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Synthese Library 393
Studies in Epistemology, Logic, Methodology,
and Philosophy of Science

Andrea Iacona

Logical
Form
Between Logic and Natural Language
Synthese Library

Studies in Epistemology, Logic, Methodology,

and Philosophy of Science

Volume 393

Editor-in-Chief
Otávio Bueno, University of Miami, Department of Philosophy, USA

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Berit Brogaard, University of Miami, USA
Anjan Chakravartty, University of Notre Dame, USA
Steven French, University of Leeds, UK
Catarina Dutilh Novaes, University of Groningen, The Netherlands
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Andrea Iacona

Logical Form
Between Logic and Natural Language

123
Andrea Iacona
Center for Logic, Language, and Cognition,
Department of Philosophy and Education
University of Turin
Turin, Italy

Synthese Library
ISBN 978-3-319-74153-6 ISBN 978-3-319-74154-3 (eBook)
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Preface

Logical form has always been a prime concern for philosophers belonging to the
analytic tradition. For at least one century, the study of logical form has been
widely adopted as a method of investigation, relying on its capacity to reveal the
structure of thoughts or the constitution of facts. This book focuses on the very
idea of logical form, which is directly relevant to any principled reflection on that
method. Its central thesis is that there is no such thing as a correct answer to the
question of what is logical form: two significantly different notions of logical form
are needed to fulfil two major theoretical roles that pertain respectively to logic and
to semantics. This thesis has a negative and a positive side. The negative side is that
a deeply rooted presumption about logical form turns out to be overly optimistic:
there is no unique notion of logical form that can play both roles. The positive side
is that the distinction between two notions of logical form, once properly spelled
out, sheds light on some fundamental issues concerning the relation between logic
and language.
The book may be divided into three parts. The first part (Chaps. 1, 2, and 3)
provides the historical background. The idea of logical form goes back to antiquity,
in that it stems from the recognition that a pattern of inference can be identified
by abstracting away from the specific content the sentences that instantiate it. The
most important developments of this idea took place in the twentieth century, as they
derive from some seminal works that mark the beginning of the analytic tradition.
Under the influence of those works, logical form became a separate object of inquiry
and started being regarded as crucial to philosophical investigation.
The second part (Chaps. 4, 5, and 6) is the core of the book. Its aim is to show
that, contrary to what is commonly taken for granted, no unique notion of logical
form can play the two theoretical roles that are usually associated with the use of
the term ‘logical form’. At least two notions of logical form must be distinguished:
according to one of them, logical form is a matter of syntactic structure; according
to the other, logical form is a matter of truth conditions. As will be suggested, in
the sense of ‘logical form’ that matters to logic, logical form is determined by truth
conditions.

v
vi Preface

The third part (Chaps. 7, 8, and 9) develops the point made in the second part
and shows some of its implications. First it outlines an account of validity that
accords with the view that logical form is determined by truth conditions. Then
it shows that the distinction between two notions of logical form suggested in the
second part provides an interesting perspective on some debated issues concerning
quantification. The case of quantified sentences is highly representative, because the
same distinction may be applied in similar way to other important issues.
Most of the ideas expressed in the book have been presented and discussed at
talks, seminars, and graduate classes at the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf,
the University of Aberdeen, the University of Barcelona, the University of Bochum,
the University of the Caribbean, the University of L’Aquila, the Hebrew University
of Jerusalem, the University of Milan, the National Autonomous University of
Mexico, the University of Padua, the University of Parma, the University of Rome
III, and the University of Turin. Some parts of the book actually emerged as answers
to questions posed by members of those audiences. In particular, I would like
to thank Axel Barceló Aspeitia, Andrea Bianchi, Victor Cantero Flores, Stefano
Caputo, José Díez, Christopher Gauker, Mario Gómez Torrente, Héctor Hernández
Ortíz, Dan López de Sa, Genoveva Martí, Manolo Martínez, Elisa Paganini, Roberto
Parra Dorantes, Victor Peralta Del Riego, Luis Rosa, Sven Rosenkranz, Gil Sagi,
Giuliano Torrengo, Achille Varzi, and Elia Zardini.
I am also especially grateful to Guido Bonino, Pasquale Frascolla, Diego
Marconi, Massimo Mugnai, Carlotta Pavese, Mark Sainsbury, Marco Santambro-
gio, Daniele Sgaravatti, Ori Simchen, Alessandro Torza, Alberto Voltolini, Tim
Williamson, and to various anonymous referees for their comments on parts of
previous versions of the manuscript. There was much to be learned from their
helpful and accurate remarks, and I really hope that I have learned enough.
The second and the third part of the book are drawn from published papers,
with the due adjustments, refinements, and terminological changes. More specif-
ically, Chaps. 4 and 5 are based on “Two Notions of Logical Form,” Journal of
Philosophy (2016), which originates from elaborations of “Logical Form and Truth-
Conditions,” Theoria (2013). Some parts of Chap. 7 are derived from “Validity and
Interpretation,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy (2010). Chapter 8 is drawn
from “Quantification and Logical Form,” published in the volume Quantifiers,
Quantifiers, and Quantifiers, Springer (2015). Finally, Chap. 9 is drawn from
“Vagueness and Quantification,” Journal of Philosophical Logic (2016). I thank the
editors for their permission to use the materials of these papers, which are listed in
the final bibliography, respectively, as Iacona (2010c, 2013, 2015, 2016a,b).
The last acknowledgment is the most important. My gratitude goes to Camila
and Leonardo, for all the time that I took away from them while I was absorbed in
writing this book. Words can hardly describe the strange sensation of emptiness that
I feel for not having been there even when I was there.

Andrea Iacona
Contents

1 The Early History of Logical Form . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

1.1 Preamble . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.2 Aristotle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.3 The Stoics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.4 Logic in the Middle Ages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
1.5 Leibniz’s Dream. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
2 The Ideal of Logical Perfection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
2.1 Frege . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
2.2 Russell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
2.3 Wittgenstein . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
2.4 A Logically Perfect Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
2.5 The Old Conception of Logical Form . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
3 Formal Languages and Natural Languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
3.1 Tarski’s Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
3.2 Davidson’s Program . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
3.3 Montague Semantics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
3.4 The Current Conception of Logical Form . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
3.5 Two Open Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
4 Logical Form and Syntactic Structure. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
4.1 The Uniqueness Thesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
4.2 Intrinsicalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
4.3 LF . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
4.4 Semantic Structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
4.5 Relationality in Formal Explanation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
4.6 Further Clarifications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
5 Logical Form and Truth Conditions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
5.1 The Truth-Conditional Notion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
5.2 Truth Conditions and Propositions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
5.3 Adequate Formalization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58

vii
viii Contents

5.4 A Truth-Conditional Account . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61

5.5 Logical Form as a Property of Propositions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
5.6 Extrinsicalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
6 Logical Knowledge vs Knowledge of Logical Form . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
6.1 Preliminaries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
6.2 Logical Identity and Logical Distinctness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
6.3 Distinct Objects Must Be Denoted by Distinct Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
6.4 Distinct Names Must Denote Distinct Objects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
6.5 Logical Knowledge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
6.6 Linguistic Competence and Rationality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
7 Validity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
7.1 Interpretations of Arguments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
7.2 Validity and Formal Validity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
7.3 The Sorites . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
7.4 The Fallacy of Equivocation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
7.5 Context-Sensitive Arguments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
8 Quantified Sentences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
8.1 Two Questions About Quantified Sentences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
8.2 Quantifiers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
8.3 Meaning and Truth Conditions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
8.4 The Issue of First Order Definability. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
8.5 Two Kinds of Formal Variation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
8.6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
9 Further Issues Concerning Quantification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
9.1 Two Kinds of Indeterminacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
9.2 Precisifications of Quantifier Expressions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
9.3 First Order Definability Again. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
9.4 Logicality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120
9.5 Quantification Over Absolutely Everything . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
9.6 Unrestricted Quantification and Precision . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124

Afterword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
Chapter 1
The Early History of Logical Form

Abstract The term ‘logical form’ is generally used to denote a property of sen-
tences. The property denoted is called ‘logical’ because it is regarded as important
from the logical point of view, and it is called ‘form’ because it is taken to be
distinct from the specific semantic features that constitute their matter. As a first
approximation, we can say that one has a notion of logical form if one thinks
that there is such a property, independently of whether one deliberately employs
some expression that refers to that property. So it is reasonable to presume that
some understanding of logical form existed long before the term ‘logical form’ was
introduced in the philosophical lexicon. As this chapter will explain, the idea of
logical form is as old as logic itself. Its origin lies in the recognition of patterns of
inference that can be identified by schematizing some of the expressions that occur
in their instances.

1.1 Preamble

Logic developed in antiquity as an inquiry into the principles of correct reasoning.

The following definition, due to Aristotle, was intended to capture the essence of
correct reasoning:
Now a reasoning is an argument in which, certain things being laid down, something other
than these necessarily comes about through them.1

According to a widely shared reading of this passage, the distinctive feature of

correct reasoning is that it cannot take us from truth to falsity: if the things “being
laid down” are true, then the thing “other than these” must also be true. Logic is
traditionally understood as a theory of correct reasoning is this sense.
To employ more familiar terminology, two definitions will now be stated. The
first is the usual definition of argument:

1
Aristotle, Topics 100a25, in Aristotle (1958).

© Springer International Publishing AG 2018 1

A. Iacona, Logical Form, Synthese Library 393,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74154-3_1
2 1 The Early History of Logical Form

Definition 1.1.1 An argument consists of a set of sentences, the premises, and a

sentence, the conclusion, which is inferred from them.
To make explicit the inference from the premises to the conclusion, an argument
may be stated either vertically, as a sequence of sentences where a horizontal
line separates the premises from the conclusion, or horizontally, as a sequence of
sentences where a semicolon separates the premises from the conclusion. When
there is no need to specify the premises, an argument may simply be indicated as
I ˛, where  is a set of premises and ˛ is a conclusion.
The second definition is the classical definition of validity as necessary truth
preservation:
Definition 1.1.2 An argument I ˛ is valid if and only if it is impossible that all the
sentences in  are true and ˛ is false.
Although the meaning of ‘impossible’ can be elucidated in different ways, it
is commonly taken for granted that validity, just as other fundamental logical
properties and logical relations, is definable in terms of possibility. The right-hand
side of the biconditional above can also be regarded as a definiens of ‘ entails ˛’,
if it is assumed, as usual, that  entails ˛ if and only if I ˛ is valid.
Given Definitions 1.1.1 and 1.1.2, we can say that the main purpose of ancient
logicians was to provide a theory of valid arguments. The idea of logical form
emerges from the reflections guided by this purpose, since it originates in the
attempts to describe patterns of inference that characterize valid arguments.

1.2 Aristotle

Early attempts to attain generality in the description of patterns of inference

employed linguistic devices of various sorts. One option was to use common words,
such as ‘thing’. For example, in Plato’s Republic we read that “the same thing cannot
act or be acted upon in the same part or in relation to the same thing at the same
time in contrary ways”. Plato seems to say that it cannot be the case that a property
belongs and does not belong to the same object: whenever we find that the property
belongs and does not belong, it is because different objects are involved. Thus, if a
man stands still but moves his hands, it would be wrong to say that the man is at the
same time at rest and in motion. We should rather say that a part of him is at rest
while a part of him is in motion.2
Another option was to avoid explicit formulations of general principles and
use ordinary sentences directly as illustrations of such principles. For example, in
Aristotle’s Topics we find statements such as “if the honorable is pleasant, what is
not pleasant is not honorable”, where it is left to the reader to see the irrelevance

2
Plato (1991), 436b–436d.
1.2 Aristotle 3

of the specific content of the sentences adopted. Aristotle requires us to understand

that the use of ‘honorable’ and ‘pleasant’ is not essential to the point he is making,
as these terms could be replaced by other terms of the same grammatical category.3
However, as long as the expressive resources employed were drawn from
ordinary language, they could hardly suit the standards of clarity and rigour required
by a systematic study of valid arguments. The use of common words would easily
generate long and clumsy formulations that were hardly understandable without
additional explanations, and the use of particular sentences as examples would leave
unspecified how the general principle could be obtained by abstraction from them.
A significant progress was made by Aristotle in Prior Analytics, where he
outlined his theory of syllogism. A syllogism is a valid argument formed by
three sentences – two premises and one conclusion – each of which contains two
terms, expressions such as ‘man’, ‘animal’ or ‘mortal’. For example, the following
argument is a syllogism:
(1) Every animal is mortal
[A] (2) Every man is an animal
(3) Every man is mortal
[A] is valid, because it is impossible that (1) and (2) are true but (3) is false. Its
validity depends on the relation between the terms ‘man’ and ‘mortal’, which occur
in the conclusion, and the term ‘animal’, which occurs in the premises. The term
‘animal’ is called the “middle term”.4
The method of exposition adopted in Prior Analytics differs in one crucial
respect from Aristotle’s previous works and from those of his predecessors. In Prior
Analytics, letters are used to formulate argument schemas. To illustrate, consider the
following syllogism:
(4) Every mammal is an animal
[B] (5) Every whale is a mammal
(6) Every whale is an animal
[B] is structurally similar to [A], in that the relation that obtains in [B] between
‘mammal’, ‘animal’, and ‘whale’ is the same that obtains in [A] between ‘animal’,
‘mortal’, and ‘man’ in [A]. The validity of [A] and [B] can be explained in terms of
this relation. According to Aristotle, [A] and [B] are syllogisms of the same type, in
that they instantiate the same argument schema:
(7) Every A is B
[C] (8) Every C is A
(9) Every C is B

3
Aristotle (1958), 113b22.
4
Aristotle (1949), 41b36. This is not exactly the way Aristotle phrased a syllogism, but the
differences of formulation will be ignored here and in what follows.
4 1 The Early History of Logical Form

Here ‘A’ stands for the middle term. If we replace ‘A’ with ‘animal’, ‘B’ with
‘mortal’ and ‘C’ with ‘man’, we obtain [A]. Similarly, if we replace ‘A’ with
‘mammal’, ‘B’ with ‘animal’ and ‘C’ with ‘whale’ we obtain [B].
Aristotle provides a classification of syllogisms based on a distinction between
“figures”, which depend on the different relations in which the middle term stands
to the other two terms. [C] belongs to the first figure, which includes four schemas
where the middle term is subject to one term and predicate to the other. The second
figure includes four schemas where the middle term is predicate to both the other
terms. Finally, the third figure includes six schemas where the middle term is subject
to both the other terms. Thus Aristotle distinguished fourteen types of syllogisms,
within the three figures, which later came to be called “moods”.5
The use of letters proved very fruitful in the formulation of the theory. This
device, which appears for the first time in Prior Analytics, seems to be Aristotle’s
invention. Probably, the use of letters was suggested to Aristotle by a well
established practice in geometry, as is shown by the fact that letters are used to
name lines in Euclid’s Elements and in Aristotle’s own work.6

1.3 The Stoics

Stoic logic, initiated by Chrysippus, developed independently of Aristotelian logic,

pursuing different but equally important lines of investigation. While Aristotle
and his followers worked mainly on inference patterns that fall in the domain of
predicate logic, the Stoics focused on inference patterns that belong to propositional
logic. For example, the following argument is valid:
(10) If it is day, then it is light
[D] (11) It is day
(12) It is light
Its validity depends on the fact that (10) is a conditional, (11) is the antecedent of
(10), and (12) is the consequent of (10).
The Stoics also employed different devices to describe argument schemas. They
did not use letters but ordinal numbers to refer to arbitrary sentences. For example,
the argument schema instantiated by [D] was described as follows:
(13) If the first, then the second
[E] (14) The first
(15) The second

5
In reality, the moods traditionally classified are four. Aristotle’s theory did include a fourth figure,
even though, due to differences of formulation, he did not recognize it as a separate figure.
6
Euclid (2002), V, Aristotle (1934), 1132b.
1.3 The Stoics 5

The expressions ‘the first’ and ‘the second’ occurring in [E] stand for arbitrary
sentences. Thus, if we replace ‘the first’ with (11) and ‘the second’ with (12), we
obtain [D]. [E] is the valid propositional schema known as modus ponens.
Chrysippus recognized five argument schemas as basic. [E] is one of them. The
others are similar, in that they employ ordinal numbers for arbitrary sentences.
The five schemas have been handed down as “the indemonstrable moods”. This
terminology is explained at least in part by the project of constructing a deductive
system within which many demonstrable moods can be derived from a few primitive
patterns. Chrysippus did in fact elaborate a host of derivative moods from the five
basic schemas.7
Apart from the differences considered, the Aristotelian school and the Stoic
school agreed on the hypothesis that inference patterns may be expressed as
argument schemas. An argument schema is obtained from an argument by replacing
some of the expressions occurring in it with schematic expressions. Conversely,
an instance of the schema is an argument obtained by uniformly replacing the
schematic expressions with expressions of the appropriate syntactic category, where
‘uniformly’ means that each schematic expression is always replaced by the same
expression.
More generally, logic began with the study of paradigmatically valid arguments,
and developed from attempts to elucidate the structural properties of such argu-
ments. The thought that lies at the origin of logic may be summarized as follows.
Some arguments are clearly valid. If one observes these arguments, one will find that
they have distinctive structural features, and if one observes other arguments with
the same features, one will find that they are also valid. Since the structural features
in question can be identified as valid patterns of inference, the validity of many
arguments can be explained in terms of the validity of the patterns of inferences
they instantiate.
This original thought suggests a method of investigation: to get a theory of valid
arguments, one has to go through a systematic study of valid patterns of inference.
The most important contributions made by ancient logicians derive from the
employment of this method. More specifically, they derive from an understanding
of this method according to which valid patterns of inference are argument schemas
obtained from valid arguments by replacing expressions occurring in them with
schematic expressions.
The idea of logical form arises from the very same thought. Since arguments
are constituted by sentences, a structural description of an argument is ipso facto
a structural description of the sentences it contains. That is, if the structure of an
argument can be described as an argument schema, the structure of a sentence can
be described as a sentence schema. For example, on the assumption that the structure
of [A] is represented by [C], we get that the structure of (1) is represented by (7).
Similarly, on the assumption that the structure of [D] is represented by [E], we get
that the structure of (10) is represented by (13). The logical form of a sentence may
be understood as a structure so described.

7
A detailed exposition of the system is provided in Kneale (1962), pp. 158–176, and in Mates
(1973). A more recent work that focuses on issues related to logical form is Barnes (2009).
6 1 The Early History of Logical Form

There is a clear sense in which a sentence schema expresses a property that

deserves to be called ‘logical’, namely, that in which it plays an essential role in
the explanation of the validity of the arguments in which its instances may occur.
Similarly, there is a clear sense in which the property expressed deserves to be called
‘form’, namely, that in which the sentence schema, as a result of an abstraction, is
independent of the specific meaning of the expressions that occur in its instances.

1.4 Logic in the Middle Ages

Medieval logicians adopted the method of representation of logical form that

they found in ancient logic. The medieval distinction between “categorematic”
and “sincategorematic” expressions provided a way to make sense of sentence
schemas: categorematic expressions are meaningful expressions that can be used
as subjects or predicates, whereas syncategorematic expressions signify nothing
by themselves, in that they indicate how the former are combined. For example,
in the argument schema [C] some expressions that occur in [A] and [B], such as
‘animal’, are replaced by schematic letters, while others, such as ‘every’ remain
constant. Medieval logicians explained this difference by saying that the former
expressions are categorematic, while the latter are sincategorematic. So the idea
was that the logical form of a sentence is displayed by a sentence schema obtained
from the sentence by keeping fixed its syncategorematic expressions and replacing
its categorematic expressions with schematic letters.8
Although medieval logicians did not differ from ancient logicians with respect to
the method of representation of logical form, their attempts to elucidate the logical
properties of sentences produced significant advances. In particular, medieval
logicians drew attention to some interesting ways in which logical form may
differ from surface grammar. Of course, ancient logicians were also aware that
surface grammar is not an infallible guide to logical form. Aristotle provided
various examples of fallacious arguments that bear superficial resemblance to valid
arguments, and he knew that the premises and conclusions of syllogisms as he
phrased them could differ to some extent from the sentences used by ordinary
speakers. But in the Middle Ages the relation between logic and grammar became
object of more thorough and meticulous studies.
At least two important contributions deserve attention. The first emerges from
Abelard’s treatment of “categorical sentences”, that is, sentences whose main
constituents are a subject and a predicate. For example, the following sentence is
categorical:

8
According to Buridan (1976), 1.7.2, categorematic expressions provide the matter (materia) of
sentences, while syncategorematic expressions indicate their form (forma).
1.4 Logic in the Middle Ages 7

(16) Peter is a man

Abelard raises two crucial issues about categorical sentences. One concerns the
reducibility of non-categorical sentences to categorical sentences. Aristotle, in On
Interpretation, remarks that a verb such as ‘walks’, as it occurs in a sentence such
as ‘Socrates walks’, may be replaced by a phrase such as ‘is walking’. Following
that remark, Abelard takes categorical sentences as logically basic, and treats ‘is’
as a “copula”, that is, a link that joins the subject and the predicate. Obviously, he
recognizes that a statement can be made without the use of the verb ‘to be’, but he
says that other verbs can be paraphrased in the way indicated by Aristotle.9
The other issue concerns the existential import of ‘is’. Abelard claims that, when
‘is’ occurs in a categorical sentence, it does not involve a predication of existence.
From (16) we cannot infer that Peter exists. If ‘is’ did involve such predication, the
following sentence would be false instead of being true:
(17) The chimaera is imaginary
Abelard seems to suggest that (17) is misleading. Although it may appear that when
we utter (17) we are committed to the existence of a chimaera, in reality what we
say is that the soul of someone has an imagination of a chimaera.10
These two issues have been widely debated in the Middle Ages, although the
influence of the received Aristotelian view heavily limited the impact of Abelard’s
suggestions. In any case, two important thoughts seem to emerge from Abelard’s
remarks. One is that, at least in some cases, the logical form of a sentence is
expressed by a proper paraphrase of the sentence. The other is that, at least in some
cases, the logical form of a sentence is not what it appears. Both thoughts imply that
ordinary language may be misleading, so that a careful study of the words we use is
required for the purposes of logic.
The second important contribution on the relation between logical form and
surface grammar comes from a thesis advocated by Ockham, the thesis that there is
a mental language common to all human beings. For Ockham, the mental language
is a universal language that constitutes the ground of all spoken languages. This
grounding relation obtains because the expressions of any spoken language are
“subordinated” to “mental expressions”, that is, expressions that belong to the
mental language. In particular, spoken terms are subordinated to mental terms,
which may be called “concepts”. Mental terms, unlike spoken terms, signify things
in a natural way. That is, while the signification of terms in spoken languages is
purely conventional and can be changed by mutual agreement, the signification of
mental terms is established by nature, and cannot be changed at will.11
The mental language conjectured by Ockham is quite similar to a spoken
language. Its grammar is structurally analogous, and it includes expressions of some

9
Abelard (1956), pp. 161 and 123.
10
Abelard (1956), pp. 136–138, 162.
11
Ockham (1974), p. 7.
8 1 The Early History of Logical Form

main categories that feature in spoken languages, such as nouns, verbs, adverbs,
connectives, prepositions and so on. Therefore, “mental sentences” are composed
by mental expressions in essentially the same way in which spoken sentences are
composed by spoken expressions. Nonetheless, the mental language is simpler than
a spoken language in at least two respects. First, its syntax is simpler, in that it is free
from grammatical accidents – such as Latin’s declensions – that characterize spoken
languages but are irrelevant for the expression of thought. Second, its semantics is
simpler, as it involves a more straightforward relation between words and things.
This is suggested by Ockham’s account of synonymy and ambiguity. Two spoken
terms are synonymous if they are subordinated to the same mental term. Conversely,
a single spoken term is ambiguous if it is subordinated to more than one mental
term.12
This obviously leaves open the question of whether the mental language itself
involves some form of redundancy, synonymy or ambiguity. It is not entirely clear
how Ockham would have answered that question, and a great deal of modern
secondary literature has been devoted to clarify his position. But independently
of that question, it is undeniable that Ockham regarded the mental language as
more suitable for logic than any spoken language. Therefore, his view reinforces the
attitude towards ordinary language that emerges from Abelard’s remarks. One way
to substantiate the thought that logical form is not immediately manifest in surface
grammar is to say that logical form is properly expressed in the mental language.
The logical form of a given sentence is the form of a corresponding mental sentence
that may differ to some extent from that sentence.13

1.5 Leibniz’s Dream

The reflections considered in Sect. 1.4 remained ineffective for long time, and
did not give rise to further elaborations of the idea of logical form. In the Early
Modern Period, several logical works were produced, some of which provided
significant contributions to the development of logic. But none of them was
specifically concerned with logical form. The ancient idea of logical form, conveyed
by medieval logicians, remained unquestioned. In particular, a basic methodological
tenet that remained unquestioned is that logical form is represented by means of
expressions drawn from a natural language, such as Greek, Latin, or German. Of
course, it was widely believed that a natural language is not ready as it is to represent
logical form: some modifications were needed, such as the use of uncommon
grammatical constructions or the introduction of schematic expressions of some
kind. But the result of such modifications was still something very close to a natural
language.

12
Ockham (1974), pp. 44–47.
13
Spade and Panaccio (2011) provide more detailed accounts of Ockham’s position.
1.5 Leibniz’s Dream 9

A crucial turn occurred when an alternative line of thought started attracting the
attention of some logicians. According to that line of thought, the language we need
for the purposes of logic is neither a natural language nor a modified version of a
natural language, but an artificial language appropriately designed. Leibniz sketched
the project of such a language in De Arte Combinatoria (1666), and then elaborated
it in later works. His ultimate aim was to put reasoning on a firmer basis by reducing
it to a matter of calculation that many could grasp. The inspiration came from Lull’s
Ars Magna and Hobbes’ Computatio sive Logica. Lull claimed that a system of signs
could be defined in such a way that all complex ideas are expressed in terms of the
combination of a set of fundamental signs, and Hobbes suggested that reasoning
could be reduced to a species of calculation.14
Leibniz thought that we can identify a set of primitive concepts by means of
analysis, and list each possible combination of such concepts. Once this is done,
we can construct an artificial language in the following way. First we introduce an
alphabet of primitive signs – which presumably includes arithmetical symbols –
to designate primitive concepts. Then we define a set of complex signs in such a
way that, for any complex concept, there is one and only one complex sign. Thus
we get a correspondence between signs and concepts: for each concept, simple or
complex, there is one and only one sign. Leibniz called characteristica universalis
the language so constructed, as he used the word ‘character’ to designate its signs.
He trusted that such a language would represent the world in a perfect way. Although
the signs that stand for primitive concepts may be chosen arbitrarily, there must be
an analogy between their relations and the relations of the elements they signify,
so that the name of each complex thing is its definition and the key to all its
properties.15
Leibniz’s view seems to be that, since the characteristica universalis perfectly
mirrors the structure of the world, it is able to exhibit the logical form of sentences
better than any natural language. He thought that a philosophically constructed
grammar could make formal reasoning easy by providing the framework for
a calculus ratiocinator, a mechanical or quasi-mechanical method of drawing
conclusions. He prophesied that, when such a language will be defined, men of good
will desiring to settle a dispute on any subject will use their pens and calculate.16
The interest of Leibniz’s project lies in its underlying idea that a theory of
reasoning can be formulated as a deductive system based on an artificial language
that employs a symbolic apparatus drawn from mathematics. This idea indicated,
at least potentially, a coherent alternative to the traditional understanding of logical
form. If one could construct an artificial language that is suitable to exhibit the

14
Leibniz (1875–1890), Lull (1609), Hobbes (1656).
15
Leibniz (1875–1890), p. 184, Leibniz (1903), p. 30.
16
Leibniz (1875–1890), p. 200.
10 1 The Early History of Logical Form

logical properties of sentences by means of mathematical symbols, one could

provide a method of representation of logical form that substantially differs from
that adopted by ancient and medieval logicians.17
However, the line of thought initiated by Leibniz could hardly gain wide accep-
tance in the seventeenth century. Although he put forward insightful suggestions on
how to construct the deductive system, he never provided a detailed exposition of
the language. This is due, among other reasons, to the impossibility of drawing up an
alphabet of human thought as he conceived it, and to the lack of mathematical tools
required by the level of abstraction he desired. In absence of a sufficiently detailed
proposal, the traditional method of representation of logical form maintained its
supremacy for a long time. Its influence extended until the end of the nineteenth
century, when modern logic developed in close connection with mathematics.

17
This is not to say that Leibniz was the first or the only author of his time who postulated such
a close connection between logic and mathematics. As Mugnai (2010) explains, different authors,
before or independently of Leibniz, had made attempts to express logic in mathematical form or to
use logic to give some firm ground to mathematical proofs.
Chapter 2
The Ideal of Logical Perfection

Abstract The rise of modern logic had a deep impact on the philosophical
reflection on logical form. This chapter explains how logical form became a primary
topic of interest between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the
twentieth century. In particular, we will focus on Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein.
Their works contributed in different ways to shape a thought that moulded the
beginning the analytic tradition, the thought that the logical form of the sentences
of natural language can at least in principle be displayed by sentences of a logically
perfect language.

2.1 Frege

Frege’s Begriffsschrift (1879) is conventionally taken to mark the beginning of

modern logic. The title of this work, which literally means “concept-script” and
is often translated as “ideography”, is the name of a formal system constituted by
a formal language and a deductive apparatus in that language. Frege describes the
ideography as a partial realization of Leibniz’s dream. Its language is conceived as
a language “for pure thought” in the spirit of Leibniz’s characteristica universalis,
and its deductive apparatus is intended to provide a calculus ratiocinator in which
all valid reasoning is reduced to steps that can be checked mechanically.1
The language of the ideography is the first artificial language constructed in
a rigorous way. Its syntax is defined by fixing a set of elementary symbols and
specifying a set of rules for combining these symbols into complex expressions.
Its semantics is defined by means of rules that determine the meanings of all
formulas, that is, of all well-formed expressions. Schematic letters are used to
express generality, according to the custom that goes back to Aristotle, and they
occur within diagrams formed by horizontal lines, vertical lines, and concavities
that are used to express negation, the conditional, and the universal quantifier.

1
Frege (1879). Boole’s important contribution to the birth of modern logic, Boole (1847), will not
be considered here.

© Springer International Publishing AG 2018 11

A. Iacona, Logical Form, Synthese Library 393,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74154-3_2
12 2 The Ideal of Logical Perfection

According to Frege, this is the kind of artificial language that we need for the
purposes of logic. The language of the ideography is appropriate to express valid
patterns of reasoning, for it represents only what is essential to valid reasoning,
namely, “conceptual content”. The conceptual content of a sentence is roughly what
matters for its truth or falsity, and thus for the validity of the arguments in which it
may occur.2
The key of Frege’s method of formalization is the hypothesis that sentences
have function-argument structure. This hypothesis, which questions the ancient
method based on the grammatical division between subject and predicate, may be
illustrated by means of an analogy. Consider the successor function, represented by
the following equation:
(1) S.x/ D x C 1
Here ‘S’ indicates the successor function, and ‘x’ stands for any integer that may
occur as its argument. ‘S.x/’ is to be read as ‘the value of S for the argument x’. That
is, for any integer x, ‘S.x/’ denotes the successor of x. For example, ‘S.1/’ denotes
the number 2. Its denotation is the result of the combination of the denotation of ‘S’
with the denotation of ‘1’. Frege suggests that something similar holds for sentences
of natural language. Consider the following:
(2) Aristotle is rich
For Frege, (2) is analogous to ‘S.1/’: the name ‘Aristotle’ denotes Aristotle, and
the predicate ‘rich’ denotes a function that applies to Aristotle. More precisely, on
the assumption that there are two truth values, call them 1 and 0, ‘rich’ denotes
a function Rich such that, for any x, Rich.x/ D 1 if x is rich, and Rich.x/ D 0
otherwise. So the structure of (2) is the following:
(3) Rich(Aristotle)
The truth value of (2), which Frege identifies with the denotation of (2), is the result
of the combination of the denotation of ‘Aristotle’ and the denotation of ‘rich’, for
it is the value that Rich takes for Aristotle as argument.3
To fully grasp the hypothesis that sentences have function-argument structure, it
must be taken into account that a function may have more than one argument. For
example, consider the addition function, represented by the following equation:
(4) A.x; y/ D x C y
Here ‘A’ indicates the addition function, while ‘x’ and ‘y’ stand for any two integers
that may occur as its arguments. For any ordered pair of integers hx; yi, ‘A.x; y/’
denotes the sum of x and y. Now consider the following sentence:

2
In later works, Frege talks of the “thought” expressed by a sentence as the primary bearer of its
truth or falsity, see Frege (1918).
3
The view that predicates denote functions from object to truth values is not explicitly stated in
Begriffsschrift, but becomes clear in Frege (1891).
2.1 Frege 13

(5) Aristotle admires Plato

According to Frege, the structure of (5) is the following:
(6) Admire(Aristotle, Plato)
Here Admire is a binary function from ordered pairs of objects to truth values, that
is, a function such that, for any pair hx; yi, Admire.x; y/ D 1 if x admires y, and
Admire.x; y/ D 0 otherwise. Note that the same structure can be ascribed to the
following sentence:
(7) Plato is admired by Aristotle
Although Frege recognizes that there may be a rhetorical difference between (5) and
(7), he takes their conceptual content to be the same. This example makes clear how
Frege differs from his predecessors. If (5) is analysed in terms of subject-predicate
structure, the distinction to be drawn is between ‘Aristotle’ and ‘admires Plato’.
Similarly, in (7) the distinction to be drawn is between ‘Plato’ and ‘is admired by
Aristotle’. So we end up with two different subject-predicate sentences, each with a
complex monadic predicate.
Frege’s method of formalization is based on the hypothesis that sentences have
function-argument structure in the sense that the formulas assigned to sentences are
intended to provide a formal representation of that structure. For example, when
one formalizes an argument in which (2) occurs, one will assign to (2) a formula
that provides a formal representation of its structure as stated in (3). Similarly, when
one formalizes an argument in which (5), or (7), occurs, one will assign to (5), or (7),
a formula that provides a formal representation of its structure as stated in (6). The
formula assigned expresses the logical form of the sentence, so it may be used to
express the pattern of reasoning instantiated by the argument in which the sentence
occurs.
The most important progress due to Frege’s method of formalization concerns the
analysis of quantified sentences, that is, sentences that contain quantifier expressions
such as ‘all’, ‘every’, ‘some’ or ‘at least one’. Consider the following sentence:
(8) Everything is material
In the tradition that goes back to Aristotle’s syllogistic, ‘everything’ is assumed to
be a term. But Frege questions this assumption. If ‘material’ denotes a function
Material such that, for any x, Material.x/ D 1 if x is material, and Material.x/ D
0 otherwise, there is no obvious way to treat ‘everything’ as a term for some
object to which the function can apply. Frege claims instead that the denotation of
‘everything’ is itself a function. If we call first-level functions the functions whose
arguments are objects and second-level functions the functions whose arguments
are first-level functions, Frege’s claim is that ‘everything’ denotes a second-level
function whose values are 1 and 0. More precisely, it denotes a second-level
function Everything such that, for every first-level function F, Everything. F/ D 1
if F.x/ D 1 for every x, and Everything. F/ D 0 otherwise. So the structure of (8)
is the following:
14 2 The Ideal of Logical Perfection

(9) Everything.Material/
In other terms, what is said by using (8) is that the predicate ‘material’ has the
property of being true of every object. To express this, Frege employs variables as
follows:
(10) For every x, x is material
Therefore, (8) can be formalized by using the universal quantifier and the variable
‘x’. The same goes for the following sentence:
(11) All things are material
In accordance with the usual convention, (8) and (11) are assumed to be synony-
mous.
To grasp the potential of Frege’s analysis, at least two familiar cases must be
considered. The first is that in which universal quantification is explicitly restricted
by a predicate. Consider the following sentence:
(12) All philosophers are rich
What (12) says is that ‘richs’ has the property of being true of every philosopher,
that is of every object of which ‘philosopher’ is true. Accordingly, (12) can be
paraphrased as follows:
(13) For every x, if x is a philosopher, then x is rich
The same goes for the following sentence:
(14) Every philosopher is rich
Again, in accordance with the usual convention, (12) and (14) are assumed to be
synonymous.
The second case is that in which the quantification is existential. Consider the
following sentence:
(15) Something is material
What (15) says is that the predicate ‘material’ has the property of being true of
some object. This is to say that, for some x, x is material, which is equivalent to
what follows:
(16) It is not the case that, for every x, it is not the case that x is material
So (15) can be formalized by using the universal quantifier and negation. Similar
considerations hold for existentially quantified sentences such as
(17) Some philosopher is rich
This sentence can be phrased as follows:
(18) It is not the case that, for every x, if x is a philosopher, then it is not the case
that x is rich
2.1 Frege 15

The same goes for the sentence obtained from (17) by replacing ‘some’ with ‘at
least one’. In accordance with the usual convention, ‘some’ and ‘at least one’ are
assumed to be synonymous.
The notation invented by Frege can provide a clear formal representation of a
wide class of quantified sentences. This class includes the sentences traditionally
studied in Aristotelian logic, such as (12) or (17), and a variety of more complex
sentences whose logical properties had not been properly understood before. For
example, consider the following:
(19) Every philosopher has read some old book
On Frege’s account, (19) can be paraphrased as follows:
(20) For every x, if x is a philosopher, then for some y such that y is a book and y is
old, x has read y
This account makes clear that ‘has read some old book’ has quantificational
structure. The traditional method is unable to display such structure, as (19) turns
out to be a sentence of the form ‘Every A is B’. Consequently, it is unable to explain
why (19) entails the following sentence:
(21) Every philosopher has read some book
This entailment is easily explained if (21) is paraphrased as follows:
(22) For every x, if x is a philosopher, then for some y such that y is a book, x has
read y
More generally, any complex quantified sentence in which universal or existential
quantification occurs within some predicate can adequately be represented in the
language of the ideography. The innovative force of the ideography crucially
depends on this capacity.4
The details of Frege’s notation do not concern us here. The cumbersome
diagrams it requires made it so hard to write that nobody else ever adopted it.
What matters for our purposes is that Frege’s method of formalization entails that
logical form may substantially differ from surface grammar. For example, although
(12) and (2) are superficially similar, they have different logical forms. The logical
form of a sentence of natural language can adequately be represented only by a
sentence of an ideal formal language. In such a language, sentences exhibit function-
argument structures that differ from the grammatical structures of the sentences of
natural language. For Frege, the understanding of this difference is a philosophical
advancement of primary importance:
If it is one of the tasks of philosophy to break the domination of the word over the human
spirit by laying bare the misconceptions that through the use of language often almost
unavoidably arise concerning the relations between concepts and by freeing thought from

4
Pietroski (2009), pp. 10–23, explains how Frege’s notation can solve some problematic cases that
emerged in connection with previous attempts.
16 2 The Ideal of Logical Perfection

that with which only the means of expression of ordinary language, constituted as they are,
saddle it, then my ideography, further developed for these purposes, can become a useful
tool for the philosopher.5

2.2 Russell

The attitude towards natural language that emerges from Russell’s article On
Denoting (1905) is essentially the same as Frege’s Begriffsschrift. Russell agrees
with Frege on the assumption that logical form may substantially differ from surface
grammar, and adopts the same kind of logical apparatus to elucidate that difference.
The main point on which he diverges from Frege concerns the analysis of a specific
class of expressions, definite descriptions. A definite description is an expression
that purports to refer to a particular object by stating a condition that is taken to
hold uniquely of that object. For example, ‘the author of Waverley’ is a definite
description. Its denotation is Walter Scott, the person that uniquely satisfies the
condition of being author of Waverley.6
Frege seems to think that, from a logical point of view, definite descriptions
do not significantly differ from other expressions that purport to refer to particular
objects, such as names. The semantic role of all these expressions, which may be
called singular terms, is to denote objects to which predicates can apply. Consider
the following sentence:
(23) The author of Waverley is a man
On Frege’s account, ‘the author of Waverley’ is a singular term that denotes an
individual, Scott, and ‘man’ is a predicate that applies to that individual. Russell
questions this account: a definite description is not a genuine singular term, in that it
hides a more complex construction involving quantification. More precisely, Russell
thinks that (23) is correctly paraphrased as follows:
(24) For some x, x is author of Waverley, and for every y, if y is author of Waverley
then y D x, and x is a man
Since (24) contains no singular term that refers to Scott, ‘the author of Waverley’
is a singular term only superficially. In Russell’s words, definite descriptions do not
have meaning in isolation. They should not be regarded as “standing for genuine
constituents of the propositions in whose verbal expressions they occur”.7
Russell argues for his theory by drawing attention to the problems that seem
to arise if definite descriptions are treated as genuine singular terms. In particular,
he shows that at least four puzzles can be solved on the basis of the paraphrase

5
Frege (1879), p. 7.
6
Russell (1905).
7
Russell (1905), p. 482.
2.2 Russell 17

he suggests. The first puzzle is how can a sentence be meaningful if it contains

an empty definite description, that is, a definite description that does not denote
anything. Consider the following sentence:
(25) The present King of France is bald
(25) seems meaningful, just like (23). But it cannot be the case that (25) is
meaningful in virtue of picking out some particular individual and ascribing a
property to that individual, for ‘the present King of France’, unlike ‘the author
of Waverley’, does not denote any particular individual. So, unless we are willing
to deny that (25) is meaningful, which is highly implausible, some alternative
explanation must be provided. One might be tempted to say that ‘the present King
of France’ differs from ‘the author of Waverley’ only in that denotes a different kind
of object. More specifically, one might claim that empty definite descriptions denote
nonexistent objects, or simply stipulate that they denote the empty set. But no such
move seems promising to Russell. His view is that (25) is correctly paraphrased as
follows:
(26) For some x, x is King of France, and for every y, if y is King of France, then
y D x, and x is bald
Thus, (23) and (25) are meaningful in exactly the same way, although they have
different truth values. Since there is no King of France at present, the first condition
stated in (26) is not satisfied, so (25) is false.8
The second puzzle is how can we make true negative existential claims by
using sentences that contain empty definite descriptions. Consider the following
sentence:
(27) The present King of France does not exist
Since ‘the present King of France’ does not denote any particular individual, (27)
is intuitively true. But if ‘the present King of France’ were a genuine singular
term, (27) would say that the denotation of ‘the present King of France’ does
not exist, which seems inconsistent. Note that it would not suffice to hold that
existence, as opposed to “being” or “subsistence”, implies concreteness, and that
(27) consistently denies that a certain abstract object exists. If A is identical to B,
there is no such thing as the difference between A and B, so the difference between
A and B does not subsist. But again, if A is identical to B, ‘the difference between
A and B’ lacks denotation. Russell’s solution is that (27) is correctly paraphrased as
follows:
(28) It is not the case that for some x, x is King of France, and for every y, if y is
King of France, then y D x.9

8
Russell (1905), pp. 482–484.
9
Russell (1905), pp. 485–490.
18 2 The Ideal of Logical Perfection

The third puzzle, known as Frege’s puzzle, is how can it be the case that an
identity statement is both true and informative. Consider the following sentence:
(29) Scott is the author of Waverley
As far as we know, (29) is true. Moreover, (29) seems informative, given that
someone might learn something new upon reading it. But if it is assumed that (29)
contains two genuine singular terms which refer to the same person, Scott, then the
most plausible explanation is that the two expressions have some kind of meaning
over and above its referent, as suggested by Frege. Otherwise it must be conceded
that what is said is simply that Scott is identical to himself, which is trivial. Russell
has a different explanation: (29) does not really express an identity because ‘the
author of Waverley’ is not really a singular term. His paraphrase goes as follows:
(30) For some x, x is author of Wawerley, and for every y, if y is author of Wawerley,
then y D x, and x is the same as Scott.
Clearly, we learn something when we get to know that (30) is true.10
The fourth puzzle, which is closely related to the third, concerns substitutivity.
On the assumption that a singular term is meaningful in virtue of its denoting
role, one may expect that any two singular terms that have the same reference are
semantically equivalent: we could take any sentence containing one of them and
substitute it with the other, without changing the truth value of the sentence. But
consider the following sentences:
(31) George IV wants to know whether Scott is the author of Waverley
(32) George IV wants to know whether Scott is Scott
It may be the case that (31) is true but (32) is false, which means that ‘Scott’ and ‘the
author of Waverley’ are not substitutable salva veritate. Russell’s solution, again,
rests on his claim that ‘the author of Waverley’ is not a genuine singular term.
According to him, the desire ascribed to George IV in (31) is to know whether
(30) is true. So it is a different desire from that ascribed to George IV in (32).11
The implications of Russell’s theory of descriptions go far beyond the four
puzzles considered. According to this theory, the logical properties of a sentence
that contains a definite description are not immediately visible, but they can be
elucidated if the sentence is paraphrased in the appropriate way. For example, (23)
is misleading, in that it may appear that ‘the author of Waverley’ is a genuine
singular term. The correct reading of ‘the author of Waverley’ becomes clear in
(24). So the underlying idea is that the logical properties of a sentence can be
revealed by an appropriate paraphrase of the sentence. This idea, which is the core
of Russell’s conception of analysis, opens a wide-ranging perspective. If the method
of paraphrase can fruitfully be applied to sentences containing definite descriptions,

10
Russell (1905), p. 492. Frege (1892) states the puzzle and draws a distinction between sense and
reference.
11
Russell (1905), pp. 485–489.
2.3 Wittgenstein 19

it is natural to think that it can be extended to other kinds of sentences. Nothing

prevents one from thinking that other kinds of sentences may be misleading in
similar ways.
After On denoting, Russell worked in this direction, trying to elucidate the role of
the method of paraphrase within a broader theoretical framework. For some years,
he described analysis as a process whereby one reconstructs complex notions in
terms of simpler ones. The process would eventually result in a language whose
vocabulary includes only logical symbols, names standing for simple particulars and
predicates standing for properties or relations. In such a logically ideal language,
the simplest kind of sentence would be an “atomic sentence”, that is, a sentence
containing a single predicate and an appropriate number of names. The truth or
falsity of an atomic sentence would depend entirely on a corresponding “atomic
fact”, which consists either of a simple particular having a property, or of a number
of simple particulars standing in a relation. The other sentences of the language
would be formed either by combining atomic sentences using truth-functional
connectives, or by replacing constituents of a simpler sentence by variables and
prefixing a universal or existential quantifier.12
The foregone outcome of this line of thought is that facts are represented
perspicuously only in a language – a logically ideal language – that radically differs
from any natural language, for it is plausible that no word of any natural language
can belong to such a language. This turns out clear if one thinks about ordinary
names, such as ‘Scott’. On the assumption that the only genuine singular terms are
symbols that denote simple particulars – the names of a logically ideal language –
we get that ordinary names are not genuine singular terms. Russell suggested that
every apparent name not occurring at the end of analysis is equivalent in meaning
to some definite description, so it can be paraphrased away.13

2.3 Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) outlines a picture of the

relation between language and reality that has much in common with that advanced
by Russell. Wittgenstein claims that the world is ultimately constituted by a plurality
of simple facts, “atomic facts”, and that language describes the world by means of a
plurality of simple sentences, “elementary sentences”, which represent such facts.14
In the Tractatus, atomic facts are defined as combinations of simple objects, and
elementary sentences are defined as concatenations of simple expressions called
“names”. Each elementary sentence represents a “state of affairs” – a possible

12
Russell used ‘proposition’ instead of ‘sentence’. But here it will be assumed that the two terms
are not synonymous.
13
Russell (1998) advances this line of thought.
14
Wittgenstein (1992). Like Russell, Wittgenstein uses ‘proposition’ instead of ‘sentence’.
20 2 The Ideal of Logical Perfection

combination of simple objects – because the names in the sentence denote simple
objects, and the way they are concatenated exhibits a way in which those objects
can be combined. In virtue of this representation, each elementary sentence asserts
the existence of an atomic fact, so it is true if and only if the fact exists, that is, if
and only if the objects denoted by its names are combined in the way exhibited.15
A central thesis of the Tractatus is that elementary sentences are “pictures” of
states of affairs. A picture is understood as a combination of elements, each of which
stands for some thing. The fact that the elements of the picture are combined in a
certain way represents that certain things are combined in that way. Wittgenstein
calls “structure” the way in which the elements of a picture are combined, and calls
“pictorial form” the possibility of the structure. Something possesses the pictorial
form required to depict a given situation if it is possible to arrange its elements in a
way that mirrors the relation between the constituents of that situation. The pictorial
form is the possibility of the arrangement, something that must be shared by picture
and situation. Therefore, an elementary sentence is a picture of a state of affairs
insofar as it shares with that state of affairs a pictorial form, which consists in the
possibility of a certain combination of simple objects exhibited by a concatenation
of names.16
The pictorial account of representation can be extended to all sentences. Wittgen-
stein claims that every non-elementary sentence has a unique analysis that reveals
it to be a truth function of elementary sentences. So it turns out that every sentence
is a truth function of elementary sentences: every complex sentence is a truth
function of the elementary sentences it contains, and every elementary sentence
is a truth function of itself. A truth function of elementary sentences, according to
Wittgenstein, is made true or false by a combination of states of affairs, namely, the
states of affairs pictured by the elementary sentences that feature as its arguments.
Therefore, every sentence represents reality in virtue of its being constituted by
sentences each of which is a picture of some state of affairs according to some form
of representation.17
In order to elucidate the kind of pictorial form involved in language, Wittgenstein
asks us to think about what all pictorial forms have in common, the possibility of
the structure in the most abstract sense. To characterize this sense, he uses the term
‘logical form’:
What every picture, of whatever form, must have in common with reality in order to be able
to represent it at all – rightly or falsely – is the logical form, that is, the form of reality.18

Wittgenstein’s idea is that in order for a picture to represent a situation, the picture
must have the same multiplicity as the situation, that is, the same number of
elements and the same combinatorial possibilities. Thus, whatever has pictorial form

15
Wittgenstein (1992), pp. 31–35, 89.
16
Wittgenstein (1992), pp. 39–41.
17
Wittgenstein (1992). p. 103 and ff.
18
Wittgenstein (1992), p. 41.
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
the condition of affairs, directly consequent on Henry the Eighth’s
mere abrogation of the non-scriptural impediments to marriage.
Condemning strongly the excessive liberty of separation, which the
ecclesiastical tribunals had for generations afforded to society, they
were no less unanimous in condemning the doctrine of the absolute
indissolubility of wedlock. If it was wrong on the one hand to allow
husbands and wives the liberty of separating on frivolous pretexts,
and to provide the fortress of marriage with numerous gates of
egress, whose double locks obeyed the pass-keys of perjury and
corruption; it was on the other hand no less hurtful to society and
impious to God, to constrain a pair of human creatures, in the name
of religion, to persevere in an association, that could not accomplish
the highest purposes of matrimony, and debarred the ill-assorted
couple from the serene and wholesome pleasures of Christian life.
These were the views of the Anglican leaders; views that found
precise and memorable expression in the famous code of ordinances
(the Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum) prepared for the
reformation of our ecclesiastical laws by Edward the Sixth’s thirty-
two commissioners for that purpose, who, doing away with the
minor divorce (a mensâ et thoro), decided that the divorce a vinculo
matrimonii should be the only kind of matrimonial severance known
to English law, and that it should be granted, (1) in cases of extreme
conjugal faithlessness; (2) in cases where a husband, not guilty of
deserting his wife, had been for several years absent from her, under
circumstances which justified her in concluding that he was dead;
(3) and in cases of such violent hatred as rendered it in the highest
degree improbable, that the husband and wife would survive their
animosities and again love one another; it being expressly directed
that this last provision should not be construed as affecting spouses
whose quarrels, though frequent and distressing, were neither
incessant nor in the highest degree vehement. Had Edward the Sixth
lived only a little longer these ordinances would have become the
law of the land;—law which, though suppressed on the accession of
Mary Tudor, would have been revived on the rise of Elizabeth, and
handed down to the present time.
Of course, the Anglican reformers conceived themselves to be
justified in disregarding the limitation, which our version of the
Scriptures assigns to liberty of divorce. Whilst some of them were of
opinion that this limitation was applicable only to the Jews, others
held that, if a wrong rendering of a particular word were replaced by
its true English equivalent, Scripture would be found to sanction the
dissolution of marriages, whose infelicity was due to nothing more
than some serious mental or moral disability. Of course, also, the
Commissioners’ recommendations were a compromise between the
requirements of bold reformers who wished for a much larger, and of
timid reformers, who would have preferred a smaller, measure of
freedom of divorce. Had Martin Bucer been on the Commission, as
he certainly would have been but for his recent death, it cannot be
questioned that the Commissioners would have ordained a far
greater liberty of dissolving unhappy marriages. It was Bucer’s
opinion (vide his Judgment touching Divorce, addressed to Edward
the Sixth) that every marriage should be dissolved in which the
husband and wife did not ‘love one another to the height of
dearness,’ or the husband could not rightly govern and cherish the
wife, or the wife was flagrantly disobedient and unprofitable to her
lord, or either party ‘defrauded the other of conjugal benevolence,’—
views which commended themselves so cordially to John Milton, that
he produced a new edition of Bucer’s tract, in the middle of the
seventeenth century.
Whilst showing how cordially he concurred in Martin Bucer’s
conclusions, John Milton’s four works on divorce—the Doctrine and
Discipline of Divorce, the Tetrachordon, the Colasterion, and the new
edition of Bucer’s Judgment touching Divorce—show also how far he
went beyond the sixteenth-century divine, in declaring every man’s
right to secede from an uncongenial partner, and to associate
himself with an acceptable helpmate. No libertine, for the
gratification of vile desire, ever demanded greater license of re-
marriage than Milton, in the name of religion, demanded for
Christian men, for their spiritual advantage.
The old canon law, which insisted on the indissolubility of true
marriages, and, even in cases of adultery, afforded no larger divorce
than the separation from board and bed, having been revived at the
close of Elizabeth’s reign, our ancestors lived for several generations
under a matrimonial law of unprecedented rigour and narrowness,
that in its results demonstrated the sagacity and prudence of Edward
the Sixth’s Commissioners. Had the Commissioners’ proposals
become law, England would have escaped much of the profligacy
that, after rendering her seventeenth century proverbial for domestic
libertinism, was less remarkable in the eighteenth century, only
because the usage of successive ages had rendered society
comparatively indifferent to it. Whilst no student of our social history
can question that throughout those centuries the English home
suffered severely from the excessive stringency of the matrimonial
law, every student of literature is cognizant of the stream of written
protests against the harshness and unyielding rigour of that law,
from Elizabeth to Victoria. That Milton shocked the lighter people of
his time by his assaults on the limitations of liberty of divorce is not
to be conceived. That he did not by his writings against those
restrictions offend the more precise and God-fearing of his
contemporaries, appears from the regard in which they held him as
a religious poet, after his descent to darkness and evil days. So far
as concerns freedom of divorce, the Free Contract party of William
Godwin’s epoch required nothing that Milton would not have
granted, and urged little that Bucer would have hesitated to
approve.
In 1813 (the year in which the anti-matrimonial note of Queen Mab
was written), Shelley regarded marriage with the eyes and by the
lights of eighteenth-century writers, who decried the institution as
the source of human misery and depravation. The evils, that caused
these writers to distinguish themselves in the long war against
wedlock, were no imaginary grievances. On the contrary, they were
evils which the Anglican reformers foresaw would result from a too
stringent marriage-law, and for which they wished to provide by
their proposals for divorce. They were evils crying aloud for remedy
throughout the country. Almost every parish of the land had a
miserably mated couple, whose union should have been terminated
by the law. For the mischief there was no remedy but the old
cumbrous and costly proceedings for obtaining the greater divorce,—
i.e. the suit in the first instance in the Ecclesiastical Court for the
minor divorce from board and bed, and the subsequent suit for the
parliamentary severance of the bond of marriage:—a process that,
making divorce the luxury of the rich, denied it altogether to the
poor. In the first thirty-seven years of the present century, only
seventy suitors (less than two a-year) obtained special parliamentary
enactments for their liberation from wretched wedlock. In the last
thirty-seven years of the previous century, such divorces were much
less frequent. The rich alone could afford to pay for the
parliamentary relief. For the poor, and for the people raised only a
few degrees above poverty, there was no divorce. Under these
circumstances, whilst almost every rural village had a Stephen
Blackpool, there necessarily arose vehement discontent not only with
the defective marriage-law, but with marriage itself. Nothing was
said against the obstacles to entering marriage; but everywhere an
outcry was heard against the impossibility of getting out of marriage.
Amongst the populace, social sentiment permitted a man in many
cases to be the physician of his own trouble, and after deserting his
lawful wife, to live with a woman who was not his wife. The general
grievance being the difficulty of escape from uncongenial wedlock,
the Radical writers dealt with this grievance, and usually forbore to
criticise the impediments to marriage, of which no large number of
people complained.
Taking his views from these writers, it was natural for the youthful
Shelley to think and write chiefly of the evils arising from the law,
which forbade a man to leave his wife and straightway attach
himself to another woman. In constructing the note to Queen Mab,
it was enough for him to put together, with no common smartness
and one or two original touches, the remarks of previous writers on
the troubles resulting from the permanence of matrimonial
obligations. Contemning marriage from his boyhood, after the
fashion of his teachers, he was eloquent about the difficulty of
escaping from it. Apart from a statement of the grand principle that
‘love was free,’ and that every person should be at liberty to marry
whomsoever he pleased, he does not seem to have troubled himself
about the divers impediments to the first entrance into the
unendurable bondage, before he went to Geneva. It was otherwise
on his return from the residence in Switzerland with Byron.
The startling discovery, that they were believed to be living in
incestuous intimacy with the same two women, caused each of the
poets to ponder the nature of the crime with which rumour charged
them. Stirring and fascinating Byron’s imagination, the scandal bore
fruit in Manfred and Cain. Stimulating and holding Shelley’s fancy, it
resulted in Laon and Cythna. It is interesting to observe how
differently the two poets dealt with the same repulsive subject. For
the timid sceptic and half-hearted innovator, who to the last was (as
Shelley put the case to his wife at Pisa) ‘little better than a Christian,’
it was enough to point to the crime in Manfred, as one of the
hideous possibilities of vicious desire,—as a monstrous and appalling
extravagance of wickedness, too hideous to be spoken of precisely;
as an offence so loathsome and revolting, that poetry could refer to
it only by vague hints and obscure suggestions. In Cain he could
refer with cynical mockery to times when, if Genesis were true,
brothers necessarily mated with their sisters, for the accomplishment
of the Creator’s purpose;—mockery, that was not so much a
palliation of the iniquity, as an assault on the credibility of the Book
which seemed to sanction the wickedness.
Shelley handled the subject in a very different way. It was natural for
the thorough and unwavering disbeliever, who had formerly denied
and still questioned the existence of the Deity, and no less natural
for the fervid political theorist, who regarded all human governments
and their subordinate institutions as the mere contrivances of
tyranny for the subjugation and debasement of the peoples, to come
to the conclusion that the impediments to matrimony had no other
foundation, and were in no degree more entitled to the respect of
reasonable men, than the impediments to escape from wedlock.
Absolutely ignorant of the social conditions from which the
hindrances to marriage had arisen, and no less ignorant of the
physical and social reasons for regarding most of them as conducive
to domestic purity, and some of them as needful for preserving the
human species from mental and bodily disease and deterioration,
Shelley was only carrying certain of his principles to certain of their
extreme logical conclusions, when he closed his consideration of the
impediments to marriage, by regarding them as so many capricious
and pernicious interferences with natural forces, which, if they were
left to take their own course, without let or hindrance from
presumptuous, and arrogant, and meddlesome mortals, would in
due course bring the whole human race under the dominion of
universal love;—a dominion under which all mankind for countless
ages would have enjoyed unqualified felicity, had it not been for the
disastrous activity of tyrants and priests.
It was not in Shelley to distinguish between the various
impediments, and discover grounds for deciding that some of them
should be retained, whilst others might be abolished. To Shelley, a
man’s right to marry his deceased wife’s sister was not more obvious
than a man’s right to marry his own sister. Regarded by the new
light, arising from the larger consideration of the matrimonial law, to
which he had been incited by the Genevese scandal, the artificial
hindrances to egress from matrimony were not more demoralizing
than the artificial hindrances to ingress into matrimony. For human
happiness marriage must be relieved of the impediments on its one
side, no less than of the hindrances on its other side. Love must be
restored to Freedom:—to freedom so perfect that a young man
would be free to marry his own sister, without the intervention of
priest or the control of lawyer; and after wearying of her be free to
marry her younger sister under circumstances in no way affecting his
freedom in the future. This discovery was the completion of Shelley’s
social philosophy in respect to the intercourse of the sexes;—the
philosophy that is, in the opinion of some of his admirers, a part of
his title to be regarded as a man, who, under auspicious
circumstances, ‘might have been the Saviour of the World!’
Having made this important discovery after his return from Geneva,
Shelley determined to communicate it to the world in a poem, which
should teach its readers that incest was nothing but an imaginary
sin; that ceasing to have the show of sin, on being rightly regarded,
it was seen to be compatible with the highest virtue; that it was one
of the great ‘multitude of artificial vices,’ to whose existence the
fewness of ‘real virtues’ was referable; that instead of being
loathsome, nauseous, hideous, unutterably repulsive and sinful, the
conjugal union of a brother and sister under the Free Contract was
permissible in the eyes of philosophic moralists, and compatible with
moral purity and the finest delicacy in the brother and sister; that
besides being altogether permissible, and in no degree
reprehensible, this conjugal union was a virtuous relation, in which
brothers and sisters would often stand towards one another in a
rightly-constituted society. To put this social doctrine before the
world, in the form most likely to commend it to the feelings of
youthful readers, and induce them to further every movement for a
state of things, in which brothers and sisters could so live together
without offending their neighbours, Shelley wrote Laon and Cythna:
or, The Revolution of the Golden City: a Vision of the Nineteenth
Century. In the Stanza of Spenser.
Brother and sister of the same parents, Laon and Cythna, the hero
and heroine of the poem, are beings endowed with all the virtues
conceivable in perfect human nature, and are still enjoying the
scenes of their childhood in Argolis, when they pass from the state
of mutual affection, that is desirable in a brother of some sixteen or
eighteen summers and a sister (ætat. 12), to a state of mutual love
that is desirable only between young people who can in the ordinary
course of things marry one another. What follows from this state of
things is indicated with consummate delicacy by the poet, too wary
and artful to shock his readers in the second canto by clear
disclosures, that might determine them to refrain from perusing any
later canto of a long poem. Laon and Cythna are suddenly torn
asunder by the agents of the tyrant, who figures in the poem as a
type of European monarchs in the nineteenth century, and soon
after their severance Cythna gives birth to the lovely child who owes
her life to Laon. In a later passage of the narrative, after he has
been released from the cage on the column’s top, and she, after
divers painful experiences, has been proclaimed the prophetess and
supreme directress of the revolutionists of the Golden City, Laon and
Cythna come together under circumstances, which prevent them
from recognizing one another in the first hour of their reunion. Laon
is still uncertain whether she is really his sister, or only bears a
strong resemblance to her, when he hears Cythna harangue the
Golden City revolutionists in these words:—
‘My brethren, we are free! the plains and mountains,
The grey sea shore, the forests and the fountains,
Are haunts of happiest dwellers;—man and woman,
Their common bondage burst, may freely borrow
From lawless love a solace for their sorrow;
For oft we still must weep, since we are human.
A stormy night’s serenest morrow,
Whose showers are pity’s gentle tears,
Whose clouds are smiles of those that die
Like infants without hopes or fears,
And whose beams are joys that lie
In blended hearts, now holds dominion;
The dawn of mind, which upwards on a pinion
Borne, swift as sun-rise, far illumines space,
And clasps this barren world in its own bright embrace!’
Fearful that the words ‘lawless love’ may frighten simple readers, Mr.
Buxton Forman (who thinks Shelley ‘might have been the Saviour of
the World’), in his most useful edition of Shelley’s works, appends to
the alarming words this note:—‘The words lawless love seem to be
used, not in a conventional sense, but merely to signify unshackled
love.’ True, but ‘unshackled’ from what? Cythna meant that tyrant
custom, or tyrant anybody else, having been overthrown and
rendered powerless for the moment, her brethren and sisters were
free to marry, and changing about to remarry, in perfect liberty of
affection—in love liberated from the shackles of human law—in
matrimony, no less easily entered than easily quitted—in marriage,
alike free from legal impediments to ingress, and from legal
impediments to egress—love, in fact, so perfectly free from the
supervision and control of human law, that it might be rightly styled
‘lawless love.’
Later in the poem’s story, when Cythna has rescued Laon from the
tyrant’s soldiers, and carried him off, on the ‘black Tartarian horse of
giant frame,’ to a picturesque ruin, the brother and sister, after
recognizing one another as whilom playmates in Argolis, pass
through emotions, that are set forth in the following stanzas:—
‘The autumnal winds, as if spell-bound, had made
A natural couch of leaves in that recess,
Which seasons none disturb, but in the shade
Of flowering parasites, did Spring love to dress
With their sweet blooms the wintry loneliness
Of those dead leaves, shedding their stars, whene’er
The wandering wind her nurslings might caress;
Whose intertwining fingers ever there,
Made music wild and soft that filled the listening air.

We know not where we go, or what sweet dream

May pilot us thro’ caverns strange and fair
Of far and pathless passion, while the stream
Of life, our bark doth on its whirlpools bear,
Spreading swift wings as sails to the dim air;
Nor should we seek to know, so the devotion
Of love and gentle thoughts be heard still there
Louder and louder from the utmost Ocean
Of universal life, attuning its commotion.
 To the pure all things are pure! Oblivion wrapt
Our spirits, and the fearful overthrow
Of public hope was from our being snapt,
Tho’ linkèd years had bound it there; for now
A power, a thirst, a knowledge, which below
All thoughts, like light beyond the atmosphere,
Clothing its clouds with grace, doth ever flow,
Came on us, as we sate in silence there,
Beneath the golden stars of the clear azure air.

In silence which doth follow talk that causes

The baffled heart to speak with sighs and tears,
When wildering passion, swalloweth up the pauses
Of inexpressive speech:—the youthful years
Which we together past, their hopes and fears,
The common blood which ran within our frames,
That likeness of the features which endears
The thoughts expressed by them, our very names,
And all the wingèd hours which speechless memory claims

Had found a voice; ...

* * * * * * * *
The meteor shewed the leaves on which we sate,
And Cythna’s glowing arms, and the thick ties
Of her soft hair which bent with gathered weight
My neck near hers, her dark and deepening eyes,
Which, as twin phantoms of one star that lies
O’er a dim well, move, though the star reposes,
Swam in our mute and liquid ecstasies,
Her marble brow, and eager lips, like roses,
With their own fragrance pale, which Spring but half
uncloses.

The meteor to its far morass returned:

The beating of our veins one interval
Made still; and then I felt the blood that burned
 Within her frame, mingle with mine, and fall
Around my heart like fire; and over all
A mist was spread, the sickness of a deep
And speechless swoon of joy, as might befall
Two disunited spirits when they leap
In union from this earth’s obscure and fading sleep.

Was it one moment that confounded thus

All thought, all sense, all feeling, into one
Unutterable power, which shielded us
Even from our own cold looks, when we had gone
Into a wide and wild oblivion
Of tumult and of tenderness? or now
Had ages, such as make the moon and sun,
The seasons, and mankind their changes know,
Left fear and time unfelt by us alone below?

I know not. What are kisses whose fire clasps

The failing heart in languishment, or limb
Twined within limb? or the quick dying gasps
Of the life meeting, when the faint eyes swim
Thro’ tears of a wide mist boundless and dim,
In one caress? What is the strong controul
Which leads the heart that dizzy steep to climb,
Where far over the world those vapours roll
Which blend two restless frames in one reposing soul?

It is the shadow which doth float unseen,

But not unfelt, o’er blind mortality,
Whose divine darkness fled not, from that green
And lone recess, where lapt in peace did lie
Our linkèd frames; till, from the changing sky,
That night and still another day had fled;
And then I saw and felt. The moon was high,
The clouds, as of coming storm, were spread
Under its orb,—loud winds were gathering overhead.
 Cythna’s sweet lips seemed lurid in the moon,
Her fairest limbs with the night wind were chill,
And her dark tresses were all loosely strewn
O’er her pale bosom:—all within was still,
And the sweet peace of joy did almost fill
The depth of her unfathomable look:—
And we sate calmly, though that rocky hill,
The waves contending in its caverns strook,
For they foreknew the storm, and the grey ruin shook.

There we unheeding sate, in the communion

Of interchangèd vows, which, with a rite
Of faith most sweet and sacred, stamped our union.—
Few were the living hearts which could unite
Like ours, or celebrate a bridal night
With such close sympathies, for to each other
Had high and solemn hopes, the gentle might
Of earliest love, and all the thoughts which smother
Cold Evil’s power, now linked a sister and a brother.’
At the poem’s close, in reward for all their good deeds in a naughty
world, and all their pains of self-sacrifice for the promotion of human
happiness, this brother and sister (after death), together with the
charming child, who is the issue of their incestuous embraces, are
permitted to enter the boat of hollow pearl, in which they are carried
to the islands of the blest, to repose in everlasting felicity near ‘The
Temple of the Spirit.’
Lest it should be said that I misrepresent the story in a particular,
which, though important, affects in no way the poem’s principal
doctrine, let it be observed that to some readers this charming child
appears to have been the tyrant’s daughter, instead of Laon’s
offspring. Sir John Taylor Coleridge’s memorable article in the
Quarterly Review shows that, whilst recognizing with repugnance,
the incest of Laon’s intercourse with his sister, he regarded the child
as the issue of the despot’s passion. But on this point I conceive the
reviewer to have erred through the mystifications and ambiguities of
the narrative. To me it is clear that Shelley meant to intimate to
careful readers of the monstrous story, that Cythna’s child was
Laon’s daughter. The question, however, does not touch the poem’s
main purpose, as offspring would be the natural sequence of the
endearments interchanged by the brother and sister in the
picturesque ruin.
The two actors of the poem, in whom it is sought to interest the
reader most strongly, and for whose stainless purity and unqualified
goodness the author solicits our admiration, are a brother and sister,
whose embraces result in the birth of a little girl, no less lovely in
person and mind than her parents. The main purpose of the poem,
which has numerous subordinate and minor objects, is to plant the
incestuous pair in the reader’s affection, and lure him into regarding
so exemplary an instance of conjugal affection with sympathy and
approval. By some of the less daring of the Shelleyan zealots it has
indeed been urged that Laon and Cythna should be regarded as a
mere poetic ‘vision’ (as it is described on the title-page), and the
pure outgrowth of exuberant fancy, and not as a serious contribution
to social philosophy, intended to influence the judgment and conduct
of its readers. To this plea a sufficient answer is found in the pains
taken by Shelley to provide the work with a carefully worded prose
preface, in which he intimated, that the poem was addressed to
persons thirsting ‘for a happier condition of moral and political
society;’ that the hurtful institutions and principles assailed in the
poem were the hurtful institutions and principles then dominant in
European society, and especially of English society; that the
doctrines of the poem were offered for the solution of the various
religious problems, political problems, and economical problems,
then holding the attention and troubling the minds of earnest
philanthropists; that, notwithstanding its artistic form and beauty,
the poem was offered as a serious contribution to political and social
philosophy, and had been written with a view to practical results in
human conduct.
By others of the less courageous of the Shelleyan zealots, it is urged
that, instead of definitely recommending conjugal love between a
brother and a sister as a relation to be countenanced, or even
tolerated by England in the nineteenth century, Laon and Cythna
merely reminds readers that, instead of violating any principle of
natural morals, the connubial intercourse of a brother and sister
would be unobjectionable, and might even be positively virtuous, in
a country whose laws either encourage or only permit such an
association. This apology for the prime doctrine of Laon and Cythna
may as well be considered in connexion with what the poet says on
the subject in the last sentence of the preface, which runs thus:—
‘In the personal conduct of my Hero and Heroine, there is one
circumstance which was intended to startle the reader from the
trance of ordinary life. It was my object to break through the crust
of those outworn opinions on which established institutions depend.
I have appealed therefore to the most universal of all feelings, and
have endeavored to strengthen the moral sense, by forbidding it to
waste its energies in seeking to avoid actions which are only crimes
of convention. It is because there is so great a multitude of artificial
vices, that there are so few real virtues. Those feelings alone which
are benevolent or malevolent, are essentially good or bad. The
circumstance of which I speak, was introduced, however, merely to
accustom men to that charity and toleration which the exhibition of a
practice widely differing from their own, has a tendency to promote.
Nothing indeed can be more mischievous, than many actions
innocent in themselves, which might bring down upon individuals the
bigotted contempt and rage of the multitude.’
To this last sentence of the preface to Laon and Cythna, Shelley
(obviously by an after-thought, and in consequence of the pressure
put upon him by some friend or friends) appended this foot-note
—‘The sentiments connected with and characteristic of this
circumstance have no personal reference to the writer’!!!
The last paragraph of the preface to Laon and Cythna is preceded by
these words, ‘Love is celebrated everywhere as the sole law which
should govern the moral world.’ Having regard to the abrupt
transition from the present to the past tense, the significant
difference (in style) of the last paragraph from the preceding
paragraph, and the known conflict that occurred between the author
and publisher before the poem had passed the press, few critical
readers will decline to think with me that the last paragraph, instead
of being part of the preface when it left Shelley’s pen, was an after-
thought, written to meet Ollier’s objections to the incestuous relation
of Laon and Cythna. Nor will it, I think, be questioned, that the
astounding note was an after-thought to the after-thought, and was
put at the foot of the last paragraph, because Ollier, or Hunt, or
Peacock, pointed out to the author that the poem, commending the
incest of brother and sister, would expose him to the most hideous
of imputations.
But what do the statements of the last paragraph amount to? (1)
That in making Laon and Cythna live like a married couple, the poet
merely aimed at startling his readers out of the trance of ordinary
life.—(2) That in so startling his readers he wished to enable them to
break away from the notion, that there was something inherently
vicious in a brother’s connubial association with his own sister.—(3)
That Shelley rated such incest as a mere crime of convention, to be
placed in the same category with offences against the game-laws,
the excise-laws, or a custom’s tariff.—(4) That feelings should not be
judged by their results, but by their effect on the disposition of the
person entertaining them.—(5) That in so startling his readers out of
an antiquated repugnance to the particular kind of incest, he hoped
to render them tolerant of, and charitable towards, persons
committing the mere offence against conventional morality.—(6)
That though, in his opinion, no rule of natural morals forbade a man
to marry his own sister, the poet thought his readers had better
refrain from such incest, since, though innocent in itself, the
perpetration of it would be likely to infuriate the bigoted multitude.
This from the man who, according to his most fervid idolaters, would
have redeemed the world from sin and wretchedness, had he
worked for its regeneration under auspicious circumstances.
Is the incest of brother and sister a mere crime of convention? The
science of morals, of course, is progressive. What is virtue in a rude
state of society becomes crime in a high state of civilization. Some
countries, lying well within the wide and vague boundaries of
civilization, are behind other countries in the science of morals. What
is crime in England may be honesty in Thibet. There are offences
about which we may hesitate to say off-hand, whether they are
offences against natural morals or mere crimes of convention. But
surely action that is maleficent to the mental and physical welfare of
mankind, wherever it may be practised, is not action about which
there can be any uncertainty. Permitted in the country, where (by his
own confession in prose) he commended it to tolerance and
charitable consideration, the license commended by Shelley would
poison the springs of domestic virtue, whilst producing its universal
results on the bodily shape, nervous force, and moral health of the
people. Permitted amongst the settlers on a barbarous coast, it
would in a few generations be fruitful of such physical infirmity and
debasement, as are ever accompanied with moral depravation.
Action so universally maleficent is universally wicked. Though it may
be less mischievous in its consequences, the conduct recommended
in Laon and Cythna is no less essentially wicked, in a small and
thinly populated island, than in a great city.
The poem having been written to the last line, Shelley sent it to
Messrs. C. and J. Ollier, of Welbeck Street, whom he had selected for
his publishers, at the request of their friend Leigh Hunt. As the book
was to be produced at Shelley’s cost, the publishers of course
wished to publish it. But these gentlemen looked for money, instead
of disaster, from business with their client. On finding that the poem
was an apology for incest, they took counsel with one another, and
probably with their lawyer. The result was that, when the poem was
nearly, if not altogether printed, one of the Messrs. Ollier wrote to
Shelley, stating they could not venture to produce a work, so certain
to put them in an ignominious position. Instead of feeling for the
men of business, and shrinking from the thought of injuring them,
Shelley urged them to go on in the road to ruin. But the publishers
were less manageable than Shelley hoped to find them. They
repeated their wish to be quit of so dangerous a book. Whereupon,
dating from Marlow, on 11th December, 1817, Shelley wrote the Mr.
Ollier (who was attending to the matter) a letter that contained
these words,—
‘There is one compromise you might make, though that would still
be injurious to me. Sherwood and Neely wished to be the principal
publishers. Call on them, and say that it was through a mistake that
you undertook the principal direction of the book, as it was my wish
that it should be theirs, and that I have written to you to that effect.
This, if it would be advantageous to you, would be detrimental to,
but not utterly destructive of, my views. To withdraw your name
entirely, would be to inflict on me a bitter and undeserved injury.’
(Vide Shelley Memorials.)
To see the nature of this advice, readers must remember how usual
it was in former time for several different firms of booksellers to be
concerned in the publication of the same work. The principal
publisher in these joint-enterprises,—i.e. the publisher in negotiation
with the author, and to whom the author looked as his publisher—
had the direction of, and chief responsibility in, the business. His
name, or the name of his house, appeared on the title-page before
the names of the other publishers. Thus holding a place of honour,
he held also the post of greatest danger; for in case of proceedings
against the author and publisher of an unlawful publication, it was
the way of the law to hold the first and principal publisher as more
responsible than the other associated booksellers, and even in some
cases to regard the latter as being in no degree morally accountable
for the contents of the work. In accordance with this trade-usage,
Messrs. Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, of Paternoster Row, were
associated in 1817, as second and subordinate publishers with
Messrs. C. and J. Ollier, of Welbeck Street.
Shelley’s suggestion was that, as the Olliers were frightened, they
should slip out of the more dangerous position, by inducing
Sherwood, Neely, and Jones to step into it by misrepresentation. The
Olliers were instructed by Shelley to tell the other set of publishers
an untruth, that was a rather complicated untruth. They were
instructed to keep their alarm to themselves, and say to their
comrades in the trade, ‘We took the principal direction of the book
through a mistake’ (a sheer untruth), ‘as it was Mr. Shelley’s wish for
you to be his principal publishers’ (another sheer untruth), ‘and
therefore as Mr. Shelley has written us to that effect’ (a third untruth
on a point of fact) ‘we think even at this late stage of the business
you had better figure as principal publishers’ (a false suggestion of
motive). That the Olliers did as Shelley thus instructed them, may be
inferred from the fact that, on the title-page (the 1818 title-page) of
Laon and Cythna, Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, figure as principal
publishers.
Laon and Cythna was published, in so far that a few copies (three
copies, according to some writers on the subject, but probably a
larger number) passed into circulation; one of them being the copy,
that afforded the Quarterly Reviewer an opportunity for making his
memorable onslaught on the book. But this had barely been
accomplished, when the poem was an addition to the considerable
list of the works, written by Shelley and speedily suppressed. What
was the immediate cause of the renewal of their alarm does not
appear; but the book was no sooner out, than the Messrs. Ollier
decided that not another copy should be issued with their name on
the title-page. Probably they acted on their lawyer’s urgent
representation, that, unless it were promptly suppressed, so
scandalous a book would certainly result in their prosecution. It has
been repeatedly averred that their alarm proceeded chiefly from the
freedom with which the poem dealt with matters of religion and
politics. But the changes which converted Laon and Cythna into The
Revolt of Islam, show that this was not the case. Some of the
changes, no doubt, modified the terms relating to the Almighty; but
the prime purpose of the alterations was to relieve the poem of its
incestuous sentiment. Unquestionably the publishers were alarmed
by the book’s blasphemy and political extravagance; but their most
serious apprehension was fear of such an outcry against the poem’s
indecency, as would put them on trial for issuing an obscene book.
On reconsideration the publishers saw that in case of such a
prosecution, it would avail them nothing that their name appeared
after ‘Sherwood, Neely, and Jones,’ on the title-page of the book, of
which they would be proved to have been the principal publishers.
No wonder they were firm. No wonder also that Shelley was in the
highest state of excitement for his own interests,—and of indignation
at his publisher’s cowardice. What the Olliers felt was, of course, felt
by the other publishers.
Matters were in this position, when it occurred to some ingenious
student of the suppressed poem, that it would be easy to relieve the
work of its incestuous quality and some of its most objectionable
passages touching religion, by cancelling a few leaves and replacing
them with leaves, that would change the character and complexion
of the whole performance. By dropping the final paragraph (with its
note) from the Preface, producing a new title-page, and altering
fifty-five lines of the body of the book, it would be easy to
manipulate, at a trifling cost, the printed sheets out of their
egregious offensiveness into comparative innocence. Who was the
originator of this ingenious suggestion does not appear; but the
editorial ingenuity of the proposal inclines one to attribute it to Leigh
Hunt. Anyhow, the suggestion was carried out by a council,
consisting of one of the Messrs. Ollier, the author, Peacock, and
some other of the author’s personal friends (Leigh Hunt and Hogg
being, no doubt, of the number). Never perhaps was stranger work
done by a literary committee at successive meetings. At the sittings
of the council, Shelley (says Peacock) ‘contested the proposed
alterations step by step; in the end, sometimes adopting, more
frequently modifying, never originating, and always insisting that his
poem was spoiled.’ No wonder he fought his friends point by point.
The poem had been written to demonstrate the purity and loveliness
of the extremest kind of Free Love. By changing Cythna from Laon’s
sister, to a mere orphan, living under the protection of his parents,
the alterations deprived the poem of the prime doctrine it was
intended to inculcate. The poem that should have proclaimed the
beauty and holiness of incestuous Love was manipulated into a mere
poetic apology for Lawless Love of an ordinary and less interesting
kind. So castrated, the Poem of Incest could no longer generate the
sentiment, whose activity was needful, in Shelley’s opinion, for the
attainment of ‘a happier condition of moral and political society.’ As
any reader may learn from a careful study of the poem, enough
mischief was left in The Revolt of Islam to satisfy an ordinary
enthusiast for lawless love; but Shelley was an ‘extra’-ordinary
enthusiast for wedlock without restrictions. It is imputed to him for
righteousness by his idolaters, that he persisted to the last in the
pure and unqualified doctrine of the unaltered poem. In reference to
Lady Shelley’s quite inaccurate statement that the poet (in 1817-18)
was ‘convinced of the propriety of making’ the ‘alterations,’ which
converted Laon and Cythna into The Revolt of Islam, Mr. Buxton
Forman remarks proudly of the teacher, who might have been the
Saviour of the World, ‘There is nothing in his subsequent history to
countenance the idea that he regarded Laon and Cythna as in any
way offensive.’
But before the superlatively offensive poem had been manipulated
into a comparatively inoffensive one, some copies of Laon and
Cythna had passed from the publisher’s hands to the world. Whether
these copies were no more, or several more, than three, does not
matter. If they were only three, they were enough to darken the
poet’s fame and cloud his happiness for the rest of his days. Three
hundred copies in circulation could not have been more disastrous to
his social credit than those three, one of which was lent to the
Quarterly Reviewer.
Is it wonderful that Shelley, during the few years still remaining to
him of a brief existence, lived under the world’s ban, and though
producing works of incomparable art in quick succession, produced
them only to stir the wrath of critics, and aggravate the pain he
endured from the world’s neglect of his genius? It was known, and
could not be gainsaid, in every coterie of men of letters, how
abruptly he had left his first childish wife; how, on breaking with so
young and lovely a creature, he told her to ‘do as other women did’;
how within a few weeks of breaking with this girl, he had carried off
his familiar friend’s sixteen-years-old daughter; and how in language
of matchless beauty and vigour, he had used all the powers of his
poetic genius, not only to deride marriage, but to teach his readers
that the most repulsive and blighting of all the several kinds of
incestuous love was wholesome, innocent, and beautiful. Is it
surprising that in less than a year and four months from the
publication of Laon and Cythna, he wrote from Rome to Peacock, ‘I
am regarded by all who know or hear of me, except, I think, on the
whole, five individuals, as a rare prodigy of crime and pollution,
whose look even might infect?’ Is it surprising that, critics, fully
cognizant of the power and many excellences of his poetry, forbore
to extol his genius, from a conscientious repugnance to his social
philosophy, and a fear that by applauding the poet they should
strengthen the hands of the social innovator? Is it surprising that,
whilst temperate and judicious men of letters were silent about what
they secretly admired, but could not venture to openly commend,
less discerning critics in their abhorrence of the social innovator,
wrote wild nonsense about the stupid trash, the drivel and
buffoonery of his finest productions?
Of course, these less discerning critics had better have imitated the
more temperate and discreet men of letters, and held their peace.
But critics are human; and when men speak under the influence of
strong resentment, they are apt to say wild things. To point to the
angry things written to Shelley’s discredit, when the passions he had
stirred were at their fiercest rage, as evidence of a singular and
unaccountable blindness to the excellences of fine poetry, is to
misread the signs of a former time. Like Byron, the author of Laon
and Cythna provoked a storm he was not permitted to survive;
though he would have survived it, had he lived to middle age and
continued to write in the vein of Prometheus Unbound and Adonais.
It is not wonderful that violent things were said of the man, who had
done violence to society’s finest sensibilities. What occurred to his
annoyance more than sixty years since would occur now-a-days to a
similar offender,—say, to a novelist of high culture and singular
aptitude for his department of literary art, guilty of producing a novel
whose hero and heroine, born of the same parents, and reared in
the same home, should live and love like Laon and Cythna; the
whole romance being cunningly devised and skilfully worked out, for
the purpose of luring readers to the opinion that brothers and sisters
ought to be allowed to marry one another. After all that has been
done during the last fifty years to make people tolerant of the Free
Contract, what would happen if such a story came to us one fine day
from the pen of a young and remarkably able writer (ætat. 25),
together with his assurance that the work was ‘an experiment on the
temper of the public mind,’ and an attempt to bring about ‘happier
conditions of moral and political society?’ Would critics be mealy-
mouthed and weigh their words precisely in declaring the
experiment an outrage, and the attempt a monstrous scandal?
Would they be less outspoken on discovering that the young writer,
at so early a stage of his existence, had put away his first wife,
seduced his intimate friend’s sixteen-years-old daughter, written
strongly on previous occasions against chastity and conjugal
constancy, and been declared by the Lord Chancellor a person
whose conduct proved him unfit to have the charge of his children?
One is often asked to explain what is meant by ‘the irony of fate.’ It
is easier to explain a term by an example than by words. It was
fate’s irony that, whilst the poet, who exhibited a brother’s
incestuous intercourse with his sister as sinless and beautiful,
escaped the imputation he may be said to have invited by the
personal note at the end of the Preface, the world was induced to
charge the crime passionately on another poet, who had only written
of such incest vaguely as an enormity of wickedness, or mockingly
as the familiar arrangement of a remote period. Another example of
fate’s irony is found in the fact that, when Byron was suffering in
posthumous fame from the Beecher-Stowe calumny, the more fervid
of the Shelleyan enthusiasts and the more fervid of the Shelleyan
socialists combined to decry him as a prodigy of wickedness for
practising the form of Lawless Love, which Shelley had declared
compatible with virtue. Fate also was set upon another exploit in
irony, when she determined that the poem, which a committee of
men of the world declared unfit for circulation during the profligate
Regency, should be produced verbatim for the moral edification of
the men, and women, and young people of Victorian England.
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