On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, Topics and Sophistical Refutations

Summary

This record covers four of the six treatises that later editors grouped as Aristotle's Organon, the 'instrument' of thought: On Interpretation, the Prior Analytics, the Topics and On Sophistical Refutations, in the Oxford translations by E. M. Edghill, A. J. Jenkinson and W. A. Pickard-Cambridge. (The attached text also carries G. R. G. Mure's Posterior Analytics, which the library treats with the Physics, and the Categories has its own record.) Read in this order, the treatises move from the single statement, to valid deduction, to argument with an opponent about what is commonly believed, to arguments that only look valid. On Interpretation begins with language. Spoken words are signs of experiences in the soul, and written words of spoken ones; a noun and a verb joined make a statement that can be true or false. Aristotle then maps how affirmations and denials are opposed (the relations later drawn as the square of opposition) and treats statements of possibility and necessity. Its ninth chapter asks whether 'there will be a sea-fight tomorrow' is already true or false today, and answers that while the whole disjunction is necessary, neither half need be, a passage argued over by Stoics, medieval theologians concerned with God's foreknowledge, and modern logicians. The Prior Analytics invents formal logic. Aristotle defines the syllogism as discourse in which, certain things being stated, something else follows of necessity, and works out which combinations of universal and particular, affirmative and negative premisses in his three figures yield valid conclusions, using letters as variables for the first time in Western thought. Book I adds modal syllogisms; Book II treats circular proof, reduction to the impossible, induction, argument from example, and the enthymeme. The Topics turns from proof to debate. It is a handbook for dialectic, the trained exchange of question and answer in which one speaker defends a thesis drawn from reputable opinion and another tries to refute it. Aristotle sorts predicates into definition, property, genus and accident, and then supplies hundreds of 'places' (topoi) from which arguments can be drawn, closing in Book VIII with practical advice on how to ask, answer and train. On Sophistical Refutations catalogues the ways an argument can seem to refute while failing to: six fallacies that depend on language, such as equivocation and amphiboly, and seven that do not, such as begging the question, false cause and many questions treated as one. In its last chapter Aristotle claims that on reasoning, unlike rhetoric, nobody before him had done any systematic work at all. For students the four books together are both the source of the logic taught in the trivium and a sustained argument that clear thinking can be learned.

Top Lessons

• Words signify thoughts, thoughts signify things

  On Interpretation opens by placing language between the mind and the world: the same experiences are shared by all, though speech differs from people to people. Grammar and logic meet in the statement, the smallest unit that can be true or false.

• Necessity and the open future

  The sea-fight argument shows that 'either it will happen or it will not' can be necessary without making either outcome necessary. Aristotle defends deliberation against the claim that everything is already fixed.

• Validity before truth

  The Prior Analytics separates the form of an argument from the truth of its premisses: a syllogism can be valid with false premisses, and Aristotle shows how true conclusions can even follow from false ones. Letters as variables let him study form alone.

• Arguing well from what people believe

  The Topics treats debate as a discipline with rules. Dialectic starts from reputable opinions, held by all, by most or by the wise, and examines them by question and answer; Book VIII teaches both attacker and defender to argue honestly and skilfully.

• Seeming and being in argument

  On Sophistical Refutations begins with the difference between real and apparent health, beauty and gold, and applies it to arguments. Naming fallacies is a defence of truth against those who only want to seem wise.

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