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[3]
Again,
Deliberative Excellence is not the same as Quickness of mind,1 which is a form of skill in Conjecture.
Nor yet is Deliberative Excellence any form of Opinion.
But inasmuch as a bad deliberator makes mistakes and a good deliberator deliberates
correctly,2 it is clear that Deliberative Excellence is some form of
correctness; though it is not correctness of Knowledge, nor of Opinion. Correctness cannot
be predicated of Knowledge,3 any more than can error, and correctness of Opinion is truth;
and also any matter about which one has an opinion has been settled already;
[then again Deliberative Excellence necessarily involves conscious calculation.
It remains therefore that Deliberative Excellence is correctness in thinking, for thought
has not reached the stage of affirmation;]4 for Opinion has passed beyond the stage of investigation and is a form of
affirmation, whereas a man deliberating, whether he deliberates well or badly, is
investigating and calculating something.
1 ἀγχίνοια appears from Aristot. Post. Anal. 1.33, 89b 10, to denote the faculty of guessing immediately the ‘middle term’ or fact which explains the relation observed between two objects.
2 Perhaps the text should be emended to read `inasmuch as one who deliberates badly goes wrong and one who deliberates well acts rightly.’
3 i.e., correct knowledge is a redundant expression; knowledge means correct notions; erroneous notions are not knowledge.
4 The two sentences bracketed interrupt the argument. The rest seems to belong to 9.2, though it does not fit in there exactly. The second is altogether irrelevant, and employs the term διάνοια of the intellect as enquiring, not as contemplating the results of enquiry, a Platonic use not found elsewhere in Aristotle: ‘correctness in thinking’ here is in fact equivalent to ‘correctness in deliberation’ in 9.4.
Aristotle in 23 Volumes, Vol. 19, translated by H. Rackham. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1934.
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