PLATO'S SOPHIST AND THE SIGNIFICANCE AND TRUTH-VALUE OF STATEMENTS

Author(s): William Bondeson

Source: Apeiron: A Journal for Ancient Philosophy and Science, Vol. 8, No. 2 (November, 1974),
pp. 41-47
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 41.

PLATO'S
SOPHIST
AND SIGNIFICANCE
THE AND OFSTATEMENTS
TRUTH-VALUE

The greater portion of Plato fs Sophist deals with a number of issues in

what might be called the philosophy of language. It also deals with a series
of metaphysical and ontological views and attempts to show how language and
reality are related. Thus one way of organizing the views of Plato in the
Sophist is to view much of the material up to and including 260E as concerned
with topics centring around the question: how is discourse possible? Thus
Plato talks about Being , Non-being, Sameness and Otherness and makes the claim
that it is the t&v ei6u)v auunAoxnwhich makes discourse possible (259E) . The
interpretation of this important passage and what precedes it in the dialogue
must be left aside for the purposes of this paper because it is concerned with
what follows 260E rather than with what precedes it. I am concerned in this
paper to explicate Plato's answer to the question: what is a Aoyos? (260E)
and I assume that Plato is not using Xoyds to mean something like language or
discourse in general but rather that he is using Xoyds to refer to a sentence
or statement. The question is put in a way not unlike that of a Socratic
dialogue: it concerns the essence or nature of something, in this case the
essence or nature of a statement (i.e. ti hot' eaiu Aoyos; -260E 5-6). ^ This
question about the nature of statements is a distinct question from questions
concerning the possibility or presuppositions of discourse in general. The
question about the nature of statements is concerned with the parts of a state-
ment and is, primarily, a syntactical question about the functions of kinds of
terms in statements. This question also serves to re-introduce the problem
of falsehoods first raised, in 236D-237A insofar as Plato wants to show in this-
section of the dialogue that the location of truth and falsehood is in statements
and not in the things which statements are about.
In this paper I want to do four things. First, it will be necessary to
discuss and evaluate Plato's answer to the "nature" question about statements
and their parts. Second, I want to determine the relation between statements
and truth or falsehood, and to determine how statements can be true or false.
Third, I want to determine whether Plato has adequately discussed and answered
the Sophist's difficulties and confusions about falsehoods (these will be alsc
discussed as the topics in the first two parts are developed) , and fourth, to
point out the propositional character of belief which will indicate some im-
portant connections between the Sophist and the Theaetetus.
In another paper in this journal, I argued that part of Plato's task in
the Sophist is to determine the nature of subjects of discourse. I tried to
show that Plato maintains that subjects of discourse must in some sense be
one, many, etc. It is not implausible to divide the Forms involved here into
two types following the vowel-consonant analogy. Clearly being, sameness, and
otherness as Forms are expressed in statements of different types, and Plato
is at least on the way to the distinction between the various sense of "is"
and "is not." In contrast to the vowel-Forms which are expressed in these
kinds of sentences, motion and rest do not seem to operate in this way. Rather,
they seem to be Forms which are universally applicable and which stand for two
of the conditions which an entity must fulfill if it is to be a subject of dis-
course. Unity and plurality seem to operate in the same way. Every subject
of discourse must, in some sense, be one and, in another, be many.
These conclusions are important for determining what Plato is trying to do
in the section of the Sophist now under discussion. Plato holds that, just
as some letters do and others do not combine to form syllables and just as
some Forms do and others do not combine to make discourse possible, so some
words or terms do and others do not combine to form statements (261D) . And
this leads to a fundamental problem which Plato must consider for an adequate
discussion of propositions, i.e. the problem of subjects and predicates. Every
statement, in some sense, is about something. The statements "Theaetetus sits"
and "Theaetetus flies" are clearly about Theaetetus. Are they, in any sense,
Apeiron Vol. VIII (1974) No. 2

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42.

about sitting and flying? If we took "Theaetetus sits" and "Socrates sits",
it would not be implausible to maintain that both these statements are about
sitting.
Plato holds that there are two types of terms or sentence-elements; there
is a double class "of the vocal indicators of being" ( t&v ttJ<pa>vrj
nep' ttiv oucuav
6nAa)yaTU)v-261E4-6) . These are called ovdyaxa and pn'yaxa; the former are in-
dicators of the things which "act", and the latter are indicators of the
"actions" performed (262A3-7) .
This raises the questions: is the ovoya/pn'yadistinction a logical or a
grammatical distinction? What does it mean for a statement to be about some-
thing? In the matter of Ramsey, we could take "Theaetetus sits" and "Sitting
is a characteristic of Theaetetus" and maintain that in the grammatical sense,
the first is about Theaetetus and that the second is about sitting, but we could
also maintain that both sentences express the same proposition. This of course,
implies the view that a difference in what statements are about grammatically
. does not necessarily imply a difference in what they say (the proposition they
express) . This involves an elaboration of the criteria for propositional saire-
ness, but it clearly implies that the subject/predicate distinction is only a
grammatical one and that "with a sufficiently elastic language any proposition
can be so expressed that any of the terms is the subject."-* For Ramsey, objects
cannot be divided into logical subjects and predicates.
Insofar as Plato has not distinguished between statements and propositions,
it is difficult to determine what sort of reply he would make, but we can fincn
at least a partial agreement with Ramsey. If part of what Plato is trying to
do in the Sophist is to give the necessary conditions for subjects of discourse,
and among these are that they must be one, many, have being, etc., then we can
infer that both Theaetetus and sitting (i.e. the Form) can be subjects of dis-
course. But this raises a fundamental problem for Plato; are Theaetetus and
the relevant Form one, many, etc. in the same sense? Insofar as Plato has not
answered these questions (and not actually even raised them) , we shall have tc
conclude that any entity which fulfills these conditions can be a subject of
discourse, and, in" this sense, there is no distinction between types of entities.
But this does not affect the distinction between the Forms which are universally
applicable as vowe1 -Forms , those which are universally applicable as consonant-
Forms, and more 'ordinary1 Forms which are in no sense universally applicable.
All these Forms are to be distinguished from particulars to complete the list of
entities which are, in this sense, of different types. I would argue that it is
because Plato has not attempted to co-ordinate these two sets of distinctions
that many of his difficulties arise. E.g., unity is a universally applicable
vowel-Form and can be a subject of discourse. But, if it is a subject of dis-
course, it must also be predicatively one, and, to put the matter somewhat
paradoxically, it is its own condition for being a subject of discourse.
But on the linguistic side Plato does want to maintain that there is a dis-
dinction between types of sentence-elements. Some commentators have main-
tained that the ovoya/pnyadistinction is a linguistic one and corresponds to
that between nouns and verbs. Thus it has been maintained that Plato, in
these passages, is doing ancient grammar rather than ancient philosophy. This
does not appear to be the case. "Ovoya can, in a general sense, mean "term."
It is used this way when the general problem of discourse is first raised:
how can one thing have many ovdyaxaapplied to it? (251A5-6) In the section
now under discussion it is first used to cover both types of sentence-elements
when the question is raised as to whether all 6vdyaTa"fit together" to form
sentences (261D1-3) , but the class of ovdyorra is quickly divided in two. In
this more technical sense ovoya seems to cover both nouns and proper names.
Both "man" and "Theaetetus" (262C9 and 263A2) .
are ovo'yorra But the important
point is that this type of term is used to indicate an "actor" which is the
subject of the statement in question. In Plato's language, to ask what a

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 43.

given statement is about is to ask for the entity named by the ovoyot. In
another way, and going back to an earlier formulation, the ovoya refers to
the entity which has the naSos of something else (cf. 252B8-10) .
What about pn'yaia? To translate this as "verb11 would be misleading.
yj' yeya (257B7) and u (237D2) 5 are stated to be pnyotxaas well as what would
ordinarily be called verbs such as "walks", "runs", etc. The general con-
dition for a term to be a pfjyais that it should indicate an "action11. Again,
in Platonic language, it should in the statement that x is y, indicate the
of y which x has.
Tcdtdos Thus it is likely that this term can be used to
cover verbs but it also has the wider function of standing for any sort of
predicate which the subject of a statement may have. And it should be added
to this that predicates can be either positive or negative (cf . 263B11-12) .
But Plato takes great pains to distinguish a list of terms (no matter
what the type) from statements, and the distinguishing characteristic of a
statement is that it is an "interweaving" of types of terms. This notion
of "interweaving" ( auyuAoxn-262D) suggests that terms are incomplete until
combined with other terms of the appropriate type to form statements or pro-
positions. (It should be pointed out again that Plato does not operate
with a distinction between sentences or statements and the propositions which
they can be used to express.) Terms, according to Plato, are not combined
in an additive fashion; rather he appears to hold that their significance
depends upon their combination in statements. In this sense they seem to
operate like functions. Not every combination of terms is significant, and
not every combination of terms states something. Terms must be combined in
a certain order (e<pe£ns), and they must be significant tl) in order
( 6nXo'5vTot
to form a statement (261D8- E2) . For Plato "runs walks" and "sits Theae-
tetus" are not significant combinations and do not form statements.

It can be objected that if my interpretation is correct, then Plato has

not considered the significance of terms and the significance of statements
as separate problems. But this appears to be exactly his point. Plato
appears to be arguing that terms, apart from their combination in statements,
are only partially significant and that their significance depends on the
manner and the order in which they are combined to form statements. He
likens the combination of terms to the combination of Forms discussed earlier
in the dialogue. And the combination or interweaving of Forms suggests
that they have to be completed by other Forms. This interweaving is a nec-
essary condition of the possibility of discourse, and it is the function of
discourse (when true) to represent this interweaving of the elements of
reality. At the level of discourse, Plato seems to consider statements, not
as lists of words each standing for a Form which is the meaning of the term,
but rather as combinations of sentence-elements whose meaning depends upon
the logical form of the combination. If statements were significant merely
because they named the elements of reality, then we should have to allow any
list of words to be significant and to form a statement. But Plato clearly
wants to distinguish "Theaetetus sits" from, say, "Theatetus Theodorus."
The first sentence expresses a certain relation between Theaetetus and the
Form, sitting. But the sehtence is significant, Plato would argue, not
because each term names something (as the second does) but because the sen-
tence is made up of the two types of sentence-elements and expresses a re-
lation between the elements of reality. In Plato *s technical language the
sentence would run: Theaetetus partakes of (has the tcoiOosof) sitting. The
verb "sits" does not name the relevant Form but, in the context of the state-
ment, is used to express the relation between Theaetetus and the Form.

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 4H.

Also, the terms "Theaetetus" and "sits" cannot be semantically added to get
the meaning of the statement because there is more expressed than a relation
between a particular and a Form. If Theaetetus is to be a subject of discourse,
then he must, in some sense, be one, many, in motion, at rest, etc. These
characteristics are not directly expressed in the statement that he is sitting,
but they are clearly the pre-conditions which he must fulfill for there to be
any statement about him at all. But, if Plato is analyzing all predicative
statements of the form "x is y" into "x exists in relation to y", then the
statement that Theaetetus is sitting can be analyzed, "Theaetetus exists in
relation to sitting." And, if this is what the statement expresses, there
is also the Form Being to be considered when the statement is analyzed. Thus
the significance of the statement cannot be determined by a sort of semantic
addition of the meanings of its terms. In Ryle's apt words, "Plato is per-
fectly clear that a sentence, though consisting of two or more words, says just
one thing, true or false. Saying one thing in two words is not to be equated
with mentioning-by-name two things. "6

The difference between lists of words and statements, for Plato, is that
the former do not indicate ( 6r)'6u) any icpd^tvou6* aitpa£iav ou6e ouaiav ovtos ou6e
(ouaiav) yn ovtos until the sentence-elements are properly combined to form a
statement (262B9-C7) . This can be translated in various ways, but the sen-
tence seems to mean that statements can express either an "action" or the ab-
sence of an "action". It is likely that Plato means by this that statements
can be either positive or negative - 263E10-12) ; to say
and cmtfcpaais
(cf. cpdcris
that Theaetetus is sitting is to express an "action", whereas to say that he
not flying is to express an aitpogia. This same distinction might be found in
the second pair; to indicate the "being of what is" and the "being of what
is not" could mean to express a state of affairs in a positive or negative
statement, or these phrases might mean that statements express what is and
what is not the case. I favour the first interpretation on the grounds that
Plato has not yet introduced truth and falsity as properties of statements.
It rather appears to be the case that Plato is careful to first discuss pro-
blems of meaning and the relation between terms and statements before enter-
ing upon problems of truth and falsehood. Thus, in replying to the sophist's
difficulties, he is concerned with separating the problem of how statements
can be significant from the problem of how they can be true or. false. At
least some of the sophist's difficulties are due to the fact that he has con-
fused these two problems. If these general considerations are correct, then
it is likely that Plato, in the statement quoted above is maintaining that
statements can be positive or negative and can express corresponding states
of affairs. It should also be pointed out that for Plato a statement is an
expression or an indicator of the being of something.
The above considerations are directed primarily toward Plato's discussion
of how statements are significant. When this task is accomplished, he turns
to a consideration of how statements can be true or false. In so doing, he
is answering another of the sophist's difficulties about falsehoods. This
is what we might call the problem of the location of truth and falsehood. The
sophist holds that falsehood consists of believing or saying false "things".
In another paper in this journal7 I tried to argue that in the case of"Theae-
tetus flies", the sophist is not able to determine whether it is Thaetetus or
the statement about him which is false. But Plato wants to distinguish care-
fully between what is said (the statement made) and that about which something
is said (or about which a statement is made) . It is not the subject which
can be true or false but the statement made about the subject. In this sense,

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 45.

statements are the proper location of truth and falsity.

For Plato, there are two conditions which every meaningful statement must
fulfill. First, it must be about something (262E5-6) , and he surely wants to
say, if my interpretation is correct, 8 that the subject of a statement must ful-
fill all the conditions which have been elaborated earlier in the dialogue
(that it is in some sense one, many, some, other, etc., i.e. that it have the
properties connected with all those Forms which are universally applicable)
and that simples, logical fictions, and things which in no sense have being
cannot be subjects of discourse. For Plato, the subject term in a logos
must refer to something. The second condition which a statement must fulfill
is that it must have a "quality" ( uoids ) ; it must be true or false (262E-8) ,
and the truth or falsity of a statement depends on what it says or ascribes
to its subject. In Plato's relational view of predication, a statement is
used to express the relation between entities ( xa ovxa ) , and falsehood occurs
when some entity is said to be related to (or some characteristic is pre-
dicated of) a subject to which it is not related or which it, the subject,
does not in fact have. In his terminology, a true statement states xa 5vxa
as they are about its subject and a false statement states ovxa of its subject
which are other than the ovxa which it has (263A-B) . By this analysis, both
sitting and flying are ovxa (they can, in other contexts, be subjects of state-
ments as well) , but the first is an entity which Theaetetus is in fact re-
lated to, whereas he is not so related to the second. And, in this sense,
flying is an Sv which is other than the ovxa to which Theaetetus is in fact
related.
The sophist further confuses the issue by maintaining that falsehoods
are somehow about nothing or about nonentities. Plato's analysis serves
to clarify the matter by showing that the falsity of a statement consists of
what is said or predicated of its subject. Plato further clarifies the so-
phist's confusion by removing any necessary connection between positive and
negative statements, on the one hand, and true and false statements on the
other. He points -out here, as he has already indicated in the yeyiaxa yevn
section, that any entity can have many positive and many negative predicates
(cf. 263B11-12) . Although I do not have the space to argue the point here,
it seems to me that Plato's at best incomplete distinction in the earlier
portions of the Sophist between statements of existence and statements of
predication and the senses of "not" and "other" limit the success of his case
against the sophist. A more accurate and complete set of distinctions is
required to fully solve the sophist's paradoxes, and this Plato has not given.

It should be fairly clear from all that has preceded that Adyos, for the
most part in the Sophist, does mean "sentence" or "statement". Thus the
Sophist can be considered as Plato's attempt to present his logical theory.
But how is this dialogue to be connected with the Theaetetus, a dialogue to
which the Sophist is connected at least by literary means? After Plato has
elaborated his theory of truth, he maintains that "thought" (6tdvoia) , and
"opinion" (6o'£a) are propositional , i.e what is thought or opined is expressed
in true or false statements. "Thus since it was discourse (Adyos) which was
found to be true and false and since thought was seen to be the conversation
of the soul with itself, and since opinion is the completion of thought ...
it is necessary that, since these are akin to discourse (Adyos), some of them
must sometimes be false" (264A8-B3) . It is in discourse, in statements, that
truth and falsity reside, and true and false statements constitute opinion.

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46.

In spite of the fact that the Sophist is primarily concerned with certain
logical problems, Plato's views here have some interesting epistemological
consequences. In the Sophist, if my interpretation is correct, Forms are in-
volved in opinion and even in making statements about the most changeable and
variable of sensible particulars. This stands in sharp contrast to the early
dialogues where the distinction between knowledge and opinion is made, at
least in part, in terms of the intelligible entities apprehended in the former
and the sensible entities apprehended in the latter. But in the Sophist, to
say that Theaetetus is sitting is equivalent to saying that Theaetetus is re-
lated to the Form Sitting. The sort of apprehension involved here must be
entirely different from that of the earlier dialogues, e.g. Book V of the
Republic . It can hardly make sense to maintain that making the statement
about Theaetetus entails a kind of mental vision as the doctrine of the Republic
characterizes the apprehension of Forms. Rather what is required, as at
least a minimal condition, is knowing the meanings of the terms in the state-
ment. By the Sophist's doctrine it is Forms and their "interweaving" which
makes discourse possible. This is knowledge of a different sort from that
possessed by the philosopher who operates in terms of the Divided Line. Thus
the later Plato seems to be saying that we have to know Forms in order to speak
intelligibly, and there is some plausibility in maintaining that, at this stage
of his writing, Plato considered Forms to be, at least in part, the meanings
of terms. This, I believe, is shown -by the doctrine of the Sophist, and it
is further shown in the Parmenides (cf. Parmenides 135B-C) where it is maintained
that Forms are what makes discourse possible.

But what about the connections between Forms and knowing? Since Forms
are involved in true opinion, maintaining that an apprehension of them is
what characterizes knowledge will not make sense if knowledge is to be some-
thing sharply distinguished from true opinion. The Thaetetus is the only late
dialogue where the problem of determining what knowledge is and how it differs
from true opinion forms the central topic. Although I do not have the space
here to develop the point, I have argued in this journal^ and elsewhere^^ (a)
that the Sophist and Theaetetus are not only connected literarily but philo-
sophically as well, (b) that they both view opinion as propositional in
character, and (c) that in the Theaetetus knowledge is considered to be pro-
positional as well. Thus Plato's concern with the significance and truth-
value of statements and the use of statements in both knowledge and opinion
forms an important philosophical link between the Theaetetus and Sophist.

William Bondeson. University of Missouri

Notes

1. A good case could be made that Xdyoshere is best translated as discourse or speech
(Fowler does so in his Loeb translation). However,the fact that Plato spends vir-
tually this entire portion of the dialogue (from260 to 264) dealing with what anyone
would call the parts of sentences or statements justifies, I believe, translating
Xdyosas sentence or statement instead.
2. "Non-beingand the One: SomeConnectionsbetweenPlato's Sophist and Parmenides,"
Apeiron, Vol. 7 No. 2 (1973), pp. 13-21.
3. ,NewYork: Harcourt Brace, 1931, p. 116.
F.P. Ramsey,The Foundations of Mathematics

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 47.

4. Cf. H.N. Fowler's commentsin his Loeb Classical Library translation of the Theaetetus
and the Sophist , pp. 432-433.

5. If Bumet's text here is accepted.

6. G. Ryle, "Letters and Syllables in Plato", Philosophical Review, Vol. 69 (1960), p. 443.
Ryle's paper presents some interesting remarks although he admits that he may be "co-
operating" with his text. His functional analysis of the letter-syllable examples
suggests to him that Forms generally are like functions. In Plato's commentson vowels
and consonants are pronounceable apart from one another. "To put this in another
idiom: what characters stand for are not noises but noise functions, that is, ab-
stractable noise features or noise differences. We learn what they stand for not by
meeting them on their own, but only by comparing partly similar, partly dissimilar
integral monosyllables which we do hear and pronounce on their own. Similarly what
isolated words convey are not atomic thoughts, but propositional functions, that is
abstractable thought features or thought differences. We learn what they convey not
by apprehending their meanings on their own, but only by comparing partly similar,
partly dissimilar, integral truths and falsehoods. In both cases abstraction is possible,
extraction impossible, and the abstracting requires noticing the constancy of some-
thing through ranges of variations in its settings." (pp. 438-439)

7. "Plato's Sophist: Falsehoods and Images", Apeiron, Vol. 6 No. 2 (1972).

8. Cf. the article cited in note 2 above.

9. "The 'Dream1 of Socrates and the Conclusion of the Theaetetus," Apeiron, Vol. 3 No. 2
(1969).

10. "Perception, True Belief and Knowledge in Plato's Theaetetus", Phronesis, Vol. XIV,
No. 2 (1969)

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