The Essentials of Logic, Being Ten Lectures on Judgment and Inference — Themes and Context

The Sentence as the Unit of Meaning

Bosanquet argues that logic should treat judgment and inference as two stages of a single development, not as separate topics. He rejects the traditional triad of concept, judgment, and inference, because a concept or name has 'no reality in living language or living thought' except when placed in a proposition. To illustrate, he points out that a relative clause ending with a full stop—such as 'The epidemic of influenza, which has appeared in England for three successive seasons'—forces the reader to complete the thought conjecturally. Nothing less than a sentence, he claims, conveys a meaning in which the mind can acquiesce without supplementation. He traces this insight to Aristotle, who defined a noun and verb as 'a portion of discourse, of which no part has a meaning by itself,' and notes that the Greeks did not separate words in writing, treating terminal consonant changes as if within a compound word.

The Verb as an Unanalysed Sentence

Bosanquet points to inflected languages like Greek and Latin, where the verb can stand alone without a pronoun, as the type of a sentence not yet broken up into separate words. In English and German, custom forbids the verb to stand without a pronoun, but the principle remains: a verb is 'an unanalysed sentence.' He extends this idea to children's language, citing Preyer's observation that a child used 'stool' to mean four different propositions, such as 'Where is my stool?' or 'My stool is broken.' In a less analytical language, Bosanquet suggests, the child might have a sound corresponding to a whole sentence rather than a noun. This conflict between form and meaning, he argues, shows that reflective analysis—grammar and dictionaries—artificially isolates words from their living context. The bearing on logic is clear: we should not think of propositions as built by putting words together, but of words as distinguished though inseparable elements within propositions.

The Purpose of the Lectures

Bosanquet states that the course was conceived many years earlier at Oxford, prompted by a friend's answer to the question of what could reasonably be hoped for in teaching logic to beginners. The reply—'If the men could learn what an Inference is, it would be something'—shaped the lectures' structure. Only the last two discourses deal explicitly with inference, but the preceding ones 'contribute, I hope, no less essentially, to explain the nature of that single development which in some stages we call Judgment, and in others Inference.' He acknowledges that the attempt to go to the heart of the subject, however imperfectly executed, was appreciated by students and rewarded with serious attention that formal logic's trivialities would not have commanded. For those wishing to pursue the study further, he recommends Bradley's Principles of Logic, Lotze's Logic, and Sigwart's work, while noting that his own larger Logic expresses the same views in extended form.

Readers approaching this work should expect a sustained argument that logic cannot be reduced to a taxonomy of terms and syllogisms. Bosanquet's lectures reward careful attention to his use of examples—from Greek manuscripts to a child's single-word utterances—each chosen to show that meaning arises only in complete sentences. The book is best read as a continuous development rather than a reference manual; the early lectures lay groundwork that the final two on inference depend upon. Those already familiar with traditional logic will find the most value in Bosanquet's critique of its assumptions.