Sentences, Judgments, Truth: Aristotelian Logic for Teenagers

Introduction
In our previous book, we discussed words and concepts. In this book, we discuss sentences and
judgments. Our first book was focused primarily on the relationship between words, concepts,
and reality, and this book does talk a lot about words and concepts. But the focus this time is on
the relationship between words, concepts, and truth, since truth is discovered and expressed,
not in a word or a concept by itself but in the sentence or judgment of which words or concepts
are the parts. Now, you might be thinking that truth and reality are the same thing, and they
are, in a sense. But in another sense, they are not the same. Can you think of the reason? To
help you, use the adjective true in a sentence, and then use the adjective real in another
sentence. What’s similar about the sentences? What’s different? Do they mean the same exact
thing?
We say, “That is a true diamond,” as opposed to a fake one, and in this sense, true means real.
But we also say, “It is true that today is Friday,” and here it wouldn’t make sense to substitute
the word real for the word truth. Why not? In the former example, the word true is referring to
a real object in the world, the diamond. But in the latter example, the word true is referring
only to the sentence itself, the one that says that today is Friday, not to any object in the real
world. The main point is that normally, and especially in logic, true or false is a quality of, not
reality itself, but sentences and judgments that make claims about reality, while real or unreal
is a quality applied (true or falsely!) to reality itself.
As we discussed in the first book, truth can be defined as the conformity of our mind with
reality, and such conformity is enabled and expressed in judgments of the mind, which are
themselves expressed in audible or written sentences. This is analogous to the way that real
beings are apprehended and expressed in our minds by concepts, which are expressed in
ourselves and to others by words. What we are talking about here, you may have already
gathered, are the first and second acts of the mind. Although we contact reality in the first act
by apprehending the essence of things, until we make a judgement about this reality in the
second act, we do not discover truth.
A simple example may help. If I express in a word the concept in my mind that corresponds to
the essence of the being in front of me by saying “cat,” you wouldn’t respond by saying “true.”
In fact, you probably wouldn’t respond at all because I didn’t really communicate anything to
you! It is only when I say, “There is a cat,” or point to the cat while saying “cat” (which is really
just a gesture that means “there is a cat”) that you would be inclined to say, “Yes, that’s true,
and, by the way, it’s chasing a mouse!”
Now, I wouldn’t be able to express the truth of the situation, that there is a cat, unless I had
first apprehended the cat in my mind. But without yet exercising the second act of the intellect,
in this case, by making the judgment that there is a cat, I am not able to discover or assess the
truth of the situation in front of me. Why is this? We are going to go deeper into the reasons for
this later, but for now I’ll leave you with a clue in the form of a question: What word connects
the word there with the word cat in the sentence “there is a cat”? Do you think that is has
something to do with why judgments are about truth? What does is mean? What is is?
If you’ve studied grammar, you have already encountered and analyzed judgments when you
studied what is called the mood of sentences. Recall that there are five moods: interrogative
(“what is that?”), exclamatory (“wow, that!), imperative (“look at that!”), subjunctive (“I wish
you would look at that”), and declarative (“I am looking at that”). Only the declarative mood is
essentially about stating truth (or untruth), and that is because it is the primary mood in which
a judgment, the product of the second act of the intellect, is expressed. All judgments are
sentences, but not all sentences are judgments, for only sentences in the indicative or
declarative mood express the act of judgment. Recall that the product of the first act of the
intellect, the concept, is divided up into substantial and accidental concepts, mirroring the two
main kinds of real beings in the world, and these concepts correspond to the grammatical
“beings” of nouns, on the one hand, and adjectives, adverbs, verbs, etc., on the other.
To complete our brief review of the grammatical aspects of logic, or the logical aspects of
grammar, we need to bring in the third act of the intellect, reasoning, its logical product, the
argument, and its grammatical analogue, the paragraph. As words are the building blocks of
sentences, and sentences the building blocks of paragraphs, concepts are the building blocks of
judgments, and judgments the building blocks of arguments. It is tempting the think that, just
as the purpose of the bricks of a house is to make the walls, and the purpose of the walls to
support the house, with the house being the final product and thus the purpose of
housebuilding, so to the purpose of words and sentences, concepts and arguments, is to make
paragraphs and arguments, with the creation of a paragraph (or several paragraphs to make an
essay or lecture or book) the final product and purpose of grammar, and the creation of an
argument (or several arguments to make a treatise or lecture or book) the final product and
purpose of logic. By this reasoning, we would conclude that the purpose of the first act of the
intellect is to enable the second act, and the purpose of the second act is to enable the third
act, with the third act, reasoning, being the perfection and culmination of logic itself.
But consider for a moment the structure of this argument:
All men are mortal
Socrates is a man
Socrates is mortal

On the one hand, we have the concepts men, mortal, and Socrates making up the judgments All
men are mortal, Socrates is a man, and Socrates is mortal. And these judgements, two premises
and a conclusion, make up the argument. Isn’t the argument the purpose and culmination of
the concepts and judgments that constitute it? Well, consider what the purpose and
culmination of the argument itself is. Isn’t is to prove the truth of the judgment “Socrates is a
mortal”? But judgment is the second act of the intellect, and so it would seem that the first and
third acts of the intellect culminate in the second act, with the second act, not the third act, the
point and purpose of the other two acts. Is this correct? Are you confused?

Well, we have said that truth is the purpose of logic, and that truth is discovered and
articulated, not in the first act of simple apprehension, but in the second act of judgment,
through which we declare and indicate what is or is not the case, what is or is not real. Now,
the third act of the intellect, reasoning, surely helps us, by providing a chain of reasoning (itself
made up of judgments!), to justify and ground our declarations and indications regarding
reality, but argument isn’t itself an act of truth telling, just as conceptualization itself does not
tell us what is real. Instead, both conceptualization and reasoning are necessary, preliminary
aids to the intellectual act of judgment by which we discover and articulate the truth of things.
In short, the first and third acts of the intellect are ordered to the second. And thus it is all
important that we understand this act so as to most effectively exercise it in our quest for
truth!

But logic, even if we have mastered it in all three acts of the intellect, cannot by itself enable us
to find the truth. As we explained in our first book:

The truth of a proposed definition is judged by the human intellect in its second act. But
whether we know if a definition is true depends on how well we are educated in the sciences,
and how accurate these sciences are to reality. Definitions about the material world are judged
to be true in a systematic way, grounded by evidence, in the natural sciences (biology,
chemistry, physics, etc.) and the philosophical sciences (the science of being, the science of
knowledge, the science of right action — respectively, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics).

But even the sciences are not completely self-sufficient to determine the truth of things. The
sciences are just the latest and hopefully most accurate expression of the inquiries of human
beings over centuries. It is these cooperative inquiries into the nature of reality, full of struggle,
failing, error, and revision, as well as the inquiries we do on our own based upon our own
experience and thinking, that lead humans to truth. These inquiries never stop, for even the
truths that have been discovered can always be better articulated, related more complexly to
other truths, and more deeply understood. We can always gain a more fuller and deeper grasp
of reality, and liberal and fine arts, such as literature, history, poetry, art, music, and dance, are
just as powerful tools as science for grasping the mystery of reality.

When one’s mind is in accordance with reality, we call this truth, and it is a relationship, a
relationship of one’s mind with the world. The sciences are true if they describe the world
accurately, and we can only describe the world accurately if our minds are in the right relation
to it. The arts and sciences, when they model and teach the truth, can help our minds to relate
to the world rightly, but ultimately, we must accept the responsibility of searching for the truth
ourselves, allowing reality to both determine the contents of our imaginations and minds, and
measure them by its infallible standard. In short, reality is the final authority! To know the truth,
we must heed the wisdom that has come down to us, but we must also seek this wisdom
 ourselves, using the tools of logic, the sciences, literature, the arts, religion, and any other
discipline, art, or field of human experience that can help us enter into and remain in a right
relationship with reality.

So, logic is not self-sufficient for the discovery of truth. But it is still very important! And
knowing how to make good, logically correct judgments and analyze and evaluate the
judgments of others is perhaps the most important of all the logical skills, for, as we have said,
the act of judgment is the final cause of the other two acts of the intellect. Let’s get judging!

Questions to Ponder and Discuss

1) What does it mean for something to be real? For something to be true? Are these
exactly the same?

2) Why is the second act of the intellect more about truth than the first?

3) How is it that the first and third acts of the intellect are ordered to the second act?

4) Why is logic not enough to discover and know truth?

Lesson One: Propositions: Where the Truth Lies
Yes, the title is a pun of sorts! Truth cannot lie, of course, for it is the truth! What we mean by
“lies” is not false statements but the location of something. While reality is “out there,” so to
speak, independent of our thoughts and desires, truth is “in here,” meaning, dependent to
some extent on our minds. I say “to some extent” because truth is also dependent on reality,
for the truth is not reality by itself, not our minds by themselves, but the relation of the two,
precisely, when the mind is in a relation of conformity to reality. Falsity is, then, when the mind
is in a relation of non-conformity to reality. Hearkening back to our first book, we can say that
the genus of truth is “relationship of the mind,” and the specific difference is “in conformity
with reality.”
So, if truth (and falsity) “lies” in our minds when they are related to reality, why does the title
say that it lies in propositions? Well, consider any truth or falsity in your mind. Think of one.
Right now. Perhaps you thought, “This is the best book I have ever read.” This obvious falsity is
a thought in your mind, yes, but notice that when you consider the thought to yourself, it is
made up of words. Words are signs of thoughts. A sign is just any motion, gesture, image,
sound, pattern, or event that conveys meaning. When words are put together such that they
express a meaning of truth or falsity, we have a proposition, which, again, is a sign of a thought,
which is itself a sign of reality (or unreality).
So, how does a proposition signify thought and thereby reality? It does so by mirroring the
structure of reality in its very grammatical structure. OK. That’s a lot to unpack! In the first book
we discussed how the categories, the “sayables about the beables” mirror the structure of
reality. For, everything that exists is either a substance or one of the nine accidents, and the
categories are just the conceptual and linguistic signs of these ten most fundamental kinds of
reality. When you look outside, you see a tree. This tree is a “beable” of which you conceive the
sign in your mind of “tree,” about which you can then utter a sign, a “sayable,” such as, “tree”
or “substance.”
But this tree exists and it exists in a certain way, in a certain place, at a certain time, with
certain characteristics, as do all finite created beings. When you think and say “tree” or
“substance” using only the first act of the intellect, you are certainly communicating to yourself
and others something true about this reality, but not the full truth. To communicate the full
truth about the reality of the tree, you must add to your simple apprehension of the tree a
judgment regarding its actual existence, such as, “That tree is,” or “That tree is a Redwood
tree.” And this is because the reality of the tree includes not only what it is but that it is, and
the first act of the intellect, simple apprehension, can only discover and indicate the former but
not the latter. It’s the second act, judgment, which discovers and indicates both the nature of
and the existence of the tree. In short, judgment enables the mind to grasp the full reality of
the tree, both its whatness and its thatness.
How does judgment do this? Let’s try to answer this by looking at the structure of its verbal
sign, namely, the proposition. You have already learned about this structure in grammar, for it
is nothing more than the structure of subject and predicate. Both of these are made up of
concepts, the product of the first act of the intellect, but in the proposition, these concepts are
put into relationship with each other. This is the key, for all real beings exists in relation, both
within themselves and to other real beings, and propositions are the signs of these relations.
Even mental beings, such as concepts, “exist” (in the mind) in relation, and we so propositions
are also the proper signs of mental relations.
For example, a real cat (to use our favorite example from the first book) is a combination of
several elements: an essence (cat), an existence (this, and not that, cat), and a set of accidents
(black, small, meowing, etc.). Now, these elements are distinct, but in the living reality of the
cat, they are all one: “This black cat is meowing.” And with that judgment, we now have a sign
of the reality of the cat, in other words, the truth about the cat. “Black,” “cat,” “is,” and
“meowing” are not true, not because they are false concepts, but because they are just that,
concepts, and concepts alone do not and cannot adequately mirror and express reality. It is
only when concepts are joined together in a judgment that reality is mirrored and expressed.
And this is because only in the judgment do we have the discovery and acknowledgement of
existence, and not just essence, as in simple apprehension. The key to this, as we have
suggested, is the structure of the judgement and its expression in the proposition, namely, as
subject, copula, and predicate, or in simpler language, the name and the verb.
Every real being acts. In fact, being is itself an action, namely, the act of existing. Propositions,
and thus the second act of the intellect, alone capture this act, as well as all the acts of the
being that follow from this most primordial one. It is the verb that captures and signifies
existence, and when we put the verb, or predicate, together with the name, the subject, we
capture the fundamental reality of the being we are talking about. For example, the cat is. This
is a proposition, and so it captures both the whatness, with the name cat, and the thatness,
with the verb is. We could predicate (which is just a fancy word that means “say something
about”) other actions of the cat to capture other aspects of reality, such as “the cat is black.”
We can also capture the reality of the cat as it was in the past, or will be in the future by
changing the tense of the verbs, as you have already learned in grammar: “The cat was
meowing,” “The cat will be black tomorrow.”
What the proposition does, when it is a true proposition, is join together the subject with what
is true about the subject. A false proposition joins together the subject with what is not true
about the subject. The parts of the proposition, then, are 1) what we’re talking about, the
subject; 2) what is said about it, the predicate; and 3) that which signifies the joining together
of these, which is called the copula (the verb is just the copula plus the predicate). So, for
example, in the proposition, “the cat is black,” we have cat as the subject, black as the
predicate, and is as the copula. In the proposition “the cat is,” it looks like there is only a subject
and copula, with no predicate, but we could also say “the cat is existing,” which means the
same thing, and there we have the threefold structure more explicitly. Some propositions do
not seem to have a copula, such as, “the cat has nine lives,” but the copula is there but just
hidden—can you guess how we could write this differently to include an explicit copula? “The
cat is the animal that has nine lives”!

The Kinds of Propositions

When you first learned to read, you read simple stories about simple things using simple
sentences: “The cat is in the hat. The hat is in the closet. The closet is dark. The cat is scared of
the dark.” As you became more advanced in your reading, you were able to read more complex
stories with complex sentences, such as, “If the cat in the hat is in the dark closet, then he is
scared.” Notice that the last sentence combines the previous sentences together, expressing
the same meaning, but doing so in a more complex way. Propositions in logic are divided into
simple or categorical propositions made up of one subject and one predicate, like the ones in
the simple story, and compound propositions, made up of more than subject and one predicate,
like the one in the mode advanced story.
But compound propositions differ from categorical propositions not only by containing more
than one subject and predicate, but also by permitting a more complex and varying manner in
which the predicate is related to the subject. Consider the difference between saying, “If the cat
in the hat is in the dark closet, then he is scared,” and saying, “The cat in the hat is scared and is
in the dark closet.” These are both compound propositions, and are just about identical in
meaning. But the first one includes the idea of cause and effect, giving the reason why the cat is
scared, while the second one only indicates that the cat is scared.
There are two main kinds of compound propositions: categorical and conditional.