July 3, 2012  The Port-Royalists on Judgment and Other Mental
Operations  Locke famously defines judgment, knowledge, etc., in
terms of the joining or separating of ideas. It is quite
probable that Locke's source for this is the Port-Royal Logic.
There are two well-known problems with this view. First,
according to this view in order to think that Peter is not
living I must mentally separate the idea of Peter from the idea
of living, but if I do that then its not clear how this
judgment, that Peter is not living, can be a unit which can be,
for instance, embedded in complex sentences. Locke makes matters
worse by talking about the joining and separating of verbal
signs. Taken literally, this ought to have the consequence that
'Peter ......................................... living' means
'Peter is not living,' since the signs are so far apart.
Obviously he can't mean anything so ridiculous as that, but he
doesn't really tell us what he does mean.  The second problem is
that it seems, on this view, that the pr