Aristotle's De Interpretatione

The De Interpretatione presents a very thorough account on language, going through nouns, verbs, propositions, and how truth values tie into these propositions with universals and a single affirmation. So both nouns and verbs don't really have any direct meaning by themselves, but when connected they say something about the world. Aristotle makes the point that we should only be concerned with propositions because the other forms of expression such as prayer are for poets and the like.

He spends the next few chapters discussing what we would call quantifiers (some, every, no, all) and how without these statements are general and both the affirmation and the negation are true and false. This discussion is fairly straightforward and technical. At this point in the book he is mapping out all of his distinctions in which he will bring it to a point and so developing his theory of language and meaning. Although it has been pointed out that his discussion in the Categories and De Interpretatione are more focused on objects in the world, and we can conclude this because that is what he constantly comes back to is saying something about these objects. He wonders what does all this mean for objects in reality? This is probably because he puts us as the primary substances. All essence is within us, so why would he be overly concerned with anything outside of ourselves.

The first five chapters deal with the terms that form propositions. Chapters 6 and 7 deal with the relationship between affirmative, negative, universal and particular propositions. These relationships are the basis of the well-known square of opposition. The distinction between universal and particular propositions is the basis of modern quantification theory The last three chapters deal with modalities. Chapter 9 is famous for the discussion of the sea-battle. (If it is true that there will be a sea-battle tomorrow, then it is true today that there will be a sea-battle. Thus a sea-battle is apparently unavoidable, and thus necessary).