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.Similarly with adjectives.A person who is quite familiar with the ideaof things being probable or improbable is fully equipped to understandthe abstract noun probability yet is not thereby equipped to answer theabstract, conceptual question What is probability? or Is probability aproperty of happenings, though only some future ones, or is it a propertyof some of our thoughts about happenings? Questions like those thatperplexed Augustine and defeated Hume, namely the abstract questionsabout Time and Chance, can be classified as conceptual questions.They arequestions about Concepts.But a question such as How long did the battlelast? or Did the friends meet by chance or by design? is a question about abattle or a meeting.Here the ideas of temporal duration and of fortuitous-ness are being operated with; but they are not here being operated upon.Somewhat similarly, the sculptor operates with a chisel, but it is the stonethat he is operating upon.It would be the business of the mechanic, notthe sculptor, to operate upon the chisel itself.With some exaggeration we might try saying that a conceptual questionor conceptual statement typically has for its grammatical subject anabstract noun, like Time or Chance or Probability , where a factualquestion about a battle, or a meeting, or the weather would incorporatethe corresponding concrete ideas only by means of its verbs or adjectivesor adverbs.The weather forecast that tells us that in a certain region therewill probably be snowstorms tomorrow has for its subject the weather in acertain place, and not the concept of probability.This idea comes in onlyadverbially, as a qualification of the expectations about the weather.Butto say this would be too violent.For the weather forecast might just aswell be worded in this way: There is the probability or There is a highprobability of snowstorms in such and such a region.This forecastemploys the abstract noun probability , though its author would certainlytell us, if asked, that he was not talking about the concept of probability,but only talking about the weather.The presence of the abstract noun probability or time does not prove that the sentence incorporating it CHAPTER 33: ABSTRACTIONS 451expressed a proposition about the concept of Probability or the concept ofTime.It can do so, but it need not.Correspondingly, a philosopher orlogician might be discussing the concept of Knowledge, Time, Chance orProbability, although he abstained from employing those abstract nounsor any others.How is an abstract assertion, however it is worded, about the concept ofTime, or Probability or Knowledge related to the concrete assertions inwhich, perhaps, a battle is said to have lasted for three days, snowstormsare asserted to be probable, or the schoolboy is said no longer to knowPythagoras theorem? (1) Clearly the abstract assertion about the conceptis, in an important way, more sophisticated than the concrete assertions.Achild who had not yet progressed far enough to understand that snowwould probably be falling tomorrow, would a fortiori not yet be equippedto understand assertions about the concepts of Probability and Time.(2) But more than this.Abstract assertions about the concepts of Probabilityand Knowledge are parasitic upon concrete assertions expressed, perhaps,with the adverb probably and the verb know , learn or forget parasitic in this way, that the maker of an assertion about Probability orTime or Knowledge is saying in perfectly general terms something aboutwhat is said when, for example, it is said that snow will probably be fallingtomorrow, or that the schoolboy has forgotten what he had once learned,namely, Pythagoras theorem.What functioned as predicate or a part ofthe predicate of the concrete assertion is itself the subject matter that isbeing talked about in the abstract assertion.Statements about Probabilityare, in an important way, statements about what it is that is stated when westate that something will probably happen or what it is that is asked whensomeone asks whether it is more likely to snow than to rain.To put it over-grammatically, the abstract noun probability is parasitic upon, inter alia,the adverb probably , and the abstract noun Time is parasitic upon, interalia, the tenses of ordinary tensed verbs.The chisel with which, this morn-ing, the sculptor was carving the stone, is, this afternoon, the object uponwhich the mechanic is working.But he is always working upon the chiselas the tool with which stone-carving has been done and is to be doneagain, though stone-carving is not being done with it this afternoon.Maybe we can now begin to see part of what it was that perplexedAugustine
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