 A note of caution: Brentano reiterates here his claim that combining marks is not sufficient to make a judgement. He also raises a new question: what does ‘A’ stand for? If we combine two marks and then acknowledge each element of this combination, ‘A’ must stand for a mark. But sometimes he talks as if ‘A’ designated a particular object. We take this way of talking therefore to be a convenient abbreviation. Now back to the main topic. Acknowledging A already does all the work that judging that A exists is supposed to do: to commit one to the existence of A. Since one cannot judge that A exists without acknowledging A, judging that A exists is necessarily  redundant.[9]  Thus, we get as an intermediary conclusion of the argument the following claim: