Sorglose Nacht

Overview

The Enquiry is Hume’s concise rendering of his philosophical position (”moderate skepticism”). It consists primarily of statements of his methodological and epistemological views, along with his accounts of free will and religious knowledge.

In Stephen Buckle’s introduction to the first Enquiry, he describes its unified argument as such: “After Section 1 makes its case for serious philosophizing, Sections 2-6 put in place the basic account of human psychological functioning, and this account is then put to work in Sections 7-11.” I’ve taken a cue here and split the outline into two sections (1-6 and 7-11).

On a bureaucratic note, I’ve changed my outline numbering system. The reason I’ve done this is because anymore these texts are getting long, and marking numbered paragraphs alphabetically seems counter-intuitive at best. Here, I’ll try using the capitalized roman numerals (I) to represent chapters, and standard numerals (1) to represent numbered paragraphs.

Outline

1. On the different species of philosophy
   1. Moral philosophy (the study of human nature and action, contra natural philosophy - the study of the world) has two common manners of treatment.
      1. The first manner is designed to influence people to be virtuous by “excit[ing] and regulat[ing] our sentiments…[to] bend our hearts to the love of probity.”
   2. The second is more concerned with cultivating our understanding rather than our manners. Cartesian rationalism is a good example of this type of philosophy, which is “unintelligible to the common man.”
   3. It is certain that the “easy and obvious philosophy” will always receive the common person’s preference over the “accurate and abtruse.” The former may also be more useful in daily life.
   4. In this graph he makes a series of consistently wrong assumptions about which philosophers posterity will remember, choosing Cicero over Aristotle, La Bruyere over Malebranche, and Addison over Locke.
   5. Society types in particular like the easy philosophy, by whose writings “virtue becomes amiable, science agreeable, company instructive, and retirement entertaining.”
   6. Contra certain obsessive rationalists, Hume admonishes “be a philosopher, but…be still a man.” (Here, as many places, Hume is more enjoyable when read to oneself in a Scottish accent.)
   7. However, too much of a good thing (here, Epicurianism) is not the answer either. Perhaps there is something worth considering in the metaphysical endeavor.
   8. For one, accuracy-obsessed philosophy does so in the service of the humane pursuits. By analogy, Hume considers the painter’s debt to the anatomist: “Accuracy is,” he notes, “in every case, advantageous to beauty, and just reasoning to delicate sentiment.”
   9. Secondly, most human progress in understanding comes from the kind of enquiry of the metaphysicians, or “a spirit of accuracy…carries [all human pursuits] nearer their perfection.”
   10. While the important task of making this slow and arduous progress will seem dry to most, some minds “require severe exercise.”
   11. However, the justest exception to be taken with metaphysical philosophy is that these deep folk claim to “penentrate into subjects utterly inaccessible to the understanding.”
   12. This fact should not condemn the deep philosophical enterprise, though. On the contrary, the “only method of freeing learning…from these abstruse questions, is to enquire seriously into the nature of human understanding, and show…that it is by no means fitted for such remote and abstruse subjects.”
   13. There would be considerable other advantages to such an enquiry, the least of which might be a delineation of the distinct parts and powers of the mind.
   14. Skepticism against such an effort ostensibly entails skepticism about the ability of all speculation whatsoever, and of action. One cannot doubt that the mind is endowed with several distinct powers.
   15. There’s thus no reason to despair of such an effort of categorization.
   16. Hume modestly writes that even a small accomplishment in this endeavour would be ample reward for his effort.
   17. “Happy, if we can unite the boundaries of the different species of philosophy, by reconciling profound enquiry with clearness, and truth with novelty!”
2. Of the origin of ideas
   1. Objects of imagination and memory pale in force and vivacity to those of sensation.
   2. Similarly with emotions: A man in a fit of anger “is actuated in a very different manner” than one who merely thinks about anger.
   3. This indicates that we can divide all perceptions into two classes, distinguished by force: ideas (those “less lively”) and impressions (those more).
   4. At first blush, thinking seems unbounded (it is unconstrained by time and space, e.g.).
   5. Upon reflection, however, we realize that thought cannot really invent anything, rather it can merely compound, transpose, augment or diminish the objects we receive from our impressions.
   6. Two arguments to prove this. First, any of our ideas, when subjected to appropriate scrutiny, resolve themselves into simple ideas (received from impressions - very Lockean).
   7. Second, when a person has a defect of some sense (say, he is blind), he is likewise defective in his ability to comprehend its correspondent ideas (here, e.g. color).
   8. There is one phenomenon that contradicts this, for which Lock proposes the following thought experiment:
      1. Suppose a person is acquainted by experience with all but one particular shade of blue.
      2. When shown a gradient of color, he will be aware that there is a jump between the shade preceding the shade he has not experienced, and the one following it.
      3. This means, despite having never experienced that shade, he can infer that it should be there.
      4. However, Hume chalks up this example to complete anomaly.
   9. On the main, this is very useful as a heuristic device for analyzing philosophical argumentation. If you suspect that some philosopher’s terminology has no referent (apparently a big problem in Hume’s time), you can ask yourself, “from what impression is that supposed to be derived?”
3. Of the association of ideas
   1. It is evident that the different thoughts of our mind are always somehow connected to one another.
   2. Hume proposes that this principle of connection takes only three forms: resemblance, contiguity in time or place, and cause and effect.
   3. That these principles serve to connect ideas will not be doubted. That the three of them are exhaustive may justly be doubted. Hume will try to evidence his taxonomy’s exhaustiveness by showing that it applies to a wide variety of examples (following Hutcheson, he will immediately discuss aesthetics, qua the relationship between history and poetry).
   4. People’s actions are directed at ends. We seldom speak or think without purpose or intention.
   5. All compositions of genius therefore must arise at least in the first place from some aim or intention.
   6. Since this is always the case, there always must be some thread which relates the events of a narrative.
   7. The connecting principle may be different, depending on the designs of the poet or historian. Ovid’s Metamorphoses operates connectively by resemblance.
   8. A historian, however, may be influenced by contiguity in time and place.
   9. However, the most usual form of connection in poetic and historical narratives is cause and effect. For a historian, this seems obvious, as the more perfect the chain of causal links, the more perfect is the historical account.
   10. The same is true of a narrative about an individual, but from a narrative standpoint, this degree of detail can be boring. History and poetry thus differ in their “unity of action” not in kind, but merely in degree.
   11. He here gives us the example that it may not be necessary, as in the Iliad to let the reader know “each time the hero buckles his shoes.” If an epic poet does this, the reader’s imagination will doubtless flag.
   12. Secondly, he notes that the epic poet must not trace the causes to any great distance - again, the reader will lose interest.
   13. The same rule in dramatic poetry - introducing an actor only tangentially related to the main characters is just confusing. The author must, again, select which elements she will admit onto the stage, at the clear expense of providing a full accounting of the causal nexus which determines the plot.
   14. Paragraph 14 recaps 7-13: the relation of cause and effect is the same in history and poetry, where the latter’s concern is the imagination and passions of its readers.
   15. Since the difference is only measured by degrees, it will be difficult to separate history from epic poetry cleanly.
   16. Here a brief discussion of the role of narrative contrast in unifying Achilles’ anger in the death of Hector and his anger which “produced so many ills to the Greeks.”
   17. Here an analysis of Paradise Lost that suggests that the connective structure of this poem is not necessary causal, but rather resemblance (of miraculous events) and contiguity (of events in Christian metaphysical time).
   18. The full empirical review of the exhaustiveness of this taxonomy would lead us into reasonings too copious for this enquiry.
4. Sceptical doubts concerning the operations of the understanding
   1. (Part I) All objects of human reason may be divided into (1) relations of ideas and (2) matters of fact. The former are propositions which are independent of the actually existing stuff of the universe.
   2. The latter (matters of fact) are, on the contrary, just states of affairs in the really existing universe. Their contrary states don’t imply contradictions, and we cannot prove their contraries demonstratively false.
   3. It might be worth our time, then, to figure out something about what exactly assures us of any matter of fact, beyond the “present testimony of our senses.”
   4. Outside of that present testimony, everything we have to say about matters of fact seems to be founded on the relation of cause and effect. (It is supposed that there is some causal relation between the present fact and whatever we infer from it.)
   5. Therefore, we’d better look at how we arrive at the knowledge of cause and effect.
   6. Hume affirms that the knowledge of this relation arises entirely from experience. No object, considered in itself, ever reveals by its sensory qualities, the causes that produced it or the effects that will arise from it.
   7. It thus will be admitted that causes and effects are discoverable only by experience (not by reason) with regards to objects.
   8. However, it may not be so self-evident that this is the case when we consider events.
   9. Imagine two billiard balls, a first moving towards a second, making contact. Motion in the second is quite a distinct event from motion in the first.
   10. We of course think that when the first hits the second, the second will move. But we can conceive many other outcomes rationally. The first could stop, or be deflected in some other direction. There is never an a priori reason, then, that grounds our preference that the second will move on contact.
   11. Since every effect is distinct from its cause, and therefore cannot be discovered in the cause. Therfore, it is in vain that we should try to rationally infer an effect from a cause.
   12. While elasticity, gravity, etc. are probably the ultimate causes we shall ever discover in nature, “the most perfect philosophy of the natural kind only staves off our ignorance a little longer,” and “the observation of human blindless and weakness is the result of all philosophy.”
   13. Neither can geometry account for the law of motion, since the latter relies on the real existential world, for which we can only experimentally suppose the efficacy of the former.
   14. (Part II) Since the foundation of all our reasoning is experience, we need to ask, what is the foundation of all conclusions from experience?
   15. Even after we have experience of cause and effect, our conclusions from that experience are not founded on any process of the understanding. Explaining this is what follows.
   16. The main question to answer is why our experience of the behavior of one object should be extended to predictions about the behavior of other objects, however similar, at different times. Even when we allow that this inference is just, we need to know what the “medium” between the single experience and the expectation of similar experiences in the future.
   17. Just because we haven’t figured out this intermediate step yet doesn’t mean we never will. This means the negative proof isn’t good enough, and we need to endeavor to enumerate all the branches of human knowledge, and that none of them can afford such an intermediate step.
   18. There are two kinds of reasonings: demonstrative (that reasoning which concerns ideas) and moral reasoning (that reasoning that concerns fact and existence. That there are no demonstrative arguments to provide the intermediary step seems evident, since it doesn’t imply a contradiction that the course of nature may change sometime in the future.
   19. If we are going to be persuaded by any arguments to continue to expect future behaviors based on past experience, these arguments are going to be probable only.
   20. From causes which appear similar we expect similar effects, but even though there is “nothing so like as eggs,” no one “expects the same taste and relish in all of them.”
   21. If someone is to infer that some bundle of qualities (x) implies some causal power (y), based on his past experience that all x’s have the power y, of what nature is this inference? It’s neither demonstrative nor intuitive, and to say that it’s experimental is begging the question.
       1. Hume also makes the point here that regardless of the fact that as an agent he is satisfied to act based on inferences from experience, as a philosopher, he remains curious as to the nature of these inferences.
   22. Now Hume is going to give us some arguments that will prove that he hasn’t merely /missed/ some argument for the foundation of this inference.
   23. Imagine a child who puts her hand by a candle. The flame burns her, and in the future, she will be careful not to put her hand near the candle again. If you assert that the child develops this conclusion by rational means, and that the means are so evident that an infant can deploy them, this means that any valid explanation of the rational process can’t be more complex than those deployed by an infant. Since this is true, Hume thinks it likely that some philosopher would already have been able to explain it. Indeed, if he’s missing it, he would be “a very backward scholar; since I cannot now discover an argument which, it seems, was perfectly familiar to me long before I was out of my cradle.”
5. Sceptical solution of these doubts
   1. (Part I) One school of philosophy doesn’t lead us to the kind of hyper-rational selfishness in which philosophers are known to indulge. Academic (that is, post-Platonic, contra Pyrrhonian) Scepticism: suspending judgment, and renouncing speculation about things outside the limits of common life and practice.
   2. Though we must conclude (viz. the previous chapter) that there is a step taken by the mind which is not supported by a rational argument, there is no danger that this lack of argument will threaten all the knowledge (which is almost all of it) which it grounds.
   3. To an alien, there is no reason to conclude that simply because one event precedes another that the first is the cause and the second the effect.
   4. Now imagine that our alien has a little more experience. Though he now finds himself determined to draw the inference that one thing causes another, he still has no rational justificatin for doing so. But there must be some principle which makes him form this conclusion.
   5. That principle is custom or habit. It is by habit that we associate, e.g. heat and flame. There is a long footnote here that suggests that this experiential justification for reason underlies not only our knowledge of objects, but our views on civil government, moral conduct, the law, etc.
   6. “Custom, then, is the great guide of human life.” Without custom, we wouldn’t know anything about anything but what our sense experience and memory deliver us. This means that we wouldn’t know how to adjust means to make ends we want, and this would be the end “at once of all action, as well as the chief part of speculation.”
   7. Also, it is prudent to note that though our conclusions can carry us beyond memory and sense, some fact must always be present to sense or memory to provide a starting point to draw a conclusion.
   8. In conclusion, all beliefs about matters of fact are derived from some present object and a customary conjuction between that object and some other object.
   9. From here, then, we need to examine the nature of that belief and of the customary conjunctions from which it is derived.
   10. (Part II) What’s the difference, cognitively speaking, between a belief and something we just imagine?
   11. The difference lies in some sentiment or feeling that gets conjoined to beliefs (by force of custom) that doesn’t get joined up with fictions. Since there’s no logical contradiction in the idea of a red ocean, it is just some sentiment that forces us to understand an image of one as fiction, whereas to one of a blue ocean we attribute facticity.
   12. Defining this sentiment is hard, but describing it might not be so bad. We can call a belief “something felt by the mind, which distinguishes the ideas of judgment from the fictions of the imagination. It gives them more weight and influence…and renders them a governing principle of our actions.”
   13. On summary, “…belief is nothing but a conception more intense and steady than what attends the mere fictions of the imagination, and…this manner of conception arises from a customary conjunction of the object with something present to the memory or senses.”
   14. We will also remember that the principles of that conjunction are resemblance, contiguity and causation. Does it happen, Hume now asks, that “when one of the objects is presented to the sense or memory, the mind is not only carried to the conception of the correlative, but reaches a steadier and stronger conception of it than what otherwise it would have been able to attain?” He finds that in the case of cause and effect, this is indeed the case. The question is now whether it is generally the case.
   15. He argues that it is the case for the resemblance connection as well, using the example of viewing a picture of an absent friend.
   16. Further evidence for the power of resemblance comes in the form of Roman Catholic rituals that use idols (of the crucifixion of Jesus, e.g.).
   17. He argues then that it is also the case for the contiguity relation, using this example: when walking hear his home, the things that he passes remind him of his (absent) home more acutely than do similar things hundreds of miles away.
   18. Finally, “no one can doubt” that causation works similarly. His (strange) example here is the desire for religious types to have relics of saints, which he suggests are effects close to the cause (the holy person).
   19. Another, still weird example, is that in seeing the son of our dead friend, we remember him more acutely. The implication here is that the son is the effect, and the father the cause.
   20. Finally, all three connective types require that the correlative object is presupposed. It would have no effect if, e.g. we didn’t believe the father, or Jesus, or the saint, or our home, or our absent friend actually existed.
   21. This paragraph seems a little strange at first blush, because he suggests that custom is the principle by which “a kind of pre-established harmony between the course of nature and the succession of our ideas” (an obvious reference to Liebniz) and he ends up talking about final causes (in reference to Aristotle). It’s actually kind of nice, though, when you understand these problems in terms of paragraph 6 above: if custom didn’t unite our thoughts with our past experience of nature, we wouldn’t know how to act to bring about ends, and hence both moral action and knowledge would be impossible.
   22. Finally, there’s a practical analogy: we use our instinct for inferring future behavior from past experience in the same way we use our legs. We don’t have to understand the way the muscles and nerves work together to walk.
6. Of probability
   1. Although our world is causally determined, our ignorance of the real cause of any event means that our future-directed knowledge for real events and objects always takes the form of a belief or opinion.
   2. This opinion is based on probability.
   3. Now recall that a belief is just a stronger conception of some object than that which we have of some correspondent object of fiction in our imaginations.
   4. We can now understand that probability begets belief (and degree of belief). Since fire has always burned throughout our experience, it is incredibly probable that it will again. Therefore, we believe with high assurance that we’ll be burned if we touch a fire. In short, Hume thinks that when we project our experience of past events onto our beliefs about the future, those beliefs acquire a degree of assurance proportional to the consistency of our past experience in similar situations.

Overview

A Stranger, a student of Parmenides, will set out to define the Sophist. Upon reaching the conclusion that the Sophist is one who sells the appearance of wisdom, he will announce that in order to prove this conclusion, an investigation into the nature of non-Being will be required. This will be approached by an investigation into Being itself, which will be divided into five great kinds. By analyzing these, he will prove that the negation of not-being operates on the predicate being, not the subject. Further, negation simply implies difference, not opposition.

Background

This is a late Platonic Dialogue. After criticizing the Middle Period conception of the forms (the theory of separate, immaterial forms) in Parmenides. The Sophist and Statesman show the author’s increasing interest in mundane and practical knowledge.

The Setup

SOCRATES asks an Eleatic STRANGER to help him define the terms “statesman”, “sophist”, and “philosopher”. They start with Sophist. Socrates, remembering the method employed in Parmenides by its’ namesake, asks whether the stranger would like to proceed by Q&A. The Stranger indicates that he would, if someone would not give him a lot of sass-back, but just acquiesce to his points (qua young Aristoteles in Parmenides). Socrates proposes that THEAETETUS will do just that.

1. DIAIRESIS: Since Sophists are slippery to define, the Stranger suggests that they begin by using their proposed method on something easier; say, an angler.
   1. Str. defines two classes of arts: productive (or creative) and acquisitive. Anglers belong to the acquisitive class, which can itself be separated into two: exchange and conquest. Conquest may be further separated into hunting and fighting. Hunting can be divided into animal hunting and the hunting of lifeless things. Animal hunting can be divided into by-land and by-water. By-water into fowling and fishing. Fishing into enclosure (fishing by nets) and striking (by spear). Striking into firing (by night) and barbing (by day). Barb-fishing into spearing and angling (by hook).
   2. This method of definition-finding is called diairesis. Now we’re going to try this method on the Sophist.
   3. The Sophist is acquisitive, and further is a hunter. And a by-land hunter at that.
      1. Hunting on land has two divisions: Hunting tame and wild animals.
      2. Tame animals into hunting with violence [piracy, tyranny], and hunting with persuasion [lawyer, orator].
      3. Persuasion into public and private.
      4. Private into receiving hire and bringing gifts (lovers).
      5. For hire into those whose reward is virtue and whose is money. The latter of these is the Sophist.
   4. Alternatively the Sophist could follow the path of exchange. Exchange divides into giving and selling.
      1. Selling into the sale of one’s own productions (retailers), the sale of others’ (merchants).
      2. Merchants into those who provide food for the body, and for the soul (music, paintings, marionette playing, knowledge).
      3. Food for the soul -> display and (n). (n) -> sale of knowledge of virtue and sale of other kinds of knowledge (art-seller). The former is the Sophist.
   5. A third alternative is that the Sophist follows the path of the fighting arts. This into competitive and pugnacious.
      1. Pugnacious into violent (bodily strength) and controversy (words). Controversey into forensic and disputation. Disputation into without rules and by rules (argumentation). Argumentation into wasting and making money. The later of which is Sophistry.
   6. Fourth, we run down this line: Let’s start with the arts of discernment. This can be split into a) arts that split like from like and b) those that split better from worse.
      1. The latter is called purification, which can be split into purification of living things and of inanimate objects. The former can be split into purification of bodies and souls. The latter can be split into: the purification of vice and of ignorance. (Alternatively the former can be split into gymnastic and medicine.)
      2. The purification of ignorance requires instruction, which can be split into admonition (resolves stupidity - ignorance which thinks it’s knowledgeable), and the dialectical remedy for plain ignorance. The latter of these is the domain of the Sophists.
   7. Thus the Sophist is determined to be:
      1. A paid hunter after wealth and youth (c).
      2. A merchant in the goods of the soul, a retailer of these wares (and one who manufactures them) (d).
      3. A hero of debate (e).
      4. A purger of souls, clearing away notions obstructive to knowledge (f).
2. COMBINATION: With five definitions in hand, they set out to find the common elements of contained within the five.
   1. The Sophist is a disputer, and teaches disputation. That is, the art of argumentation about anything. This means that the Sophists (otherwise they would be bankrupt) are assumed to have knowledge about everything. Thus, Sophists are in possession of a conjectural, non-truthful knowledge of all things.
   2. Sophists thus imitate wisdom, he is like a juggler. And the imitative art, like anything, can be split: a) likeness-making (painters) and b) appearance-making (that is, where one could not get a broad enough perspective on the reality to even understand if there is a likeness or not.
   3. And now, if the essence of the sophist is that he produces appearances, and more precisely false appearances. He imitates the wise man (Sophist 268b-c). But how can we make sense of this appearing but not being, this stating things but not true things? We have to contend once again with Parmenides’ old doctrine: “He who says that falsehood exists has the audacity to assert the being of not-being.”
3. THE RETURN OF PLATO’S BEARD:
   1. To define the sophist as an expert in deception, as someone who produces false appearances by means of statements, the Stranger needs to show that Parmenides was wrong; he needs to demonstrate that it is possible to say and to think that things that are not are, and to do so without contradiction.
      1. We can’t say “things which are not” nor “what is not” because in doing so we attribute singularity or plurality to non-Being, which is inapplicable.
      2. This is the basic Quinean position on Plato: by admitting things that aren’t, you are already contradicting yourself. (Note that this is what propositional logic theoretically resolves - contra term logic - via bound variables.)
   2. Parricide?
      1. We can’t make the “image”/non-being analogy, because the Sophist will show that
         by defining images, we predicate non-being.
      2. False opinion seems to think that things are not are, or vice versa.
      3. Hence, the Stranger will be forced to test the philosophy of Parmenides.
   3. Investigating Being: Number
      1. First of all, all previous theories of being may have taken the concept of “being” as lightly as Theaet. used to take non-being. Thus, let us investigate being first.
      2. Both the concepts of multiplicity and unity run into problems when you assert them of being. Starting with unity, we go through the standard Purity-F regimen:
         1. If Being is one then it is both being and one, and hence not one.
         2. Being can’t parts (a beginning, end).
         3. Yet, if being is not one, it lacks unity, and hence is not whole (everything). Etc.
      3. Hence, maybe we need to throw away the idea that Being is either one or two.
   4. Investigating Being II: Essence
      1. Let’s appeal to various notions of essence (essentially: materialist and Platonic notions).
      2. Starting with the materialists, Str. wants to suggest that being is that which has any power to affect another. Now the appeal is that given bodies (changing) and souls (unchanging; essential).
      3. Further, Being must contain both the movable (insofar as it contains mind, life, and soul) and unmovable (insofar as it contains sameness, etc).
      4. Which is a bit like the problems of (c) above, insofar as both rest and motion require predication, which is thus a third term.
      5. But if the many cannot be one, and the one cannot be many, how again will we attribute being to motion or to rest? In other words, we need an account of how one thing can be called by many names.
   5. Return to Participation: To show that one thing can be called by many names and that some names specify the object but mis-describe it, the Stranger introduces some machinery. He proposes that some kinds can partake of other kinds (these terms appear to be synonyms and to introduce an asymmetrical relation between an object and a property it has), whereas some kinds cannot blend with each other.
      1. Further, there are great kinds that enable the blending of kinds, much as vowels enable consonants to fit together. Even as some expertise is required to determine which letters can associate with which, so dialectic is required to determine which kinds blend and which do not, and which kinds hold everything together and make them capable of blending, and which are causes of division.
      2. The Stranger announces that there are five great kinds. He will ask two questions about them: (1) what are they like? and (2) what capacity do they have to associate with each other? The kinds to be discussed are: motion, rest, being, sameness and difference. Note that these five are not claimed to be exhaustive of all great kinds. Presumably, there are others, such as are discussed in the second part of Parmenides.
4. THE FIVE GREAT KINDS: TWO QUESTIONS
   1. The Stranger addresses question (1): What is each of the great kinds like? He distinguishes each of the five kinds from one another, starting with being, motion, and rest.
      1. Motion and rest, as opposites, do not associate with each other; but being associates with both, since both of them are. Being must be a third thing distinct from them:
      2. Similarly, sameness and difference are distinct from motion and rest. Furthermore, being is distinct from sameness. They have to be different, because if they were not, when we say that motion and rest both are, we could substitute the same, and motion would be the same as rest.
      3. Finally, the Stranger distinguishes difference from being. This argument introduces a crucial distinction between two modes of predication.
      4. Difference is distinct from being, because difference is always in relation to other things (pros alla) and more precisely in relation to something different (pros heteron), whereas being is both itself by itself (auto kath hauto) and in relation to other things (pros alla).
   2. Question (2): The Blending of Kinds
      1. The Stranger carries out the analysis for one great kind, motion, and argues very systematically that motion is non-identical with each of the other four kinds (motion is not rest, not the same, and so on), but partakes of three of the four - all but rest.
      2. The whole analysis is implemented with two relations: non-identity (F is not G, because F partakes of difference from G), and positive predication (F is G, because F partakes of G). Note that this leaves out negative predication - which is what one would think Plato would want to use to handle the problem of false statement.
5. NEGATION
   1. The Stranger made a serious mistake about negation in the last two (constructive) puzzles about not-being earlier in the dialogue. The mistake was to suppose that the negation in “not-being” indicates the opposite of being (opposites are polar incompatibles, and these include polar contraries, like black and white, which have some intermediate between them, and polar contradictories, like odd and even, and motion and rest, which do not).
      1. The opposite of being (its polar contradictory) is nothing. Parmenides was right to object that we cannot speak or think about nothing. If any speaking or thinking is going on, we are speaking or thinking about something. The Stranger showed in the first three (destructive) puzzles about not-being that any attempt to refer to nothing fails.
      2. But Parmenides was wrong to suppose that all talk about what is not is attempted talk about nothing.
      3. The problem of not-being is solved by recognizing two things: (1) the negation operates on the predicate, not the subject; (2) the negation need not specify the opposite of the item negated but only something different from it.
      4. Now, the negation appears to specify part of a wider kind which is determined by the positive term (e.g. large) that is negated (in this case size). Like varieties of applied mathematics, whose content is supplied by the domain to which the knowledge is applied, there are kinds of difference whose content is supplied by the objects differentiated.
      5. A kind of difference (say size) contains two parts, which are opposites (polar contradictories), such as large and not-large. Let us call this kind an incompatibility range.
   2. The Stranger distinguishes between names and verbs. A verb is a sign that is set over actions (or properties); a name is a sign that is set over the things that perform the actions (or have the properties). There cannot be a sentence that is simply a string of names or a string of verbs. A statement must fit a name together with a verb.
      1. The central idea is very simple. Statements are structured.
      2. For instance, “Theaetetus is sitting” is true, because “sitting” specifies something that is about Theaetetus, who is currently sitting. “Theaetetus is flying” is false, because “flying” specifies something different from what is about Theaetetus.
      3. As noted above (§4.b.ii), we need negative predication to explain the false statement: If “Theaetetus is flying” is false, it is false because the negative predication “Theaetetus is not flying” is true.
      4. The analysis of negative predication (as distinct from non-identity) is complex. This is what scholars of the Sophist talk about; which is a lot more detailed than we care to be.
6. MUTATIS MUTANDIS…
   1. The Sophist was left closed in the imitative art, which was a kind of creation. But now, we’re going to go back and note that creation is of two kinds: human and divine.
      1. Inside the human kind of creation, we have a split (again) between representational creation and appearance-based creation. Now, from above we remember that the latter was to partake of falsehood, it it could be shown that falsehood was a part of real being. We have now accomplished this, and thus, it is so.
      2. This diairesis continues until we come to our definition of a Sophist: “he…who…is an imitator of appearance, and is separated from the class of phantastic which is a branch of image-making into that further division of creation, the juggling of words, a creation human, and not divine-any one who affirms the real Sophist to be of this blood and lineage will say the very truth.”