Note 1 — Chapter II

Footnote 1: This is the traditional definition of Opposition from an early period, though the tradition does not start from Aristotle. With him opposition (ἀντικεῖσθαι) meant, as it still means in ordinary speech, incompatibility. The technical meaning of Opposition is based on the diagram (given afterwards in the text) known as the Square of Opposition, and probably originated in a confused apprehension of the reason why it received that name. It was called the Square of Opposition, because it was intended to illustrate the doctrine of Opposition in Aristotle's sense and the ordinary sense of repugnance or incompatibility. What the Square brings out is this. If the four forms A E I O are arranged symmetrically according as they differ in quantity, or quality, or both, it is seen that these differences do not correspond symmetrically to compatibility and incompatibility: that propositions may differ in quantity or in quality without being incompatible, and that they may differ in both (as Contradictories) and be less violently incompatible than when they differ in one only (as Contraries). The original purpose of the diagram was to bring this out, as is done in every exposition of it. Hence it was called the Square of Opposition. But as a descriptive title this is a misnomer: it should have been the Square of Differences in Quantity or Quality. This misnomer has been perpetuated by appropriating Opposition as a common name for difference in Quantity or Quality when the terms are the same and in the same order, and distinguishing it in this sense from Repugnance or Incompatibility (Tataretus in Summulas, De Oppositionibus [1501], Keynes, The Opposition of Propositions [1887]). Seeing that there never is occasion to speak of Opposition in the limited sense except in connexion with the Square, there is no real risk of confusion. A common name is certainly wanted in that connexion, if only to say that Opposition (in the limited or diagrammatic sense) does not mean incompatibility.