COMPOUNDS

As we saw above, one of the things that these definitions take into account is that propo­sitions are often expressed by parts of sentences. We saw that in a statement like Augus­tine’s “If no one asks me, I know [what time is],” two other statements are contained in it: “no one asks me” and “I know what time is.” They are called components of the original statement.

(1) Benno admitted that his enthusiasm had carried him away.^[11]

“Benno admitted that” and “his enthusiasm had carried him away” are both parts of a sentence, and each could be taken to express a proposition, so they are statements by the above definition. But the first does not appear to be a component of the whole statement in the right sense. For the second, we could substitute any other statement at all, and still get something meaningful: “Benno admitted that nylon tights tear easily,” for example. Try doing that with the first! This motivates the following definitions:

One statement is a component of another if substituting it within the original by any other statement whatever still yields a meaningful statement.^[12]

A compound statement is any statement that contains one or more component statements.

A simple statement is any statement that has no components.

To see how this works, consider the following statement:

(2) Bacon was right in saying that the conquest of learning is achieved through the knowledge of languages, (ibid.,p. 191)

“Bacon was right in saying that the conquest of learning is achieved” is a statement, as are “learning is achieved through the knowledge of languages,” “Bacon was right in saying that,” and even “Bacon was right.” But none of them are components of the original state­ment.^[13] Substituting the third of these, for example, by “Nylon tights tear easily” yields “Nylon tights tear easily the conquest of learning is achieved through the knowledge of

languages,” which is pure gibberish. “The conquest of learning is achieved through the knowledge of languages,” however, is a component statement. (Try substituting other statements for it.)

3.1.3