Logic and Argument Author:James Hervey Hyslop General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1899 Original Publisher: C. Scribner's sons Subjects: Reasoning Logic Philosophy / General Philosophy / Logic Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books ed... more »ition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER III THE CONTENT OF TERMS i. INTRODUCTION -- Every term or concept has a content. This content is its meaning. As a term it is simply a word, a sound, a vocable, but it stands for something. It is a name for a thing, a fact, a quality or any circumstance about which consciousness or knowledge can be occupied. As a concept it is an idea which contains a reference to the same that is denoted by a word. The meaning or content is simply the character or characters which a term names or implies, or which an idea represents. But the meaning, material content and ways of viewing a term are rich and various. All of them have a quantity and a quality import; that is, a reference to number and a reference to properties. These characteristics bear an important relation to the laws of thought and the art of discourse. Different principles have to be considered in treating of these two aspects in which terms may be taken, especially when we come to treat of propositions. But at present we are limited to their importance in terms. The aspects under which concepts have always been considered by students of logic have been expressed by the term predicates, borrowed from Aristotle, and expressing the nature of the " predicates "or attributes possessed by terms. They are the most general conceptions under which the meaning of terms can be described and have been given as five in number. I hope to show that they are reducible to four, with a subdivision of two of them which has an interest outside of the...« less