thing should now be clear, namely, that determination of the "is" by way of the uttered proposition does not lead to the sphere of the appropriate ontological inquiry. Indifferent in its linguistic form, the "is" always has a different meaning in living discourse. Assertion, however, is not primarily revelatory but presupposes the unveiledness of some being. Assertion, dispartive and displaying, hence does not signify a being just in general, but, instead, signifies a being in its unveiledness. Thus the question arises whether this determining of that which is spoken about in assertion—a being in its unveiledness—enters into the signification of the "is" by which the being of the assertion's object is exhibited. If so, not only would there be present each time in the "is" a meaning of being already differentiated prior to the assertion, being as extantness, as esse existentiae, or as esse essentiae or both together, or a meaning of being in some other mode of being, but also there would simultaneously belong to the signification of the "is" the unveiledness of that which is asserted about. In uttering assertions we are accustomed often to stress the "is." For example, we say "The board is black." This stress expresses the way in which the speaker himself understands his assertion and intends for it to be understood. The stressed "is" permits him to be saying: the board is in fact black, is in truth black; the entity about which I am making the assertion is just as I assert it to be. The stressed "is" expresses the being-true of the assertion uttered. To speak more precisely, in this emphasis that sometimes occurs, we see simply that at bottom in every uttered assertion the being-true of the assertion is itself co-intended. It is not an accident that in setting out from this phenomenon Lotze arrived at his theory of the subsidiary thought. The question is whether our attitude to this theory must be positive—that is, whether it is necessary to resolve every assertion into a double judgment, or whether, in contrast, this additional signification of the "is," this being-true, cannot be conceived immediately from the idea of being.
In order to clarify this as a problem we must first ask what this being-true of the assertion means, which at times also gets expressed in the stressed "is" by the way the assertion is uttered. What is the relationship of this being-true of the assertion to the being of the entity about which the assertion is made, which being [Sein] the "is" in the sense of the copula means primarily?
We have already taken note of Aristotle's striking thesis about the being-true of the logos, assertion, one that has been maintained in the tradition