and found truth, and truth raised the logical problem on a different plane.
At first the problem of formal analysis only. We proceed with the talk of instances and concern ourselves first with relations of inclusion and exclusion. The question is as to membership of a class, and the dominant formula is the dictum de omni et nullo. Until the view of the Class concept. individual units with which we are so far familiar has undergone radical revision, the primary inquiry must be into the forms of a class-calculus. Individuals fall into groups in virtue of the possession of certain predicates. Does one group include, or exclude, or intersect another with which it is compared? We are clearly in the field of the diagrams of the text-books, and much of the phraseology is based upon an original graphic representation in extension. The middle term, though conceived as an intermediary or linking term, gets its name as intermediate in a homogeneous scheme of quantity, where it cannot be of narrower extension than the subject nor wider than the predicate of the conclusion.[10] It is also, as Aristotle adds,[11] middle in position in the syllogism that concludes to a universal affirmative.[11] Again, so long as we keep to the syllogism as complete in itself and without reference to its place in the great structure of knowledge, the nerve of proof cannot be conceived in other than a formal manner. In analytic we work with an ethos different from that of dialectic. We presume truth and not probability or concession, but a true conclusion can follow from false premises, and it is only in the attempt to derive the premises in turn from their grounds that we unmask the deception. The passage to the conception of system is still required. The Prior Analytics The Prior Analytics. then are concerned with a formal logic to be knit into a system of knowledge of the real only in virtue of a formula which is at this stage still to seek. The forms of syllogism, however, are tracked successfully through their figures, i.e. through the positions of the middle term that Aristotle recognizes as of actual employment, and all their moods, i.e. all differences of affirmative and negative, universal and particular within the figures, the cogent or legitimate forms are
- ↑ De Interpretatione 16a 24-25.
- ↑ Ib. 18a 28 sqq.
- ↑ Ib. 19a 28-29.
- ↑ As shown e.g. by the way in which the relativity of sense and the object of sense is conceived, 7b 35-37.
- ↑ Topics 101a 27 and 36-b 4.
- ↑ Topics 100.
- ↑ Politics 1282a 1 sqq.
- ↑ 103b 21.
- ↑ Topics 160a 37-b 5.
- ↑ This is the explanation of the formal definition of induction, Prior Analytics, ii. 23, 68b 15 sqq.
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 25b 36.
