A clever man has said that the use of language is to conceal thought.
Its primary use is certainly not to reveal thought, but to enable
one person to produce an effect on the mind of another or of others,
either for their or his own advantage. In the course of using
speech as an instrument of command, entreaty, persuasion, menace, or
fustigation, it may happen that the movements of the speaker's mind
are revealed to some extent, but this is a mere incident, not the main
purpose of the speech.
Grammar is the system of rules which govern the use of language in its
primary and ordinary capacity.
It follows from this that language is in no sense a revelation of the
reasoning processes, nor do the rules of grammar coincide with the
laws of intellect. It is just as reasonable to expect to find the
metaphysic of thought revealed in any of the industrial and fine arts,
as to look for it in the structure of speech. Aristotle drew his logic
from the composition of the Greek sentence--he might as well have
sought for logic in the constitution of the Greek buskin.[16]
Even when men begin to reason aloud and seek to render their logical
movements as evident as possible, they are so hampered by the ordinary
habits and rules of speech that their meaning is often difficult or
impossible of comprehension. Whence arises the necessity, if we would
reason aloud to any purpose, of redacting or translating language from
the vernacular into a dialect more indicative of the logical processes
that take place when we reason.
This redaction consists mainly in distinguishing clearly the four
parts composing an argument, namely, the Subject of the Precedent; the
Case which is brought under it for judgment; the Applicate or part of
the precedent bearing on the case; the Conclusion, which is the ideal
judgment concerning the case. When these four parts are expressed and
clearly understood we have a perfect argument, so far as argumentation
depends on language. But probably we have spoiled the language from
the grammatical and rhetorical point of view. We may have had
to supply much that would be redundant and unsightly in ordinary
conversation or writing, and to take away much that is appropriate to
colloquial discourse. We are diverting language to a use for which
it was not designed, and we need not be surprised if the result is
ungraceful. This cannot be helped since there exists no other means
than language by which to express our concrete reasoning.
I have already shown practically how an argument can be arranged so
as to indicate the logical relations subsisting between its parts. A
Greek cross is drawn, and in the four angles thus made the four parts
of the argument are written, or the principal words of each. Begin
with the conclusion, for that is generally the most explicitly given;
then find or supply the part of the precedent that agrees or logically
rhymes with it; next place the subject in the first compartment, and
the case under it. These relative positions should not be varied. When
this has been practiced for a while it enables one to dismember the
most intricate argument with ease and exactness.
The redaction or re-writing of the language can be abbreviated by
regarding the horizontal line as equivalent to a declaration of
resemblance between case and precedent-subject, and (by application)
between the illustrative abstraction and conclusion. If there is an
argument at all there must be this resemblance, and the right-hand
parts must have one of the six categorical relations to the left-hand
parts. The contents of the angles may be cut down to a word or two,
as--
I.
Tyrants | death
--------+--------
Caesar | _death_
If the category be further indicated by a numeral over the upright
line, we have the essential parts of the argument in a very compact
form. The cross and categorical numeral may be regarded as a
sufficient substitute for grammatical syntax and punctuation.
The negative word that generally occurs in stigmatic arguments
requires special attention. It should always be put in the second
angle, and when it may read so as to negative the subject it should
be hyphened to the predicate, thus giving it the value of _non_, _un_,
_im_, or other negative prefix. To say colloquially that 'all Russians
are not angels' leaves room to believe that some Russians are angels,
the 'not' applying to 'all' instead of to 'angels.' By linking 'not'
to 'angels' we get a term equivalent to non-angelic, which expresses
the meaning intended--that no Russians are angels.
Caution should be observed with partitive words like 'some,' 'many,'
'a few,' &c. There is little danger of ambiguity when they occur in
the case, for that means that we bring only a portion of a group
of things to judgment, which we are manifestly entitled to do. The
conclusion however applies only to the portion in question, not to
the rest of the group. 'Honest men deserve respect; some Negroes are
honest men; _these particular Negroes deserve respect_.'
In the precedent, partitive words imply that only some of the subject
have the applicate. If that portion is a dialectical 'all'--that is,
if there has been no exception in the course of our experience--we
may, though that experience has been limited, venture to treat the
applicate as universal and ground a conclusion upon it. If the subject
is really partitive--if we know for certain that some subjects have
the applicate and others have it not--the conclusion must follow the
greater probability. If the number and character of the observed cases
is known we can express the probability arithmetically; it is the
number of occurrences of a given character divided by the total
number.
Redaction must not be used to correct original errors of observation;
its purpose is to render explicit in language what is implicit in
thought, not what might have been thought supposing the thinker had
been more intelligent or industrious than he was.
'Conversion' is a process admitted or required in the artificial
methods of syllogistic dialectic. It consists mainly in transposing
the subject and predicate of a proposition, as 'some Europeans are
Mohammedans'--'some Mohammedans are Europeans,' This operation
never takes place in real argument, or is merely the emendation of a
proposition at first awkwardly expressed. Conversion can take place
only when the predicate is a class, hence the categorical propositions
cannot be converted.
[Footnote 16: Though evidently suggested by language, the
form which the syllogistic logic finally assumed is so unlike
anything grammatical, that it is easily convertible into
symbols having no resemblance to language. It has been
put into literal symbols with algebraic values, and into
geometrical diagrams. A logical machine has even been invented
by Professor Jevons, 'worked by keys like a pianoforte,' which
returns 'infallible answers'--of the Aristotelian sort--to
every kind of question. That is sufficiently unlike both
reason and language.]