Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

Port Royal: The Stirrings of Modernity 675
(called the attribut in the Logic). Arnauld and Nicole go on to say that these
ingredients are not enough to make a proposition, but that the “mind must join
or separate them” (113). This activity of the mind is signified by the copula
(est in their example) or by the copula along with negation particles (n’est pas in
their example). As Jill Buroker has pointed out, this treatment of the proposition
appears to leave Arnauld and Nicole no room for the mind’s simply conceiving
of a proposition without affirming or denying it, because on their view it is the
act of the will in either affirming or denying that creates the proposition in the
first place. It also leaves them open to Frege’s charge that this kind of analysis of
negation is incoherent. 13 Let me deal briefly with both these difficulties.
Buroker contrasts the Port-Royal account of propositions with that of Descartes.
On Descartes’ view, there appears to be no sharp line between conceiving ideas
which are non-propositional and thinking a proposition. The understanding can
have before it an idea with a propositional content, and then the faculty of the
will comes in when a person makes a judgement. Affirmation or denial is then
made on a propositional content, and the will can also be suspended, in which
case the proposition will just be considered. Now as Buroker points out, this last
step does not seem to be open to Arnauld and Nicole, for they bring the act of
affirmation or denial into the very building of the proposition; on their view it
appears that without the judgement involved in the affirmation or denial, there is
no proposition to consider.
As Arnauld and Nicole claim that negation involves the mind separating ideas
apart, it may appear that Frege’s argument in “Negation” applies to them. In
that essay 14 Frege argued that false propositions, or thoughts, had just as much
being and unity as true ones and that “our act of judgment can in no way alter the
make-up of a thought” [Geach and Black, 1970, 122]. He was especially concerned
with the view that negation was an act of the person making the judgment which
dissolved the proposition or separated it into parts [Geach and Black,1970, 123–
124]. This is just the view that Arnauld and Nicole appear to put forth.
Buroker is right about the Port-Royal characterization of propositions. The
unity of the proposition as a proposition does appear to be the function of the
verb. Starting with the fifth edition of 1683, Arnauld and Nicole included as
the first two chapters of the second part one chapter “of words as related to
propositions” (II, 1) and one “of verbs,” (II, 2) taken pretty much verbatim from
the Grammaire Générale et Raisonée. The second chapter, taken from Part II,
Chapter 13 of the Grammaire, asserts that the chief function of the verb is its role
in affirming, “to indicate the connection we make in our minds between the two
terms of a proposition” (109). In the Grammaire, Arnauld and Lancelot argued
that participles were not genuine verbs because they contained no assertion, giving
as examples “Peter living” and “Peter is living”, the first being merely a complex
idea containing the two ideas, and the second being a genuine assertion. The
inclusion of this section in Part II of the Logic was to emphasize the role of the
13 See [Buroker, 1996a, 9–10].
14 The essay was first published in 1919 and appears in [Geach and Black, 1970, 117–135].