Note 440 — Chapter IX

This issue is, I think, involved in an argument used by Miss Jones (in an article in Mind, April, 1898) in support of the doctrine that we have inference whenever we pass from a given proposition to another that is verbally different from it; for example, from Victoria is Queen of England to Victoria is England’s Queen. The passage from one of these propositions to the other is, in Miss Jones’s view, not indeed a formal immediate inference, but a syllogism in which an understood premiss has to be supplied: thus, Victoria is Queen of England, The Queen of England is England’s Queen, therefore, Victoria is England’s Queen. It may, Miss Jones adds, seem futile or even puerile to set out at length what everybody or nearly everybody knows without telling; but there may be cases (e.g., the case of a child or of a foreigner learning the English language) in which a reasoning of this kind has to be gone through.

It appears to me that there is here a failure to distinguish between two different points of view. We may no doubt draw an inference as to the equivalence of meaning of two terms or two expressions, where the whole argument is concerned with the meaning of terms or the force of expressions. Thus, to take (or, rather, adapt) another of Miss Jones’s examples, we may readily admit that there is inference if a German argues that because the word Valour is equivalent in meaning to the word Tapferkeit, and the word Bravery is also equivalent in meaning to the word Tapferkeit, therefore, the words Valour and Bravery are equivalent in meaning. Again, a child or a foreigner may arrive by a process of inference at the equivalence of such forms as Queen of England and England’s Queen. But in the syllogism given above the first premiss and the conclusion are statements of fact, while the second premiss is a statement as to modes of expression, its import being “The expression Queen of England is equivalent to the expression England’s Queen.” Hence there are more than three terms and we have not properly any syllogism at all. So far as there is inference in the case supposed, it will be something like the following,—“The form of words Queen of England is equivalent in meaning to the form of words England’s Queen,” therefore, “The judgment which is expressed in the form Victoria is Queen of England may also be expressed in the form Victoria is England’s Queen.” This is the inference, if any, that a foreigner studying the language would make; and it is very different from professing to pass from the judgment Victoria is Queen of England to the judgment Victoria is England’s Queen.