 What is telling here is Brentano’s use of the word “merely”. It implies that one can use a sign for affirmation without using that very same sign also as a sign for predication. Following Brentano’s own suggestion, we can make this clear by introducing a simple formalism. Let us use the sign “+” as a sign for a mere affirmation (like a question mark is a mere sign for asking a question), and let us use “+is” as a sign that expresses both a judgement and a predication. Then we can symbolize the two judgements above as follows: