Note 16 — Chapter IV · DE INTERPRETATIONE.

Ibid. p. 17, b. 29-37. Mr. John Stuart Mill (System of Logic, Bk. I. ch. iv. s. 4) cites and approves Dr. Whately’s observation, that the recognition of a class of Propositions called indefinite “is a solecism, of the same nature as that committed by grammarians when in their list of genders they enumerate the doubtful gender. The speaker must mean to assert the proposition either as an universal or as a particular proposition, though he has failed to declare which.”

But Aristotle would not have admitted Dr. Whately’s doctrine, declaring what the speaker “must mean.” Aristotle fears that his class, indefinite, will appear impertinent, because many speakers are not conscious of any distinction or transition between the particular and the general. The looseness of ordinary speech and thought, which Logic is intended to bring to view and to guard against, was more present to his mind than to that of Dr. Whately: moreover, the forms of Greek speech favoured the ambiguity.

Aristotle’s observation illustrates the deficiencies of common speaking, as to clearness and limitation of meaning, at the time when he began to theorize on propositions.

I think that Whately’s assumption — “the speaker must mean” — is analogous to the assumption on which Sir W. Hamilton founds his proposal for explicit quantification of the predicate, viz., that the speaker must, implicitly or mentally, quantify the predicate; and that his speech ought to be such as to make such quantification explicit. Mr. Mill has shewn elsewhere that this assumption of Sir. W. Hamilton’s is incorrect.