Apophantic ( el, ἀποφαντικός, "declaratory", from ἀποφαίνειν ''apophainein'', "to show, to make known") is a term

Aristotle Aristotle (; grc-gre, Ἀριστοτέλης ''Aristotélēs'', ; 384–322 BC) was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical Greece, Classical period in Ancient Greece. Taught by Plato, he was the founder of the Peripatet ...

coined to mean a specific type of declaratory statement that can determine the truth or falsity of a

logical proposition In logic and linguistics, a proposition is the meaning of a declarative sentence. In philosophy, "meaning" is understood to be a non-linguistic entity which is shared by all sentences with the same meaning. Equivalently, a proposition is the no ...

or phenomenon. It was adopted by

Edmund Husserl , thesis1_title = Beiträge zur Variationsrechnung (Contributions to the Calculus of Variations) , thesis1_url = https://fedora.phaidra.univie.ac.at/fedora/get/o:58535/bdef:Book/view , thesis1_year = 1883 , thesis2_title ...

and

Martin Heidegger Martin Heidegger (; ; 26 September 188926 May 1976) was a German philosopher who is best known for contributions to phenomenology, hermeneutics, and existentialism. He is among the most important and influential philosophers of the 20th centu ...

as part of

phenomenology Phenomenology may refer to: Art * Phenomenology (architecture), based on the experience of building materials and their sensory properties Philosophy * Phenomenology (philosophy), a branch of philosophy which studies subjective experiences and a ...

Herbert Marcuse Herbert Marcuse (; ; July 19, 1898 – July 29, 1979) was a German-American philosopher, social critic, and political theorist, associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Born in Berlin, Marcuse studied at the Humboldt Universi ...

defines it as "the logic of judgment". In Aristotle's usage, the Greek term ἀποφαντικὸς λόγος (apophantic speech) describes a statement that, by examining a proposition in itself, can determine what is true about a statement by establishing whether or not the predicate of a sentence may logically be attributed to its subject. For example, logical propositions may be divided into ones that are semantically determinate, as in the sentence "All

penguins Penguins (order Sphenisciformes , family Spheniscidae ) are a group of aquatic flightless birds. They live almost exclusively in the Southern Hemisphere: only one species, the Galápagos penguin, is found north of the Equator. Highly adap ...

are

birds Birds are a group of warm-blooded vertebrates constituting the class Aves (), characterised by feathers, toothless beaked jaws, the laying of hard-shelled eggs, a high metabolic rate, a four-chambered heart, and a strong yet lightweig ...

," and those that are semantically indeterminate, as in the sentence "All

bachelors A bachelor is a man who is not and has never been married.Bachelors are, in Pitt & al.'s phrasing, "men who live independently, outside of their parents' home and other institutional settings, who are neither married nor cohabitating". (). Etymol ...

are unhappy." In the first proposition, the subject is ''penguins'' and the predicate is ''birds'', and the set of all birds is a category into which the subject of penguins should necessarily be put. In the second proposition, the subject is ''bachelors'' and the predicate is ''unhappy''. This is a subjective, contingent connection that does not necessarily follow. An apophantic conclusion would, by examining the two statements—and not any evidence supporting or denying them—make a judgment between them that identifies "All penguins are birds" as more truthful than "All bachelors are unhappy." One would reach this conclusion simply because of the propositions' nature, and not because any penguins or bachelors had been consulted. In

argues that apophantic judgements are the least reliable means of obtaining truth, as they are cut from the original interpretive framework of relations to the subject. Before Heidegger, however, his former teacher Husserl had already centralized the role of apophantic judgment in his phenomenological 'transcendental logic', during the course lectures on passive synthesis in the mid 1920s. The concept appears in the Arabic Aristotelian tradition as ''jâzim'', or 'truth-apt'.Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
"Arabic and Islamic Philosophy of Language and Logic"
Retrieved 2012-05-27

References

External links

"Benedetto Croce, ''Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic''"
Philosophy of Aristotle Phenomenology Statements {{philo-stub