we; but ours is not this fallacy. Common sense has made it. Common sense has said: “Thomas never is in John’s thought, and yet John can blunder about Thomas.” How shall we unravel the knot?
One way suggests itself. Mayhap we have been too narrow in our definition of object. Common sense surely insists that objects are outside of our thought. If, then, I have a judgment, and another being sees both my judgment and some outside object that was not in my thought, and sees how that thought is unlike the object in some critical respect, this being could say that my assertion was an error. So then with John and Thomas. If Thomas could know John’s thoughts about him, then Thomas could possibly see John’s error. That is what is meant by the error in John’s thought.
But mere disagreement of a thought with any random object does not make the thought erroneous. The judgment must disagree with its chosen object. If John never has Thomas in thought at all, how can John choose the real Thomas as his object? If I judge about a penholder that is in this room, and if the next room is in all respects like this, save for a penholder in it, with which my assertion does not agree, who, looking at that penholder in that other room, can say that my judgment is false? For I meant not that penholder when I spoke, but this one. I knew perhaps nothing about that one, had it not in mind, and so could not err about it. Even so, suppose that outside of John there is a real Thomas, similar, as it happens, to John’s ideal Thomas, but lacking some thought or affection that
