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A subjective fact is one that is limited to the subject experiencing it.
An idea is the subjective evocation of an objective fact. Clear ideas, then, are ideas that faithfully reflect the objective order from which they derive. Unclear ideas, conversely, are those that give us a distorted representation of the objective world.
Our ideas are the means, not the ends, of our knowledge.
An idea is unclear or unsound to the degree that it is distanced from and unmindful of its originating source in the objective world.
Often we cannot come up with the right word for an idea because we don’t have a firm grasp on the idea itself.
“Statement” has a special meaning in logic. It is a linguistic expression to which the response of either “true” or “false” is appropriate.
True statements of objective fact are not open to argument; evaluative statements are. If I want an evaluative statement to be accepted, I must argue for it.
Don’t use technical or “insider” language merely to impress people. The point is to communicate.
the more general the word, the vaguer it is.
The only way to avoid ambiguity is to spell things out as explicitly as possible:
It is juvenile to use language simply to shock.
ontological truth we refer to the truth of being or existence. Something is said to be ontologically true, then, if it actually exists; it has real being.
Logical truth is simply the truth of statements. More broadly, we could say that it is truth as it manifests itself in our thinking and language.
What a true statement does is declare, through the medium of language, a correspondence between ideas in the mind (subjective facts) and real states of affairs in the world (objective facts).
Sometimes our failure to find the root causes of things is attributable to simple laziness.
Other times it is impatience which works against us.
A general statement is one whose subject is very large in scope.
There are two types of general statements, the universal and the particular.
universal affirmative statement” is an “every” or “all” statement (“All whales are mammals”). It affirms something about an entire class.
When we refer to a statement’s being universal or particular, we are concerned with what in logical language is called the “quantity” of the statement. The “singular statement” stands in contrast to the “general statement”; it is characterized by the fact that its subject is an individual.
“Universal statements,” affirmative or negative, are very precise. They are affirming or denying something of an entire class, with no exceptions.
Particular statements, on the other hand, are usually rather vague. “Some” covers a lot of territory; it could mean 99 percent or 2 percent.
the most effective arguments are those that are trying to make a single point.
A “necessary conclusion” is one that it is not possible to doubt—it is certain.
“Predication,” then, is the idea-connecting process by which we attribute something to something else.
