Page 519 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

that Socrates is a member of the class of philosophers. Moreover, the verb to be also means existence. Mill holds that when this verb is used as copula it does not imply the affirmation of existence.
Among propositions Mill distinguishes what he calls 'verbal propositions,' propositions which do not depend on nonlinguistic facts. An example of a verbal proposition is every woman is rational. Since ration- ality is part of the connotation of woman, as soon as we hear the name woman, we know that women are rational. A real proposition is a proposition in which we predicate of the subject an attribute which does not belong to its connotation. This predication can be wrong and can result in a false proposition. A real proposition can tell something new about the subject but it runs the risk of being false. A verbal proposition does not tell us anything about the subject, but it does not run the risk of being false. Verbal propositions are necessarily true. Furthermore, they are the only necessarily true propositions. Mathematical propo- sitions are not, according to Mill, verbal propo- sitions. This would mean that true mathematical propositions are not necessarily true: they are gen- eralizations from experience, at permanent risk of being falsified by the facts.
4. Mill's View on Inference
Mill intends to show that syllogistic inference is not 'real' inference. Consider the syllogism, All women are mortal, Heloise is a woman so Heloise is mortal. The premise all women are mortal, Mill says, already con- tains the conclusion. When we assert this sentence, we assert the mortality of Heloise—even if we have never heard of her. The universal premise is no evidence for the truth of the conclusion. The evidence for the truth of this sentence is that an unlimited number of indi- viduals to which we apply the name of woman have died. The real inference takes place when we construct the universal sentence from the particular ones: Mary died, Harriet died, etc. In Mill's view a universal sen- tence does not properly give new information. It is, rather, a formula collecting our past experiences. These sentences are dispensable in ordinary reasoning. We usually reason from particular cases to particular
cases. Mill often says that real inference consists in reasoning from particular cases to particular cases. But it is unclear if he means inferences of the type Heloise is a woman,so Heloise is mortal, or inferences of the type Mary, Helena, etc., who are women, are mortal, so Heloise, who is a woman, is mortal.
5. ConcludingRemarks
Ryle (1957) assesses the historical importance of Mill's views on meaning. According to him Mill's theory of meaning set the questions and in large measure determined their answers for Brentano, Meinong, Husserl, Bradley, Jevons, V enn, Frege, Peirce, Moore, and Russell. Mill's attitude towards natural language is congenial to the attitude of the ordinary language philosophers. Kripke (1980) has developed a theory of proper names related to Mill's. Kripke, however, considers that Mill was wrong about general concrete terms: they are more like proper names than Mill thought: neither proper names nor general terms cor- respond to a conjunction of attributes. Mill's theory of propositions is criticized by Geach (1968) under the name 'the Two Terms Theory.' But it also has a small justification in the so-called generalized quantifier per- spective of natural language quantification. Frege (1884) analyzed and rejected Mill's analysis of math- ematical propositions. Kneale and Kneale (1962) devotes a few pages to a discussion of Mill's view on inference.
See also: Names and Descriptions. Bibliography
Benthem J van 1986 Essays in Logical Semantics. Reidel, Dordrecht
Frege G 1884 Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik. Breslau.Pub- lished 1986 as Foundations of Arithmetic. Basil Blackwell, Oxford
Geach P 1968 Reference and Generality. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY
Kneale W, Kneale M 1962 The Development of Logic. Clar- endon Press, Oxford
Kripke S 1980 Naming and Necessity. Blackwell, Oxford Mill J S 1843 System of Logic. John W Parker, London Ryle G 1957 The theory of meaning. In: Mace C A (ed.)
British Philosophy in Mid-Century. Allen and Unwin, London
Charles Peirce (1839-1914) was an American phil- osopher and logician. The son of a distinguished Har- vard professor of mathematics, he lectured at Harvard
in the late 1860s and was subsequently appointed to teach logic at Johns Hopkins University. He was a vain, irascible, and intolerant man, and personal
Peirce, CharlesSanders C. J. Hookway
Peirce, Charles Sanders
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