In the third section of the sixth book of The Nicomachean
Ethics, Aristotle makes another list. This time, “the states by
virtue of which the soul possesses truth by way of affirmation
or denial are five in number.” Or, as our panel of translators
would have it: |faculties||habits||mental states||states of
mind||modes||means||instruments| |whereby||by which||in virtue
of which||in which||by the aid of which| |the soul||the
intellectual faculty||the mind| |attains truth||arrives at
truth||is true||enunciates truth||arrives at truth and is in a
state of truth| |in affirmation or negation||in affirmation or
denial||in whatever it asserts or denies||in its
decisions||affirming or denying||whether affirmative or
negative| Got that? Basically, there are five methods people
use, to come to conclusions about how things are, that are the
sort of methods that can be made better or worse in terms of how
well they draw true conclusions. Anyway, those five are (again,
using the often wildly divergent translations of our p