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WorkF. H. Bradley

The Principles of Logic

Logic taken back from the textbooks and the empiricists: the attack on formal inference from which Bertrand Russell took what he needed.

by F. H. Bradley966 passages held

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First published
(aged 37)
Original language
English

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Overview

Bertrand Russell spent years dismantling British idealism, and yet conceded that one argument in this book had convinced him: a universal statement says nothing about any existing thing, but states a condition, so that all whales are mammals would hold even if the last whale died tomorrow. That reading passed into the predicate calculus and stayed there — a book on Russell can still be written with barely a mention of Bradley. The book it came from, published by Kegan Paul in 1883, had set out to take logic away from two traditions at once. Against the textbook Aristotelianism still being taught at Oxford, Bradley argued that reasoning cannot be formalised in principle, because an inference cut loose from the knowledge it belongs to is no longer an inference. Against the empiricists he had inherited — Locke, and John Stuart Mill above all, whom he handled with open contempt — he argued that an idea is a meaning rather than a mental picture a mind carries about, and that a judgment is not three parts bolted together but a single act, referring that meaning to a reality outside it. A critical review followed in Mind the next year. Then Bernard Bosanquet, a fellow idealist who would later describe Bradley as his master, published a book-length criticism in 1885 under the title Knowledge and Reality. Bradley took it hard enough to answer thirty-seven years later: the second edition of 1922 left the original text almost untouched and put the concessions in commentary and terminal essays at the back, where he gives more ground to Bosanquet than to any opponent who had come at him from outside idealism.

Key concepts

What does Bradley mean by calling an idea a sign?

An idea, in logic, is a meaning and not a mental picture. What a mind actually has is a particular image with a date and a history; what a judgment uses is the content cut loose from that image and held out as a sign of something else. Logic deals with the meaning used, never with the psychological event carrying it.

Why does “all whales are mammals” say nothing about any actual whale?

Because a universal statement asserts a condition rather than an existence. It says that if anything is a whale it is a mammal, and that would stand even if the last whale died tomorrow. Bradley classes such statements as hypothetical, leaving the categorical judgment about this thing here as the only kind touching existence directly. Russell kept the point and dropped the rest.

What does Bradley mean by identity in difference?

One thing that stays itself through real variation. A universal is not a property abstracted from a heap of particulars but a single identity running through differences that stay different — the same man at ten and at fifty, the same law in two unlike cases. Judgment and inference both work because such identities hold; strip them out and nothing connects to anything.

Why does Bradley say every denial rests on something positive?

Because nothing can be denied at random. To say the wall is not red is to say something else holds of it which excludes red — some positive ground doing the excluding. A negation is therefore never a bare absence but a judgment leaning on a fuller one, which is why a denial always says more about reality than it appears to.

What is the real subject a judgment refers to?

The reality the judgment is about, which no sentence ever states in full. Every judgment takes a meaning and refers it beyond itself to a reality met in perception, so the grammatical subject is only a pointer at that reality. This is why truth is never self-contained for Bradley: what a statement asserts depends on conditions it has left unsaid.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Judgment as one act, not three parts

What happens when something is asserted? Bradley's answer — that a judgment refers a meaning to a reality beyond itself, in one act rather than by bolting subject, copula and predicate together — decides what logic can be about at all.

Textbook analysis broke the judgment into parts and then had to glue them back; Bradley denies there are parts to glue. An idea is used, not owned: its content is cut loose from the mental state carrying it and referred to a real subject that the sentence never wholly states. Hypothetical and categorical judgments are re-sorted by what each asserts of existence, and the conclusion that a universal statement asserts a condition rather than existing things is the one Russell took away and kept.

  • judgment
  • predication
  • categorical judgment
  • hypothetical judgment
  • meaning
  • universals
  • existence
  • truth
  • reality

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Inference cannot be formalised

Is reasoning a set of forms a mind could apply blindly? Bradley says no: an inference severed from the knowledge it belongs to stops being an inference, and the syllogism survives only as a fragment of something larger.

Reasoning, on this view, is an ideal construction performed on a reality already held in view, its result then seen; so the same premises can yield different conclusions, depending on what is read off the whole. Oxford's surviving Aristotelianism is the first target and Mill's canons of induction the second: neither an unchanging figure nor a mechanical rule can carry the work, because the work is done by the subject matter. Disjunction, probability and possibility get the same treatment — read as claims about conditions, not as forms.

  • inference
  • syllogism
  • logic
  • induction
  • disjunction
  • probability
  • possibility
  • causation
  • abstraction

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Against the school of association

Are ideas pictures the mind stores and then links by habit? Answering that is where Bradley separates logic from psychology, and what is at stake is whether meaning can be built out of particular mental images at all.

Locke and Mill had made the idea a particular image and association its law; the reply is that nothing is ever recalled or found similar except under some universal aspect, so association already presupposes the meaning it claims to explain. Perception, memory and resemblance are re-described accordingly. The separation is not contempt for psychology but a refusal to let the history of a mental state settle the truth of what it asserts — a refusal the next generation kept after dropping everything else of his.

  • associationism
  • psychology
  • empiricism
  • perception
  • memory
  • similarity
  • philosophy of mind
  • universals
  • identity
  • epistemology

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Within this work

passages held
966
distinct concepts
595
by passages held, corpus-wide
#65

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “inference” and “logic”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 28 pairings. 77 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
inferencelogic55
inferencejudgment47
judgmentreality36
identityinference31
identityjudgment31
judgmentperception30
abstractioninference23
judgmentlogic21
judgmentuniversals19
inferenceuniversals18
perceptionreality18
abstractionjudgment17
inferenceperception17
identitylogic13
inferencereality13
abstractionreality11
perceptionuniversals11
identityuniversals10
abstractionuniversals8
logicuniversals8
realityuniversals8
abstractionlogic7
abstractionperception7
abstractionidentity5
identityperception4
logicreality4
logicperception2
identityreality1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1876 Ethical Studies

    Not a treatise but a chain of essays, and the only book Bradley gave to morals. He never revised the text in the remaining forty-eight years of his life, so this is his ethics entire; the posthumous second edition only added matter around it.

     EN
  2. 1883 The Principles of Logic you are here EN
  3. 1893 Appearance and Reality

    The book that made him, and for two decades after 1893 the centre of English philosophy. It is also the centre of his own system: the logic leads into it, and the essays of 1914 defend what it claims.

     EN
  4. 1914 Essays on Truth and Reality

    Pragmatism is the occasion: these are the papers Bradley wrote against it in the journals, collected in 1914 and the last new book he published. The arguments arrive dated and aimed at named opponents, as controversy rather than as a system.

     EN
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