Philosophical Review

Being, Negation and Logic by Eric TomsReview by: Donald C. WilliamsThe Philosophical Review, Vol. 74, No. 3 (Jul., 1965), pp. 390-392Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of Philosophical ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2183365 .

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BOOK REVIEWS

BEING, NEGATION AND LOGIC. By ERIC TOMS. Oxford, Basil Blackwell, I962. Pp. 124. 12S. 6d.

This is a remarkable little book, for not only does it attempt honestly to deal, in the light of philosophic tradition and logical analysis, with the prodigious topics named in the title; it proceeds through them to the most prodigious of conceivable conclusions: that the work of thought must be done over from the beginning because our "orthodox logic" and its categories are hopelessly vitiated by the paradox and problem of "over-necessitation, ... immense, unsolved, and almost untouched" (p. 124). Though the whole enterprise will seem cranky to many and much of its execution obscure and perverse, Mr. Toms, a lecturer in logic at the University of Glasgow, does not grind a dialectical or existential axe (though perhaps he has one, "an altogether different approach," p. 122). His animadversions are as informed and consider- ate as they are ingenious, and right or wrong should put salutary burrs under the saddles of our Neo-Protagorean nags and generally quicken the ontological pace.

The bookling is hard to summarize because, with its enormous subject, it is already very summary, not so much by condensation as by ellipsis, and not merely by ellipsis but by prolepsis, frequently referring for needed elucidation to subsequent passages (for example, on pp. 17, I9, 79), including some that never turn up. This incon- secutiveness, which seems more a quality of exposition than an inco- herence of ideas, extends to the eighty-two appetizing titles and sub- titles, which seem oddly disconnected from one another and from the topics under them, each topic in turn being dismembered among several headings. "Failure of the argument that a logical principle is trivial," for example, which heads subsection (b) of Section 7 of Chapter II of Part I, would be as appropriate to any of a half dozen other sections. Add divers difficulties with the symbolism and diction, very likely my own fault, and a surprising number of typographical errors, some affecting the sense, and it will be plain why I state even the principal theses with some diffidence.

"Over-necessitation," I take it (pp. 121, 122), is the circumstance that "orthodox logic" makes inevitable the violating of its own chief principle, noncontradiction ("NC"), by the necessitating of both members of opposed pairs, not just in the few sporadic inconsistencies which the reflexive paradoxes portend but by the ubiquitous paradox of negation ("PN"), intrinsic to NC itself (pp. I05, I I 6), namely, that every proposition entails its contradictory. This is the ancient puzzle

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BOOK REVIEWS

of nonbeing (pp. 97, 124), and is attributable directly to PNE, the paradox of nonexistence, namely, that x does not exist presupposes and entails the existence of x (pp. 71, 97, I21). It ensues upon the latter because the only philosophy of negation which does not either involve a vicious regress or obviously and immediately fail the essential "NC test," that a negative automatically exclude the corresponding affirm- ative (pp. 82, 1 19), is one which reduces every negation to an irreduc- ible negative fact that there does not exist the fact which would make true a specified proposition (pp. 88-9i). Mr. Toms is as aware as any- one that facts, and especially negative facts, are "among the least reputable of entities" (p. 75), and that the paradoxes he exploits are widely believed to be creatures of verbal confusion, avoidable by linguistical reconstruction incorporating theories of descriptions and of types (pp. 95, 99, 102, I o8, i19, I i8). Most of his work, therefore, is devoted to proofs that orthodox logic, ancient, medieval, or contem- porary, cannot admit that all its necessities are linguistical and is best understood as not conventional at all but as an intuitive metaphysics whose subject matter is certain specified forms, the logical constants, and the ruck of unspecified individual existents in which they must be embodied (pp. 2-10, 31-35, 58-68, 70, 74, 77, 96, 101, 117, i i8); and that, linguistical or real, it does not permit of type distinctions, Russell- ian, Aristotelian, Meinongian, or Rylean, either among beings or among modes or grades of being (pp. 10-29, 73, II5) . Particularly strik- ing incidents in these principal arguments are the analysis and criti- cism of different disposals of negation (pp. 75-92, 96-104), the analogy (misleading, I think) between PN and "the paradox of the past" (that past facts both are and are not; pp. I o6- I I 7), censure (warranted, I think) of the vain replication of ontic differences in the notion that ghostly existents, for example, must exist ghostily (pp. 20, 25, 93n.), the exhibition that the logical conventionalist always uses an intuitive real logic in the making and use of his ostensible conventions, including the standard truth tables (pp. 36, 40, 43, 49, 58, 99), and repudiation of nonpropositional "rules of inference" (pp. 34-55) and of formalistic demonstrations that a self-contradictory proposition entails every proposition (pp. 37-40). (The rules are neither sufficient nor necessary for their pretended function; the demonstrations proceed by assuming the falsity of the antecedent they are testing.)

Almost anyone may benefit from such ruminations, whether or not he agrees with many of them (as I do) or is baffled by some (as I am), but he is most likely to find them interesting and credible if he reads in them bona fide ontology, and not, as the author prescribes, mere

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BOOK REVIEWS

effigies engaged in hanging themselves. The former happier attitude to them is actually the more rational because, even if every one of Mr. Toms's theses were virtually unassailable on its own ground, their conjunction, on all their grounds, would not be so; and even if it were, the eventual disclosure that it entails the invalidity of logic would do more to prove retrospectively that the sequence must have gone wrong somewhere than this book, or a dozen like it, could counteract. Mr. Toms, who very properly believes in clear and distinct ideas (p. 6i), may have so superb an intuition of the affair that he personally is justified in preferring the destruction of the whole intellectual world to the scratching of one of his enthymemes, but he should not take it amiss if he is told that the weakest links in the chain, as is apparent to the mere reader, are just those notions which cut the biggest figure- existence, negation, necessity, facts. Though he says a good deal around and about them, he tells us much more of what they are not than of what they are. His doctrine of existence is slight and obscure, though promising (p. 28); necessity and fact he does not try to explicate (pp. 52, 74); and he vacillates on whether it is existence or the existent which is negated (pp. 93, 94, 95), and indeed whether there is any existence (pp. i9, 22, 24, 28, 69, 73) or, for that matter, any such object as a fact (pp. 74, 99). These would be pardonable defects in normal philosophical circumstances, but they mean here that, even if we concurred in his most sustained and impressive argument-that every negation is constituted by the nonexistence of a fact-and did not cavil whether he begged questions or scamped alternatives, the fateful maxim that an object must exist in order not to exist is left with little warrant more substantial than a claim to be "scandalously" obvious (pp. 29, 71, 75, 8I, 94, 97, 12i), and that is not enough.

DONALD C. WILLIAMS

Harvard University

THE COHERENCE THEORY OF TR UTH: A CRITICAL EVAL UA TION. By HAIG KHATCHADOURIAN. Beirut, American University, I96I. Pp. Xi, 230. $4.00.

This book, a revision of the author's Ph. D. thesis submitted at Duke University, is an attempt to explain and refute the coherence theory of truth (hereafter called CTT). More space is devoted to refutation than explanation, and the author, recognizing the diverse forms of CTT, concentrates his discussion on Bradley, Bosanquet, and

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