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Thus, in the case of remembering a room in which the window is to the left of the door, when we believe the image-content the proposition will consist of the image of the window on the left together with the image of the door on the right. We will distinguish propositions of this kind as "image-propositions" and propositions in words as "word-propositions."
We have thus, as regards the opposition of positive and negative, three different sorts of duality, according as we are dealing with facts, image-propositions, or word-propositions. We have, namely: Positive and negative facts; Image-propositions, which may be believed or disbelieved, but do not allow any duality of content corresponding to positive and negative facts;
But for this purpose it is necessary to revert to image-propositions instead of word-propositions. Let us take again the illustration of a memory-image of a familiar room, and let us suppose that in the image the window is to the left of the door.
But we can form no image of the fact that the window is not to the left of the door. Attempts have often been made to deny such negative facts, but, for reasons which I have given elsewhere,* I believe these attempts to be mistaken, and I shall assume that there are negative facts. * "Monist," January, 1919, p. 42 ff. Word-propositions, like image-propositions, are always positive facts.
Whenever possible, except when actual beliefs are in question, it is generally a simplification to deal with propositions. It would seem that image-propositions are more primitive than word-propositions, and may well ante-date language.
But as soon as we have words for relations, word-propositions have necessarily more terms than the facts to which they refer, and cannot therefore correspond so simply with their objectives as some image-propositions can. The consideration of negative propositions and negative facts introduces further complications.
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