e.g. 'that the diagonal of a square is commensurate with the side' or 'that you are sitting'; for one of these is false always, and the other sometimes; it is in these two senses that they are non-existent. (b) There are things which exist, but whose nature it is to appear either not to be such as they are or to be things that do not exist, e.g. a sketch or a dream; for these are something, but are not the things the appearance of which they produce in us. We call things false in this way, then, — either because they themselves do not exist, or because the appearance which results from them is that of something that does not exist.
(2) A false conception is the conception of non-existent objects, in so far as it is false. Hence every conception is false when applied to something other than that of which it is true, e.g. the conception of a circle is false when applied to a triangle. In a sense there is one conception of each thing, i.e. the conception of its essence, but in a sense there are many, since the thing itself and the thing itself modified in a certain way are somehow the same, e.g. Socrates and musical Socrates. The false conception is not the conception of anything, except in a qualified sense. Hence Antisthenes foolishly claimed that nothing could be described except by its own conception, — one predicate to one subject; from which it followed that there could be no contradiction, and almost that there could be no error. But it is possible to describe each thing not only by its own conception, but also by that of something else. This may be done altogether falsely indeed, but in some ways it may be done truly, e.g. eight may be described as a double number by the use of the conception of two.
These things, then, are called false in these senses, but (3) a false man is one who is ready at and fond of such conceptions, not for any other reason but for their own sake, and one who is good at impressing such conceptions on other people, just as we say things are false, which produce a false appearance. This is why the proof in the Hippias[1] that the same man is false and true is misleading. For it assumes that he is false who can deceive (i.e. the man who knows and is
- ↑ Hippias Minor 373 C seqq.
