Academic periods

Usage examples of terms.

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In fact, however, the two sciences have little in common except a few general terms, and even these they employ in different senses.

It is to such concrete experiences that we have always to refer in order fully to realise the meaning of abstract terms, and therefore, of course, to understand any qualification of them.

Concrete terms may be subdivided according to the number of things they denote and the way in which they denote them.

Singular Terms, each denoting a single thing, the most obvious are Proper Names, such as Gibraltar or George Washington, which are merely marks of individual things or persons, and may form no part of the common language of a country.

But whether all terms must connote as well as denote something, has been much debated.

Whether Abstract Terms have any connotation is another disputed question.

After all, if it is the most consistent plan, why not say that abstract, like proper, terms have no connotation?

But in truth all general terms are popularly and classically used in somewhat different senses.

The matters which terms are used to denote are often so complicated or so refined in the assemblage, interfusion, or gradation of their qualities, that terms do not exist in sufficient abundance and discriminativeness to denote the things and, at the same time, to convey by connotation a determinate sense of their agreements and differences.

Subject, but both these terms are never predicable of the same Subject in the same relation: such pairs of terms are called Contradictories.

It is symbolic terms, such as X and x, that are properly said to be contradictories in relation to any subject whatever, S or M.

The distinction between Positive and Negative terms is not of much value in Logic, what importance would else attach to it being absorbed by the more definite distinction of contradictories.

And, on the other hand, as we have seen, when positive and negative terms are not contradictory, they are misleading.

Logic as the science of thought only as embodied in propositions, in respect of which evidence is to be adduced, or which are to be used as evidence of other propositions, the above laws or principles must be restated as the conditions of consistent argument in such terms as to be directly applicable to propositions.