Pursuing praxis

From HWB "Talking nonsense is not thinking" Joseph. pgs 41-46

"There is a certain difficulty in the notion of a negative term, and in the account merely the absence of a quality. The Irishman’s receipt [recipe?] for making a gun, to take a hole and pour iron round it, is not more difficult to execute, than it would be to frame a term whose meaning consisted simply in the fact that a particular quality was not meant. A term must have some positive meaning, in order to be a term at all.

"It is indeed sometimes said that a negative term includes in its meaning whatever is not meant by the corresponding positive term. According to this view, there is no positive term to which we may not frame a corresponding negative; to man there corresponds not-man, to book not-book, to square not-square, to colour not-colour; not-man is everything which is not man, and includes therefore not only the other animal species, but plants and minerals, books and institutions, birth and immortality; not-book includes all these but books, and man besides; and so forth. The two ‘contradictory’ terms, (as they are called) comprise between them all that is; nothing can be conceived, of which one or the other is not predicable; and they divide the universe between them. What the positive term is, does not matter; for whatever it be, the negative term covers everything else; and therefore it may be expressed by a symbol; let A represent any term, and non-A its contradictory; we may then say that A and not-A between them make up all that is, or that there is nothing of which one or the other may not be predicated. ‘Everything is either A or not-A.’

"Such negative terms as these do not really figure in our thought; they are ‘mere figments of logic’; …

"The invention of such terms however is explained when we remember the relation of a term to judgment. The latter, as we have seen, is the primitive and remains the complete act of thought, and terms are got by abstraction from it. Now the affirmative judgment ‘All flesh is grass’ may be resolved into the terms flesh (the subject) and grass (the predicate affirmed of it); and the negative judgment ‘Man is not a fly’ into the terms man (the subject) and fly (the predicate denied of it). But since we do therein affirm that man is not a fly, it seems possible to say that the predicate, not a fly, is affirmed of man, as well as that the predicate fly is denied of him. This attempt to reduce negative and affirmative judgments to a common affirmative type, by throwing the negative into the predicate, is not really defensible, for the negative term not a fly does not signify the nature of anything, and so is not really a term; it should, if it were a general term covering everything except the corresponding positive, be predicable of all subjects except flies in the same sense; but there is no common character in all these which it is intended to signify. Hence, as we should not take the trouble to affirm of man nothing in particular, the only point of the judgment must lie in denying of him something in particular; so that the meaning of the ‘infinite’ judgment (as it is called) ‘Man is not a fly’ lies in the negative judgement ‘Man is-not a fly’, and it is clear that we have not resolved the negative into the affirmative form, when such affirmative can only be understood by restoration to the negative. But it is out of such attempts that so-called purely negative terms like ‘not-fly’ have arisen; and it is only by understanding that the term A has been the predicate of a negative judgment, that we can understand how the term not-A should ever have been formed.

"There are however certain negative terms which are not such mere figments of logic as the ‘infinite terms’ considered above. Where the positive is not a general concrete term but is attributive, there the corresponding negative may be quite legitimate; indeed the distinctions of positive, negative, and privative most properly apply not to all, but only to attributive terms, or to abstract terms founded upon these. For all attributive terms imply a subject of which they may be predicated, and to which they refer that attribute which constitutes their meaning. Therefore even if the term be negative, it still suggests a subject which, lacking the attribute which the negative term excludes, is conceived as having some character instead. And here we have a basis of positive meaning to the negative term; for let A be a positive term; then not-A will signify what a subject, which might be A, will be if it is not A. Thus intemperate signifies what a man, who might be temperate, will be if he is not that; uneven suggests what a line or surface, such as the surface of a road, will be if it is not even; not-blue suggests what a thing which might be blue (that is, an object having some colour) will be if it has not that colour. The definiteness of the positive meaning which a negative term thus conveys will vary greatly, according to the range of alternative attributes which we conceive possible to a subject that might conceivably have possessed the attribute denied of it; thus intemperate has a more definite meaning than not-blue, because when temperance is excluded, though there are many degrees of intemperance, yet they have more affinity with one another as opposed to temperance than have the remaining colours as opposed to blue; unruffled has a more definite meaning still, for a surface which is not in any way ruffled can only be smooth.

"It has been alleged that ‘not-blue’ does not necessarily imply ‘coloured in some other way than blue’, nor ‘not-even’ a surface of another kind than even; that it is as true to say of banter that it is not blue as of a buttercup, and that larceny is as much not-even as Lombard Street. But such a contention misinterprets our thought. Just as privative terms imply the absence of an attribute from a subject that possessed or should have possessed it, and therefore must convey a notion of what the subject consequently is without that attribute, so negative terms (at any rate when they are not mere figments of logic) imply the absence of an attribute from a subject that might conceivably have possessed it, and therefore convey a notion of what the subject is instead. The attribute which a negative term excludes belongs to a genus of attributes (as blue belongs to the genus colour, or prudence to the genus feature of human character, or square to the genus figure); and if a subject is unsusceptible of any attribute within that genus, we should not be a pains to deny of it some particular attribute therein; since the soul for example has no figure, we should not say that it is not-square; since furniture has no feature of human character, we should not call a towel-horse imprudent. The negative term is only used of what must have some attribute within its genus; and this genus furnishes a substratum of positive meaning to the negative term; not-blue does mean ‘coloured not with blue’ and not-even ‘having a surface which is uneven’.

"Many negative terms indeed are not themselves attributives, but are abstracts which presuppose an attributive; and what has been said of negative attributives is confirmed by the fact that these abstracts - such as injustice, inequality, non-intervention - are very positive in their meaning. ‘Injustice’ does not mean whatever is not justice (such as ‘accidence and adjectives and names of Jewish kings’), but the quality of being unjust; ‘inequality’ means the relation of being unequal; non-intervention the conduct of the non-intervening. Abstract negative terms like not-equality or not-colour are as unreal as concrete negative terms like not-Socrates or not-book.

"It may be asked, if all negative terms (and the same is true of privative) have a positive meaning, what is the use of the distinction between them? The answer is as follows. First, with regard to the distinction of positive and privative terms; there are some states which can only be understood as the privation of a positive state: deafness would have no meaning, but for our knowing what it is to hear; we cannot think of a body dessicated, except we think of it as having first contained moisture.

"Secondly, with regard to the distinction between positive and negative terms: there is a real difference between a term which signifies one definite attribute, and a term which signifies any attribute within a genus except one; the latter is in most cases comparatively indeterminate and uninstructive; e.g. vertebrate signifies a definite anatomical structure; invertebrate signifies an animal structure which is not vertebrate, but fails to characterize it further. Positive terms are positive directly and precisely, negative terms indirectly and for the most part vaguely. This distinction is important, and we are therefore justified in calling attention to it; it will be seen for example presently to be one of the rules of definition to state what a thing is, not what it is not; this is best expressed by the injunction to avoid, as far as possible, negative terms; and there is no way in which the point of this instruction could be so well conveyed as by the help of the distinction of negative and positive terms."