The first major statement of Russell's views on logical grammar occurs in his 1903 classic The Principles of Mathematics . The focus is on the notion of propositions understood as mind-independent complexes. There he claims that the grammar of the sentences used to express propositions is a mostly reliable guide to understanding their make-up, and even that "[t]he correctness of our philosophical analysis of a proposition may ... be usefully checked by the exercise of assigning the meaning of each word in the sentence" (PoM p. 42). The proposition expressed by "Plato loves Socrates" consists of Plato, Love, and Socrates. He even suggests that "Socrates is human" expresses a proposition with three constituents, and that the copula has for its meaning a special sort of relation (PoM p. 49). However, a proposition is not an aggregate of its constituents; it is a kind of unity, and the relationship of the constituents to that unity is fundamentally different from the usual relation of whole and part (PoM pp. 139ff). Moreover, there are different ways in which an entity can occur in a proposition. An entity can occur as term , i.e., as logical subject , or it can occur as concept , i.e., predicatively. All entities are capable of occurring as term, but only some are capable of occurring predicatively. Those that can occur both kinds of ways are called concepts ; those that cannot occur as concept are called things . Socrates is a thing, whereas Humanity , Love , and Wisdom are concepts. While Wisdom occurs as concept in Socrates is wise , it occurs as term in Wisdom is a virtue .
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